Eighteen

Toking, chatting,
Killing hours,
Smoking, laughing,
Sniffing flowers,
Those with answers
Think we haven't listened,
If these and rhymes
Are wasting time,
What isn't?

Affirmation

You are unique
In your own special way.
Your body's physique
And your mind's walks astray.
All that you do
And everything you say.
Let nothing seduce
Yourself from what it may.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall

Every wall that man has ever built
Has gone the way of amateur on stilts.

Still

The pondering individual remains the only notion.
Lonely, one has just himself to share in all emotion.
A twinkling speck among the pod above an evening ocean.
In dreams alone a man can know his neighbor and approach him.

Ecclesiastical

I sat once alone, without friends,
And having no company or destination
My mind got to wandering:
The flow of time, it seems,
Resembles water running over rocks,
Washing away the piles land has driven up
Like John Henry hammering with two picks
Or a mason mortaring brick on brick.
Shelters are good, yes, I don't dispute;
But is there not more beauty in a wild butte?
Everything I've made will someday subside.
I do not pride myself in thinking that
My work will be eternal. The surface isn't.
The drawings I create will be erased,
But the principles I draw from will last.
Everything God made was good,
But times have changed, But God is not dead.
It is a man's job to die.
The Earth the Lord has given us is swell,
So why in unlit prisons do we dwell?

The Pothead

At seventeen
He found the answer:
Smoke on green
Then die of cancer.

Nicomachean Farce

Aristotle
Sipped a bottle,
"To hell with virtue,
Fun won't hurt you.
Hedonism
That's my motto,
Oh lowly slave:
Send in the models!"

Ballad of some Broken Dreams

Quitting can be hard, you see,
When boxing with a pipe it seemed
Was everything could ever be
And all in life I'd ever need.

To dream a lofty far off goal,
Something I would never tell
But kept within my wrinkled soul
Seeming more and more like hell.

Cutting off the ball and chain
Appeared to me the brighter side,
Ending the internal pain,
Restoring trust and long-gone pride.

But when the time to tell the truh
Came and went, the bitter scene
Did less to aching heart give soothe
Than rock and hard place wedge between.

Here on hand my smoking friends
Who, though in sin we took our fun
Chilling in the ill-known den,
Were in my life the only ones,

And on this side here gravely stood
The mom and man who'd been providers.
Their faith I'd smeared across like blood
Of egg-laying ignorant spiders.

And when alone, I fought myself:
Had my actions ruined life?
In what condition lay my health?
All I knew was anxious strife.

But conversation proved the key,
I spoke of these with those the wiser,
The answer to the mystery
Was tell the truth, not turn a miser.

So choices made are often wrong,
Adolescence throws us curves,
One must shift the path he's on
Or else become a boil of nerves.
Someday I will blaze again,
But not today my friends,
But not today my friend.