No, I’m not chasing – the truth in the lies, the chance
dreams, so alluring – that without consequence
they remain recurring, – would ruin all thought of romance
until they sting, – until words are lost in a frozen glance,

until these eyes lose their fire – until love loses its luster
but I could chase a desire – reducing a reality to a blur,
if the circumstances should require, – may a change of heart occur,
that a lover be reduced to a liar – to conjure any truth I could muster.

#268                                        11-01-08

*Note to the Readers:
I borrowed this idea from PT Diep, the originator of the cleave poem, which is what
this poem is. it is meant to be three poems in one: first, read only the left hand lines,
then, read only the right hand lines, then read all the lines together as a whole.

More information can be found at Cleave Poetry. i hope that you will stop by his site and offer opinions on his form of poetry.

You may also find PT Diep Blogging at wake up, sleeper.

You enter the room and,

for the first time since we met,

I didn’t feel immediately relaxed when I saw you,

every word of this passionate pain

sitting heavy in my chest.

Words that you could never hear

because I could never say them,

words that strain against the binds

that hold them inside of me,

words dying to be received

by unsuspecting ears.

Finding an outlet,

the secret slips away

with each breath I take,

a blanket of nerves

covers my trembling body

as I concentrate on

each and every curve of yours.

I can’t let you go,

but I can’t let you know,

my tongue paralyzed by an unseen force,

keeping me from saying

everything that, by tomorrow,

will be too late for you to hear.

I watch you come closer,

can feel your breath on my face

as you lean in to mine

and I exhaled all the words I was choking on

as our lips connected

(it was somewhat of a release,

the words exchanged

without tone or volume,

unchained passions traded in a fluid motion

between parted mouths and closed eyes).

I never said a word,

but the electric aura in the air

told me that you knew it all before,

that the unspoken words and truths

that I had struggled so hard to share

had been shared at another time, another place,

that the secret I tried so hard to keep hidden

was never, at any point, a secret.

#267                                                      10-03-08

Hey stranger,

you don’t look like you’re from around here.

I haven’t seen you around these parts;

it looks to me like you feel you’re in a strange place

and the strange stares you’re getting from everyone else

are the norm for someone we haven’t seen before.

We don’t get too many new people very often,

in fact its often a strange occurrence

when a lost soul wanders through those doors.

However, I could help but notice this strange feeling I got

when you walked into this place, into my life,

and there is a strange calming effect being transferred

between the strange looks in our eyes.

Forgive me, but I think there’s something here already,

something fiery, something subconsciously tickling

these long-forgotten endorphins into use,

something deep enough to take root in my brain and my heart,

something floating to the surface of my skin like a cold sweat,

except that I am enjoying nearly every second

of this stranger-than-fiction story that we’re writing

with our eyes.

I can see a bit of a glint in your eye, as if you feel a little

of this out-of-control, not-a-care-in-the-world feeling,

and strangers usually don’t fall into anything this fast,

but stranger things have happened.

There doesn’t seem to be a need for any more words,

because we’re both reading each other’s thoughts

like a book without a cover, the front page wide open for all to see.

I know we were complete strangers

before this time and this place,

before I ever had a chance to feel something like this

but give me a chance,

like I think you will,

and you might find

you like me a little bit more

than the stranger staring back at you in the mirror.

#266                                                                      09-13-08

Because i thought i would have been back sooner.
Because that last one nearly took everything out of the sails.
Because I never meant to leave for so long.
Because this should have been here long ago.
Because i looked back and said to myself,
   “Where did all of that shit come from?”
Because half of me was fighting the other half
   that wanted so badly to connect the words again.
Because, maybe, it just wasn’t time to call it a day
   and pack it up and leave it on the table,
   unfinished and unread, unknown to a world
   eager for a grand presentation.
Because the fans enjoyed every second,
   while i detached myself from every word
   just to make it through the nights.
Because there never seemed to be an end
   to all the beginnings that came along.
Because i couldn’t go back and read it all,
   because everything came back to me when i did.
Because it almost killed me inside.
Because i can’t get away from it.
Because it’s a part of me.
Because I want it.
Because i can.

#265                                                          09-05-08

I
My car sits in the parking lot,
the engine humming a song to me,
trying to console the emptiness that I felt sitting in that booth.
A third or fourth confrontation didn’t seal the blank passion I wanted to rid myself of,
locking it in a cardboard box that replaced a piece of my heart long ago,
the part that I lost to another girl,
the part I use to forget every fire-starter who has crossed my path.
Still you haven’t actually waited my table,
and still you haven’t left my mind since the first time.
Every time I come back here,
you look more stunning than the last time,
as if that were possible for someone
with a body soaked in the essence of a thousand Helens,
the beauty literally dripping down over your curves
to pool on the carpet you walk on.
I wish I could meet you outside of this situation,
I wish I could see you in some other light
than just as a waitress in a restaurant,
perhaps spend a day in the park for a picnic
or catch a late night movie,
to know who you really are,
to not just appreciate you for how you look.
I wish that this could be something more
than just me watching you while you cut your path through the tables,
coming close to me, but never close enough.

II
I close my eyes, so that I could catch glimpses
of the last ninety minutes I was still myself,
watching a dream materialized, living, breathing,
waiting,
not for me, not on me, but on some other lucky customer
without another reason to be here other than
to satisfy his hunger.
Maybe he thinks you’re pretty,
Maybe he just decided to turn on his charm,
Maybe he would like you to come back to his apartment for a glass of wine or a night of insignificant love-making,
and then forget about calling to see if you still cared
because I know as well as anyone
that if he thinks you’re hot,
then he doesn’t give a shit about your feelings,
he just wants to be inside you for ten minutes or so
and then forget you were actually a person with a sense of feeling and emotion.

Jealousy and rage fill my eyes just pondering that suggestion,
that some stupid asshole like that would look down on you
as if you were some sex object,
something walked upon except when absolutely needed purely for pleasure.
I almost feel obligated to protect you from that evil
though you don’t belong to me intimately,
but even so, I feel something more than just an innate passion,
something more than any ordinary man would feel without interaction
and perhaps that is inevitably my downfall.

III
Now I’m fighting with myself, or, at least,
fighting to keep myself from letting whatever I feel get any deeper.
I would give anything just for this to be something more,
and I would give more than that just to forget it happened.
I want you in my life, and I want you to go away.
The sight of you holds these pieces together,
but the thought of you breaks them apart.
The puzzle can never be completed
yet you give me the hope that someday
I’ll recover the lost pieces and be whole again.
I close my eyes so that I can picture you in my head,
and I close them to avoid seeing you when you’re near.
Do I love something I don’t want,
or want something I don’t quite love?
The dilemma rages inside my head,
whether to pursue the interest
or to stomp in into the ground and forget it.
My insecurity and lack of self-confidence
make up the chains that keep me back,
but my desire for you is the force
that pulls and twists the chains to the point of breaking.
I don’t know whether to solve this dilemma
or let it eat at me until I lose myself.
The problem is that I am nothing to you
and you are not nothing to me.

IV
My conscience sits in the backseat,
rubbing my shoulders and repeating under his breath,
“It’ll be alright,” like it was supposed to make me more apathetic
to the last hour and a half spent in the middle of a restaurant
that I drag myself back to, over and over again,
just to see your face one more time.
Well, fuck him, he doesn’t understand,
he can’t feel something that feels like love
but isn’t.
He doesn’t have to cope with a dumb addiction,
he doesn’t have to crawl back like a dog
to the same place, at the same hour each time as much as humanly possible
just to keep breathing.

The idiot keeps bothering me, pretending that he’s helping me
by uttering some masqueraded fabrication into my ears,
trying to invent a sedative to calm me down
though he knows it wouldn’t change anything
except to allow me to forget about her for a few days or so.
I couldn’t tell him anything
without him using it against me,
making me out like a failure at life,
as if he were so much better than me
like he was the angel to my demon.
And he can’t keep a secret,
he would enjoy torturing me by marching right up to her
and proclaiming to the world, and especially to her, all the words I’ve struggled to keep away from her,
if he had two legs to stand on and a mouth to form the words.

I felt an incredible urge to punch that son of a bitch in the face
after he repeated the same lie for the fifty-third time,
after the door in my ear slammed shut to his words
and still the words poked their way underneath the doorjamb,
I thought that maybe he thought that if that damn lie was repeated enough times,
maybe I would eventually believe it.
All this time, perhaps he just poured the lies out of a bucket over my head,
maybe there were too many veils cast over my frozen stare
to believe that I could ever enjoy what always seemed to be the dream
but always turned out to be the nightmare,
to believe that this time would be different,
that I could feasibly have a relationship with someone as beautiful as the waitress in the restaurant.
Maybe I was never meant to escape the spiral of intrapersonal tragedy,
that the downfall I so unwillingly inherited is the unfortunate truth
and that my stupid conscience was protecting me from reality.
I look into his face through the center mirror
and see a faint smile across his face, as if he were listening to my thoughts.
As if he knew I realized he was right.

V
Driving home,
The air is stagnant in the car.
Even though I’m sitting upright,
it feels like someone is sitting on my chest.
The overhanging lights glare at me through my glasses,
temporarily blinding me again and again,
and interrupting my thoughts like a strobe light.
The radio plays, but I don’t hear the music.
The car races between the dotted lines,
so fast that eventually they blur together.
The empty feeling grows inside me,
as if you took my heart from me before I left
and you hold it in your hands, squeezing it so tightly
that I feel a dull pain everywhere.
It seems that the faster I sputter away from you,
the more you pull me back to you.
Escape becomes more and more improbable
with every rotation of the rubber against the pavement.
80, 90, the speedometer climbs relentlessly,
but speeding away I am still returning to you
if not in body, then in mind and soul,
trapped by a feeling I can no longer fight.
The flames beckon me back to your side in spirit,
trapped by what my tired mind holds as a being
as close to perfect as one could ever get,
someone too far out of my league.
I make myself numb to everything else
because I can’t hold myself together
with everything else ripping me in twenty-five directions.
I want the impossible,
and though it hurts more,
it feels better to run away.

#264  03-30-08

Lately, i have been feeling especially apathetic and unmotivated to write anything. i don’t have any idea why, but i can’t seem to find anything to write about. i get bits and pieces formulated in my head but can’t piece them together or i can’t write lines that flow smoothly. therefore, i believe it is necessary to take a couple of weeks off from writing, to clear my head and to get back into the swing of writing things.

Sorry to disappoint

-KM

Update: The break is not going well. I thought it would help, but it seems that thigns are just getting worse.
Unfortunately, I can’t thing of anything to help, so i don’t think i have any other choice but to suspend writing
activities indefinitely.

Update #2: Apparently, pretending to suspend writing activities actually helped me out a lot. I actually have
something in progress as i write this. I should have it up soon, but so far it is actually three pages (!) long, and
i’m trying to find good division points, because it came out as a multi-perspective poem. I’m not very experienced
in writing from different viewpoints in a poem, so this is an experiment for me. Hopefully i’ll have it for you by tomorrow (today being Wednesday) but if i can’t, i will let you know when i am going to post it so that you can
stop by again to read it.

Update #3: i’ve gotten a lot of work done on the new piece, but there are still a few things missing, and i had a
large art assignment that i had to complete for tomorrow, so i did not get a chance to work on the new piece much
today. It will be up by the end of the weekend, i promise.

-KM

I

I felt awkward, dressed in a tuxedo,
black sport coat sprawled over a white dress shirt;
the heavy coat restricted the airflow,
which caused me much sweating and discomfort.
All around me, classmates were chattering,
reminiscing and enjoying the night,
but I couldn’t clearly hear anything,
so I stood and staggered toward the moonlight.

My eyes wandered, my mind stuck in vagrance,
But I struggled through a caffeine headache
and I realized in my mind’s turbulence
that the caffeine was all that kept me awake.
Through my half-closed eyes, I hardly saw you,
but still you provided a stunning view.

II

You’re an indulgence I didn’t deserve,
but still, you were mine for a little while;
a man, self-conscious, nervous and reserved,
and a woman with a grand sense of style,
out on the dance floor, hands clasped together,
my dark eyes frozen to your smiling face,
doubting that there could be something better
than to be with you in that moment and place.

I drowned in the sweet scent of your perfume
as we pressed together for one slow dance.
I pretended no one else was in the room
so that this little spark of our romance
could become my one last parting memory
since, after tonight, you’d be gone from me.

#263                                                                     02-20-08

A desire, a need to feel you near me;
feelings escalate and I am smitten,
addicted, paralyzed by love’s poison,
pouring my heart out to you, wishing to be
free to love you unconditionally,
to trade a broken spirit for passion,
hollow love for unspoken affection,
merely a prisoner to your beauty.

As love manifests from a simple guise,
I conclude, through these memories of you,
that only a pure soul could give rise
to what I feel, staring into your eyes,
an insatiable passion coursing through
a lonely heart hoping to win its prize.

#262                                     02-18-08

In my eyes,
the four thousand dollars worth of makeup
you smear across your face every morning
doesn’t do you any good.
There’s an hour that you’ll never get back,
spent every day trying to cover up
what I see as already beautiful.
I wish, for once, you would accept
that your plainly beautiful,
that sometimes the cosmetics make you look worse.
I didn’t fall in love with the makeup,
I fell in love with the face buried beneath it,
and the woman to whom that face belongs.
Your lips don’t need to be ruby red every day
to receive attention from mine,
and your cheeks don’t need to match the rest of you;
they appeal to me more with that rosy pink tinge in them.
Please, Dear, put away the mascara and eyeliner,
and all that other worthless surface beauty;
none of it is necessary.
If others can’t accept your real beauty,
then their opinions are as worthless as
all of that crap you believe you need to look beautiful.
But in my eyes, you’re beautiful the way you are.
And that’s all that should really matter.

#261                                                            01-31-08

Red passions
entwined in black handwriting and white backgrounds,
revealing emotion, a yearning for something
too perfect to be real,
too real to be imperfect,
a love unparalleled and undivided,
a love more fervent than the passion of a million men combined
who seek among others what can only be found in oneself.
I was fated to feel these things,
feelings that faded once
only to return more powerful than before.
Subtleties lost in subconscious,
separate intricacies of your beauty staring into my eyes,
things merely recognized before, now infinitely appealing,
my feeble eyes frozen on your form.
A fleeting glance from you and the world stops,
Moments turn to memories, turn to fantasies, turn to dreams,
a touch, a longing, a melody sung into my ears,
the softest of voices teasing my eardrums,
a light poking through the hollow darkness
to reveal what I once desired, lost, now what I desire again.
A destiny to live alone bears its teeth,
a fake smile plastered over my lonely stares,
a bleeding heart choking on those words
written to keep alive inside the fire
so willing to be shared,
and yet the fire burns alone with me still.
Letting go once was an option,
now removed like leaves in the breeze,
flipping wildly over the binding,
replacing white backgrounds and black handwriting
with white backgrounds and blank handwriting,
removing from sight the red passions
leaking from my mind.

#260                                                                   01-07-08

I miss you.
Not because we don’t talk,
but because I can’t see you.
Maybe our relationship wasn’t ever much more
than just being close friends,
maybe it was never meant to be anything more,
but I had hope for all those years that it could have been.
And the feelings flowed freely from my fleeting thoughts,
through the ink in my pen,
dispensed in scribbled handwriting scattered among notes
initially never intended for you to see.
You never would have seen them, either,
except that the feelings grew too strong,
until you were a part of me.
And a little piece of me died that day
when you said we couldn’t be,
and seeing you on graduation day hurt the most,
because it should have been the last time I would ever see you,
and I didn’t have enough time to get over the love I had.
Sure, senior year was never really much, a lot of waves and hi’s in the hallways,
but it still meant a lot to me
just to see you every day.
But high school passed,
and diplomas were handed out,
and my heart melted for the last time
when you smiled and said “Great speech” as you walked by,
and I thought that was the end of it all.
But I’ve seen you since.
Only once.
It was only a wave and a returned “Hey,”
just like it was in high school
but after six months of hardly talking and forgetting each other
I felt like that encounter deserved more,
some catching up that was never quite done.
Maybe it was because your boyfriend was there
and it would have been awkward to leave the area,
but it turned out awkward anyway.
I didn’t mean to stop talking to you
but I didn’t know how else to get over you.
But you still have a piece of my heart
whether you want it or not,
because you always come back to mind
when all else seems failed,
when I have nothing else to pull me through the toughest days.
When there is no other love left in my heart,
you come back and fill the empty hole,
just like this time,
just like every other time,
so, maybe next time we meet,
I’d like to sit down and have a chat,
rather than just a wave.

#259                                                   12-23-07

I remember you.
I saw you last time I was here,
and you intrigued me.
You aren’t waiting my table,
but I wish you were.
You looked great last time,
but you’ve really caught my eye this time.
You have something of an unparalleled beauty;
a supermodel walking right in front of me.
On a scale from one to ten,
you’re about a 4,000:
Five-foot-five,
deep blue eyes,
brown hair collected in a bun,
Ear-to-ear smile,
a voice that could put beautiful symphonies to shame,
form-fitting jeans that accentuate your curves so well;
everything I could ever ask for in a girl.
A goddess stuck in a waitress’ uniform,
you walked past so slowly
as if you knew I was watching,

wanting,

lusting,

almost begging you to say anything to me.
You drove me insane with such divine beauty,
an image burning slowly into my mind and into my heart.
I could close my eyes and picture you perfectly in front of me,
a dream three feet from my face,
a moment’s worth of a fantasy
that I would never want to end,
but as my thoughts wandered,
I came to the realization that, even if our worlds collided,
nothing could ever come of this.
I had to get away from you,
as badly as I wanted to watch you for the rest of the night,
for the rest of my life,
in my life,
by my side,
hand-in-hand, wherever this life will take us, together forever,
but that is just a dream
and now is not the time.
And at the end of the day,
you’ll still be here,
and I won’t be,
and I need to forget about you before I can’t.“Check, please.”

#258                                                                                  12-18-07