Some people will die
And we will never know why,
We just close our eyes
and cry,
wondering why,
we couldn't say,
Bye.

I bet Jesus liked Chocolate Ice Cream

Chocolate ice cream
is absolutely the best,
Joe said.

But Joe,
I like Vanilla more,
said Jackie.

I don't see why,
almost everyone likes chocolate,
it is the most popular flavor.

It wasn't always that way Joe,
a long, long time ago,
lots of people favored Vanilla.

And what about the other flavors?
Are none of them as good as chocolate?
Isn't chocolate ice cream just a preference?
There really isn't a best flavor is there,
since it is all ultimately subjective?

I don't know,
said Joe,
I just like Chocolate,
and you should too.

It's almost like being
dunked in to a pool
of freezing water.
My entire body locks up,
my jaw is frozen,
and I am unable to talk.
Words trickle out
like the last stubborn
bit of toothpaste left in the tube.
This is the punishment
given to the shy people
all over the world.

We're all just people
that live one day
and die the next.

So as a living creature
be not concerned
or self-conscious.

You are beautiful.

Thus History Repeats

Another failed summer,
lying on my stomach in my
warm, musty room
with my ceiling fan
spraying dust on me.
My days are spent working,
a place with memories of you.
My nights are spent alone,
my only company are
thoughts of what our future holds.
Some random song is playing
during my sadness,
and I know for the rest of my life,
the connotations the song will hold.
I'll write a fiction story
to take my mind off of you,
but eventually it comes to an end,
and I will get the guts to call you,
and we may or may not talk long,
and I will probably ask you out,
and you will probably say okay,
and probably cancel at the last minute,
breaking the already shattered glass
of this see-through window called my heart.

What do you know about my past?
Nothing.
What do you know,
about living on the sixth floor
with no friends?
What do you know?
Nothing.
What do you know about burying your head in a pillow,
and contemplating suicide as a legitimate option?
You know nothing.
What do you know about Tom Petty and Birdland?
What do you know about the only friends I had,
and the free Ventrilo channel that became my social life?
You know nothing about how 電車男 moved my heart.
You know nothing.

So many things I could've done different,
so many things I could do different now.
I hate thinking about going back,
it puts a bowling ball in my stomach.
I don't know where I belong
inside of that world.

Watching those damn YouTube videos
makes me sad,
and I hate giving speeches.

Vietnamese Jungles

He heard the sound of an AK-47
and stopped to take time to think.
That was his first mistake.
The M-16s got jammed in the jungles
so sometimes they'd pick up AK's
dropped by the VC's.
He knew where the sound
was coming from, and probably
where its owner was.
But was it a VC, like he thought,
or an ally who's gun was broken?
He stopped, to think about
the weight of his decision.

He thought to himself:
This place wasn't meant
for thinking men,
and fired his weapon.

Even as it's forming you can see the problems
formulate themselves inside of your head.
You know what will go wrong,
it's just a matter of when and where.
What you don't know is why it goes wrong,
just that it will, in all plausible circumstances.
You clutch on to a keepsake or ideal
that symbolizes faith or hope.
You pray it will be different from last time
so hard that you should be in a Church.
So you live day-by-day until out of nowhere
a snake slithers out from the tall grasses
and strikes you with its venom of secrets,
just like you knew it always would.

There are some people
that are happy for me
because of it.

There are some
that hate me
because of it.

There are some
that question me
because of it.

And there are some,
that despite it,
don't even know me.

Some people waste their lives
in front of computer screens,
and others drinking beer.
Some people waste it working
and others in something
other than happiness.
So you ask why I do this.
You ask why the choices I make
and the dreams I choose to pursue
are always filled with difficulty.
The only answer I have for that
is destiny doesn't have a cookie cutter shape
that you can press down
on to a mushy dough called life.

The World Around You

There's an entire world around you
but none of it matters
except what's in front of your face.
This is something I tell myself
so I can try to write poetry.
I don't worry or think about the future,
about how we're going to make it,
about if we're going to make it.
If I do then I slip and wander off,
as I feel myself doing now,
in to fears and concerns
that stop my poetry,
dead in its tracks.

Irony? Or....

While driving the other day
I hit a boy on a bicycle and killed him.
He was an organ donor, and his liver
saved my grandfather's life.

National Security Agency Meeting #34 - Operation Foxhound

"We're gonna give kids this videogame, see,
and they will think they are just shootin' bad guys, right?
But they'll really be shooting living illegal aliens, yea?
They'll be controlling robots that are actually out there, man,
and stopping these people from infesting in to our country.
Immoral? Let me tell you about morals. Hard-working Americans
who's jobs are being stolen by illegal aliens is immoral.
Huh? The homeless? Bums? Whatever man...
the kids won't know any better anyways."

Words like "nigger"

Georgia high schools have rednecks
that have no qualms about saying
words like "nigger."

They don't think about it,
about what it means to say it,
they just want to look cool.

At lunch it might be
"Look at that nigger,"
or "There's another nigger."

Sometimes they say it with hate,
but it's usually just with ignorance.

My friend - he had it coming.
At a job interview with a black manager
he said "Yes sir" and "No sir."

"Sir?", I asked.
What happened to nigger?

Science kind of scares me.
A friend said that some guy,
I think from Princeton,
did some study or paper
explaining how love is a chemical.
How when we fall in love,
a chemical is released,
and makes us feel good.
Then after a while
the chemical wears off,
and we don't feel it
to be as special as it was.

So being me, I stop to think,
about how science kind of scares me.
Could how I love someone,
be affected by... chemicals?
Are my feelings, emotions, all of that,
simply the result of a love drug?
Well, he did say it was from Princeton...
Damn Yankees.

Flying Westward

There's two pilots up front
and several thousand-pound
engines humming on either side,
suspended on wings underneath
the blue and red Delta symbol.
There's lots of reasons
that this plane is in the air.
But I'd like to think
that it's my heart's high spirits,
that keep it floating,
like a dream.

This poem is for all the kids
who pretended they could fly.
For all those who drummed
with carrot sticks at lunch time,
and smoked a large fat pretzel
as if it were a Cuban cigar.
It reaches out those special few
that always had a joke if you asked,
and also those that recognize the air guitar
as an actual instrument of play.
This poem is for the brothers and sisters
that played hangman with hotel pens
on the programs of the Church
on early Sunday mornings.
It's for all those that turned a playroom
in to American Gladiators,
and a vacant basement
in to Legends of the Hidden Temple.
This is for all those kids
who acted like they were actually dead
after being shot with a nerf gun
or Super Soaker Nine Thousand.
This is for all of those carefree kids,
and the adults that still act like them.
This poem is in dedication to those that realize
that life is too short to cry,
so we should laugh, play, and imagine
that anything is possible, especially happiness.

Imagine there's an island
shrouded in a dense forest,
and a castle in the middle
that is hidden and ancient.

A beautiful system of ramparts
that cries of solitude and
with trees that seem to grow
out of the Will of the earth.

You have to row to get there,
trek on horseback up the steep inclines,
and walk on foot through miles of trees,
but the sight of the drawbridge is amazing.

And inside there are not jesters,
or kings, or even jealous serfs.
Only you and I exist in this castle
and while some may call it prison,
shut off from normalized society,
you and I live in pure spirits
knowing heaven couldn't possibly be better.

At one time she loved them,
those little black Oreos.
When I was only five or six
and was done chopping wood,
she'd show me how to dip
them in a glass of milk.
Now I sit next to her bed,
with my son besides me,
holding a package of Oreos,
and wonder if today she knows who I am.

"Oh you two fine men there", she begins,
(Guess it's a bad day again...)
"Are those Oreos you have there?
Let me show you how to dunk them in milk,
I once knew a charming young boy
that I taught the same thing."

---

Proving you can make poems from everyday conversation (one person will know what I'm talking about).