The Drugs on the Microwave

You have an expired bottle of
Oxy sitting on the Microwave
from your C-section
that you never took

and in my dreams, I put on
a leather jacket and stand out
in front of our house
lighting a cigarette

before crushing up a few
pills with the heal of a
butter knife and cutting
it up on the coffee table

with the scribbles from
my daughter's crayon set
and discolored scuff marks
from her Velcro shoes;

floating above the stained
sofa with my heals eclipsing
my head, straight out like
a cadaver, I slip and skitter

on frozen flames that
call out a din of doom,
collapsing in on myself:
a neutron star -

I wipe up the blood with
this page and form
it into letter, into
words.

Benedril and Coca-Cola

A lighthouse sits beyond the sailboat's bow
It's focus ever steadfast at the sight
the Captain never knows just when or how
his vessel finds the line, it finds the light
For where is Jesus in the the depth of hell
when Satan has forsaken sinful souls
and if the poker player has a tell
then fire down below means heaven's cold?
Yet I still sit down at this old computer
to find some satisfaction big or small
I know not who will mine my smelted pewter
but fingers on the keyboard say it all
I'll set my sights on heaven at all cost
even though I know all souls are lost. 

Waves Above

The embers of the flame of love
are burning out, inside --
The woman that I married left me
long before she died.

We slowly drove Dalmatian cliffs
when wedding bells did chime --
the honeymoon was broken
when I lost my fucking mind --

We drove around for hours and
I had no soothe avail --
the man she thought she married,
hardly there, beyond the veil;

Flash forward twenty years and still
I'm working on my soul --
the lesson that I learned is she
would never make me whole,

so when you find this poem that
your father wrote is grief --
remember there is always more
that's going on beneath.

Doctor G from Lynwood

This 

seventy-something 

white-haired

LSD-loving 

gun-shooting 

desert-driving

Ph.D 

with a Goatee 

lives 

in your fucking 

poolhouse

and is 

fucking 

your wife. 

a Little Strange Inside

When I was 16, and it was winter
near the coast in San Diego,
I was listening to music in
the middle of the night
on my headphones,

when the outline
of my step-dad came
up to the door and
I asked him what he was
doing and my voice

must have been loud
because he charged
at me like a drunken
frat-boy pummels
a foreign exchange student

while she is in a country,
in a city, in a school, in
a house with greek letter that is
not her own,
that is not her home;

after he left, I wept -
even though at 16
I had inches over him
and I had muscles over him,
he was still my father

he could've beat me
if he wanted to, and
now, I am so much
bigger and so much further away
that the music in my headphones

is still playing loud
I am quiet
so still and so quiet
closed and quiet
but still I weep when I'm alone.