It’ll Cost You Points on the Scrabble Board

Rested at the crossroad in declining light,

wanting to see a blameless city burn,

with a thousand screams sending hammer strikes through windowpanes

from the frigid air you’ve been cramming down my throat.

It’ll be my fault for the shrug and turn demonstrated

when circles face inward and cast out the outcast outward,

jagged geometry punishing for poking a head out of doors.

---

Should have known better in the room’s poor weather,

feeling a frost from a friend’s bare blade advertised as a coming of age.

Distance is what stands a character straighter,

makes a man grow a mammoth’s coat,

digs a wider cave to let a bear swallow up a conscience,

sleep soundly through a season without a need to care or be cared.

---

The biting temperature’s greeting is a feeling that’s unrelenting

in the absence of flotsam to grip onto a lucid thought.

I’ll pull back the lever that’s laid down the gates,

letting their fangs shing bright on shirt stains and band aids,

their urgent signs the manor wall boxing me into nothing.

I’ll sap out the marrow in the name of Puritan self-sufficiency,

chasing myself out the back door of parties with my own words,

smearing over a veneer to never let in on the fear.

---

Hung up, chin down on a fortress surface,

I take Rothko as my shield and never give a hint otherwise

that there’s any other color to spy besides the one clear in the eye,

unequivocally un-opaque next to more exciting shapes.

---

Inside a blank picture are a thousand screams

all loosely tied to draw out the frame of me.

Should I ever loosen grip on the wall,

light strings fly, tossed into a cold breath,

made thin in the presence of larger characters.

---

Would rather be found in a tree limb’s embrace,

discovered in a kite riddled with pike strikes

as those around desperately stamped out the sound of a soul

for never fitting properly in the jigsaw world.