Rosary

Rosary 

The time has come for honesty/

I admit I suck at boxing these/

Fighters, they're lunging, robbing me/

Of a dream that kept me up and walking free/

When my life wasn't mine, I'd thrust and pocket these/

Experiences, my trust was not the thing/

Reciprocated but my love was stalking me/

All around the world, but the lottery/

Came and went and I was stuck with all the beat/

Tickets, so I burned them and the rush it halted weak-/

Minded busted fallen dreams/

I clutched my balls and screamed/

I'm not done, don't walk on me/

As the exposure seeped/

In my bones as sleep/

Came over me/

It became my rosary/

I was quoting reams/

Of poetry/

When on the lowest brink/

I chose to keep/

Fighting and swinging, yet closure seemed/

So far away, but I rode the steep/

Waves of my internal roving needs/

The crones and leech-/

  -es began to notice me/

So I'd throw a weak/

Punch and found a skull/

In my hand to hold/

Powerful/

Strength that wasn't there before, I was astounded, pulled/

Myself out of the land that tore/

Me apart, sought to ground my soul/

Into dust, I was a magnet for/

Substantial torm-/

  - ent, but in a magical/

  Way I slammed the door/

On that enslavement and began to hammer forth/

My voice no longer stammered or/

Stuttered, I'd found my force/

And reason to live/

The beatings to give/

Were gifted, gradually I needed a shift/

In perspective, I was eager to kiss/

A lost love but she was leaving and kicked/

Out unjustly, I was beleaguered and drift-/

  - ing, weeping and split/

  In two because evil exists/

Creepily it/

Made its way into my peace and insist-/

  - ed it belonged, but I served a cease and desist/

Letter, my writing keeps me up when/

The world is heavy and my back is creaking and shivved/

Because the knives there have become so deeply dismissed/

That I've forgotten that they were there like weeds in the midst/

Of a green lawn, jade and opulent/

I was hating all of this/

But I made a promise with/

Myself to behave and walk with Him/

So maybe condescend-/

  - ing shame's intolerant/

Of the way I want to live/

Her faith's a monolith/

That I pray to often in/

Quiet moments when the shade is calling me/

But I see the Sun's rays and ponder them/

My life was meant to be this way, a constancy/

War, and the hate theyre mongering/

Is Hades stalking me/

So I stand and make my prophecy/

A play exalting me/

Wrap my hands and brave this ardent stream/

Of decay and bartering/

Punching my way through, cobbling/

A plan together while I drain the swamp in me/

Countertop

 Haunting this countertop/

Wondering how could all/

This go bad and walk/

Away from us, the patterns caught/

On repetition in my life, absent thought/

A coward's plot/

To brandish false/

Hope and manage slots/

Left over from the branch that rots/

Away, the old adage copped/

As an excuse, wrath of God/

Plant your balk-/

-ing seeds and stand and walk/

Because you are my spectre/

And I'm stressing/

Out over the time left in/

Our dying ending/

The price mentioned/

Was too much, so I write, wept in/

Quiet, bet this/

Life's questions/

Won't answer why settling/

Down defied convention/

My best friend/

You'll soon fly, stretching/

Our hearts like vested/

Lives destined/

To find remnants/

Of each other in every girl or guy messed with/

And getting over you/

Is akin to choking booze/

Down and moping through/

My days, hopeless, nude/

Vulnerable, emotions bruised/

Soaked in blue/

Feelings, morose and gloom/

My heart poured into/

Every poem proof-/

  -read at a bar, alone, enthused/

For nothing but foreboding moves/

Prose is glued/

To my eyelids, the chosen few/

That make the road we rue-/

 -fully walk down not a total slu-/

 -icing off of our former hues/

See me in every errant pen/

That stares and grins/

At you and cherishes/

Your caring lens/

That sees the world and cares and lends/

A cherry red/

Kiss and buries them/

In kindness, I sweared it then/

And now, but marriage went/

The way of our weariness/

Let the ocean's ensnaring winds/

Carry this/

All bleary fits/

Of weeping until my larynx rips/

Itself from my throat, I'm daring it/

Love is a scary den/

To leave, but it's our merriment/

A Drunkard's Lament

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Alcohol/
Is a battle fought/
With madness wrought/
From the sadness caught/
Between a man that calms/
His hands and thoughts/
With poison that wraps its claws/
Around his watch/
Makes time pass and stop/
Whenever he slams a shot/
I have forgot-/
-ten the chasms walked/
Barefoot and half distraught/
When I've drowned in bot-/
-tles of the brownest rot-/
-gut liquor, that the damned can flaunt/
Prancing, dropped/
By the rancid vom-/
-it that crams and falls/
From the mouth of all/
The manic lost/
Ones that choose to pad their traum-/
-as with Jack and vod-/
-ka, Schnapps and all-/
-the traps of karma/
Let's get plastered, crawl the/
Line, disasters wobbling/
Pants are starting/
To tear, we're panting, heart is/
Racing, death a tragic pardon/
From the crimes of a master wrong one/
The fortune amassed is startling/
Fan your pockets/
For the change that's always last for varmints/
Alas, unvarnished/
Regrets are magic, popping/
Up wherever you're lashed and charred with/
The fires of your family's charges/              

A Mission Statement

A Missiom Statement

The Poeta Bellator, Latin for Warrior Poet, is an archetype that has always resonated with me, long before I was mature enough to grasp its depths and comprehend its intricacies. 

It was one that has been applied to me by others throughout my life, in addition to some less savory monikers, because of my seemingly contradictory love for both literature and physical culture.

Indeed, as I grew, what began innocently enough, a vague comparison made because of my interests and hobbies, would grow to encapsulate my sense of self and, eventually, become the very path leading me out of profound personal darkness and despair.

I feel that the modern world is lost, adrift and directionless, bereft of purpose and meaning, for a few simple reasons. 

The first of these is that we shirk adversity and hardship, whether external or internal, encountered or self-inflicted. 

Some of us don't, and those that refuse have become some of my best friends and most trusted confidantes, family by bloodshed rather than blood of birth. 

We train, strive, introspect, and create, because no matter the medium, any act of self-expression is laudable and cathartic. 

Those that do avoid struggle and pain itself find no kinship with me, or those like me, simply because we can't relate. 

Since leaving the Navy, I've encountered a kind of somnambulance out here, witnessing golems and constructs, soulless, hollow, and vacant, trudging through life empty and wavering, only appearing to be human. 

They possess no inner-life, the spark of existence snuffed out by endless streams of alcohol, narcotics, and pleasureful pursuits. 

I'd call on everyone if I could to rouse their slumbering spirit, to find salvation, physically, mentally, and spiritually, the way it was introduced to me. 

Lift ponderous weights, perform actual, arduous calisthenics, more akin to the gymnastics of the Warrior cultures of antiquity than the soft, effete "circuit training" so common now. 

Sprint until your lungs threaten to burst from the exertion, then smile self-effacingly because that was your warm up. 

Practice a martial art, or several, getting back in-tune with your body and the harmonious violence, beautiful and blunt, that it's capable of, knowing all the while that in turning yourself into a living weapon, you're tempering your baser, weaker nature, transcending what you were to realize what you may yet become.

Read, widely and voraciously, indiscriminately and promiscuously, until you wake up several years later and discover that your formidable erudition has earned you the fabled title "Renaissance Man". 

Journal, so that you may know yourself, because introspection and self-analysis are the only true pathways to peace, enlightenment and perfection, God's perfect gift to remove negative, sabatoging thoughts and feelings before they take root, manifest malignantly and threaten your self-labor.

Lastly, but most essentially, pray. What this looks like is completely up to you, unique, subjective and, above all else, personal. 

Though I'm Christian, I neglect churches as a whole because of the radical adherence to dogma that I've encountered there. 

What begins as a service and worship of God inevitably degenerates into a cult of personality, with a fallible, opinionated human being as the figurehead, bastardizing The Word Of God for their own insidious agendas. 

Disgusting, and may they burn in Hell for their heresy. 

My own relationship with Christ, and the resulting Jesuism of my adolescence, is deeply intimate and private, something that no man or woman could ever seize from me or damn me for. 

So it must be with you. 

Throughout my life I've known Christians, Catholics, Methodists, Calvinists, Baptists and Episcopalians. 

I've met and befriended Wiccans, Odinists, Satanists, Atheists, Agnostics, Spiritualists, and even a fucking self-professed Jedi. 

Their beliefs all differed greatly and wildly, but they all derived intense and fervent purpose from their individual beliefs, and this caused them to strive for more in this world, to rise above the common man and refashion themselves into something greater, a Phoenix rising triumphantly from its own ashes, a product of the reincarnation of self-immolation. 

There's really not much more to say. 

Im not here to start a movement or group, a club or organization. I just want to speak my truth, to give light to my voice in a world crippled by commodification and disconnect. 

Maybe in the process I'll help a few people the way that my predecessors assisted me, by showing me that, yes, there is an alternate choice, a different route that focuses on self-development, rather than self-destruction. 

I'll see y'all out there.