A Trio of Vignettes

There was once a man who dreamed of dead things

         That lived in the shadows of his footprints and the corpses of fallen leaves.

They were not his friends,

            Not quite,

And he knew they'd only be there for him in patience til he died. 

                                            So he wished for them to not so gently fade.

He built himself a room of cheap dollar charms and quickburn sage

                                                                   And the coffin nail remnants of a man and his grenade,

In the hopes that it might drive away the devils in the hallways

           And the shadows in his ears.

    Yet still they flickered as the man grew weaker

                 And those happy dead things played dice with shattered bones

Until the clock struck 29 and the living man lost living life came slowly dying home.

                                                                  *

I once shot a shadow in the hopes it was a leper,

Amid all the errant and traitorous truths that it was just a specter. 

But how was a man to know within that static snow of every false bravado and histrionic lie,

That painted life with broad black strokes and laid eggs in fictitious minds. 

How was he to know was I,

That the specter falling fast with all its shadowed awe,

Was naught but cannon fodder in wake of heart's shotgun blasts. 

Yet it all was clear enough to see if only I had looked

When my last name was finally written within fate's hallowed books,

That penciled my damnation and bent to hear the cry

Of he who would live and die at the altars of shadows and the whimsy of his lies.

                                                             **

There was once a man and he lived his life by passing days and the failing time of lava lamps.

He watched clouds pass and wished they were dragons,

He saw people pass too and he thought they might be knights.

His feet scattered pebbles like they were meteors

And when the day came for hands to rise from waters high,

He saw in those fingers and fists the pages of a book that would someday end.

They were his books and they resembled his seconds, his hours, and his days.

The man wished for substance,

The man wished for life,

But he sat on water's edge with late-light laments

Because his pages were blank and the stars had gone dark.

They were just there. 

The perfect encapsulation of a life lived in a mind

And the world that ages and the pages that turned,

While the man bobbed adrift through the waves of change that never once had the tide to occur.

                                                                    ***