The Toothpick Fire

I.

One of my friends said

Nothing good happens

After midnight.

I say

Nothing good happens

Before.

II.

Rebekah said that

It’s dangerous to

Walk around downtown

After the respectable people

Have gone in.

I always thought

It’s exciting to

Walk around downtown

After the real people

Have come out.

III.

The moon of

Darkest night

Covers the

Gray, ugly

Cement

With decadent

Flashes of

Reflected heaven.

Or does

The sun of

Sultry summer

Cover the

Decadent, reflective

Flashes of

Cement

With somber

Waves of

Grey heat?

Little Louise is seventeen

And hasn’t got a clue,

But reaching out beyond her door

She looks for what is true.

Weak but strong, she’s growing up;

She now lets out her sails—

Searching for the next horizon

To see what life entails.

Little Louise is graduating

From everything she knows,

But stout in heart and fresh in spirit

Her soul breaks free and goes.

Little Louise is stabbed inside

By a little, pestering poke;

Gazing into an Artist’s sky,

This guilt is not a joke.

She gives her heart to the only One

Who Knew this Little Louise,

And every day she learns just more

Of mankind’s grave disease.

Little Louise had found her Home

But still she felt unrest,

And with a love for a quiet boy

Her feminine soul was blessed.

He didn’t speak, he didn’t cry,

He never was afraid;

And Louise didn’t know to walk away,

So instead she loved and stayed.

His mind, his heart, was a mystery,

But fearlessly she did confide,

Never knowing of all the demons

He harbored still inside.

A quiet wedding was watched by ravens—

A foreshadow of deepest gloom,

And the spirit of Little Louise was slayed

That late July afternoon.

They had two boys and a girl in the middle

Who never learned to Live—

Searching in vain for the love of a father

Whose love he’d never give.

Little Louise taught her children to trust

In something beyond Today,

Knowing inside her broken heart

That hope had passed away.

Those three little people just wanted a home—

Together with Mom and Dad,

But Little Louise couldn’t give the love

That she had never had.

He never speaks, he never cries,

He never is afraid;

Bitterly working from dawn to dusk

As his family slips away.

Day by day Louise holds on

And tries to never feel,

But deep inside her soul is broken

And joy is no longer real.

Every year she’s less of herself

Till one day the view is clearer,

And she realizes with despairing dismay—

There’s a stranger in the mirror.

Little Louise was seventeen

And didn’t have a clue,

But reaching out beyond her door,

She looked for what was true.

O Daddy listen, for just this once

While the years remaining are few:

You tried to be a king; a god,

But all she wanted was you.

The years were harsh to all of us;

Each season wintry cold;

And prematurely all of us

Found ourselves growing old.

Today only I and the great God above

Are crying in blackened breeze—

For the precious, beautiful, lovely, lonely,

Dying Little Louise.  

A sailor sailed to sea, to sea

And never once did he look back.

Hoisting red sails merrily,

Dressed for luck in red and black.

Alone he sailed, alone he sailed

A vale of laughs, a vale of smiles;

He’d lived on land; on land he failed

Now sailing away for 22 miles.

Sailing the mists of February

A sailor seeks up, a sailor sails out—

To mystic sky so legendary,

To find what ethereal blue’s about.

The anchor is raised, the flag is flown;

The wind blows cold through empty dock

With soundless word and breathless moan

‘Neath one lone hungry circling hawk.

The sailor lifts his arms up high

And bids the fading land farewell—

The land he tires of living by;

The land he tires of hearing tell.

In comes the sea on white-laced horizon:

Clear and blue and quiet and clean

And fit to reveal and life to enwisen;

Nevermore a land to be seen.

A sailor lifts his eyes to the mast

Whose scarlet sails have flown him home

Where hill and mountain grass are past

And only love in the rippling foam:

A crimson love from east to west,

Wrapped in the arms of forever rest,

Lost in the sea of forever rest.

All the time,

I hear about more

Of my friends

Cutting,

Attempting suicide,

Being checked into hospitals for

Self-damage.

For some,

They provide a dire warning.

For me,

They just pave the way.

We broken, lonely few

At war with ourselves,

With each other,

With the world.

We fight, we fight, we fight;

We, this counted multitude—

The prisoner of war

Who just gives up,

Never living.

The heroes, the villains

Who die in glory.

The deserters,

Destined to wander the earth,

Forever alone,

Forever wondering,

And the people 

Who never went,

Haunted to the soul

With that singular feeling

That the whole world

Is at a birthday party

These lucky, cursed few

Didn’t get invited to.

But

We I,

We you,

We all

Find ourselves

On this battlefield—

Whether today,

Or tomorrow, 

Or forever.

We form our sides,

Our sides form our ranks,

Never knowing at the end

Of the gunfire,

The smoke,

The bayonets,

We all lie bleeding,

Side by side—

The colonel, the private,

The marine, the nazi,

Insides picked clean

By the same raven

Sweeping down,

Devouring,

We I,

We you,

We all—

We broken,

Lonely 

Few.