The truck was full, its open back
heaped black, and there a leg, an eye;
daylight thickened on the sweating
stack and blurred the further sky.

Ten feet away I pulled the key
and let the engine jolt and choke,
the CD skipped, an old riff jarred,
a line of meaning stopped and broke

and something in that silence straightened,
left a splintered ****** mark,
I closed my eyes and felt it there,
hating in the blinded dark.

And she says
Nature is the devil’s church
As I feel the birch trees
Fall all around me
And this land
Seems to have an *******
From our birth
From our pain
And she blows her candles out
Like dandelions in acid rain
In Idaho fields
Her own private shield
In Idaho fields
And if all that flies falls
Who will be circling up top
Who will be swimming
Is there any plot of Earth
Free from grid-demise
Worth saving
Worth slaving over
On this black-top
Spinning asphalt
And she says
All the world’s a trap
The trees just create a map
For the pandemonium tax
And the breeze
You best think twice
Before you stare down
The one with medusa hair
In Idaho fields

My friend published a book
of collected Scots Proverbs.
200 pages and more, filled
with countless ways of saying
"Don't show off."

And that precious wisdom,
generations in the making
percolated through smokey thatch
in dismal dripping glens,

Tattooed into tenement bricks
with the soot of dead industry,
added to the diet
with the excess salt and saturated fat,

Paving the roads
on which all ambition travels south,
And fizzing through the lager
on its way to the head

Now hangs around the kids
like the stink around an ashtray
and stifles any pride
they might invest in themselves.

They will pass it on
with their genes
and their endless disappointments,
despising anyone who rises
above the station
at which they are
eternally delayed.

I cast my words away like children cast stones over dark waters on a summer's sunset soon faded.
Torn between a direction none with many promises of hope but surely chaos in hand with devil's grip.
One is never good enough and twelve is but a taste of a speeding train soon to derail.

My message is a as murky as the  air that swirls in his barroom of empty ness I call my existence.
Tortured genius and drunken buffoon often share drinks of a sandy nature in an oasis of torment.
Beaten in thought and charred in reason I'm seldom at home in this crowd.

Stones that skip often no matter the distance sink into the dark waters
of empty ness.

We are moments shared in logic of other's shattered in fragments.
No attempt seems to clam my efforts only drown my hope.
It's written upon the page will you ask or simply ignore ramblings in
a staged tragedy. I seldom seem real.

Stones were once part of boulders aborted by mountains.
So after the fall what is left but fragments?
Maybe I'll pull it together if only for a moment.

I'm slipping in sanity and drowning in the depth of a hollow existence mocked by my own words
like a prisoner left too long within the hole.
I shout only for my voice's comfort.

To long I've rambled I've begun to sink.
A sunset's embrace is but a epitaph of envy in a gravediggers diary and I am but a blank page.

Familiar empty feeling has now changed to be a comfort,
Routine will always get me by.
This self indulgent feeling can not go for any longer
Ive always been too proud to cry.

But not right now, Ive got no time as I get ready for the day
Put on my socks, my shoes, my smile
Always been my saving grace.

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.