Between Two Cities

Poetry & Prose

[micahwachovec]

Kindness Changed Me

   

I find salvation from the heaving taunt

In the joy children don’t know not to flaunt

I find inoculation

In the pride of amputees for their nation

I burst open into patterns of light while remaining whole

Because this old existing has given me a new soul

The treasure is deep and the mission will creep

The duty will not forever keep

But beauty will not forever sleep

The Counts and the Princes

Of Cristo

Of Harlem

Kings don’t rule and hearts won’t harden

Power is the fibers of muscle in the legs of a steed

Transcending is knowing that when I cut you

We both bleed

I have seen the waterfalls of cosmic sulfur

The flow and mix of kindness with love in culture

The only torch in that deepest of caves

Is not

That man

Must

Behave

But that I can believe

And you can save

[micahwachovec]

Even If You Aren’t Mine

Know that peoples attention span is not a barometer

For the impact

Of the life altering cosmic force that is

You

You in your small ways and magnificent opuses

You, you, you and the elegance that writhes enviably throughout

We are whole separated for we are together always in pockets of existence

Slivers of time and slips of the ultrasublime   

In all the hours I spend swinging on the cot that is the open arms of your love

The universe that is the creation of your mind

The cells that transient they may be they lift your pulse and ease my suffering

I’m not sure life is anything but easing the constant that is suffering

It isn’t for me

I write these words not because you don’t know them

But because I know it eases to know someone else knows them

That you, you, you were singularly beautiful today

That a second later you became a poem lines and all

And how I love your poetry

Just as love is not possession but appreciation

Possession is doomed while appreciation can transcend

And you fucking transcend  

[micahwachovec]

Creation Is The Tissue Of Thought

I’m still at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Ferrying leaky buckets of water

Telling nature the devil loves to barter

The Gods have arguments

The ego is self and the ego ferments

The back and forth of government scorn

Peace is Olympus to the battle born

The valley of candles wears heels not sandals

Benevolence is a wall and we lay siege

Existence is watching a stick of dynamite bleed

I’m still at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Ferrying sky scaling flowers to visiting children

Burying war at the feet of civilians

Acts are for sale but emotions are for earning

Minutes traded for millions like fire for the burning

Surrender every weapon and they’ll come for your mind

The predator is so easily created

And innocence its end fated

Surrender your mind and life is pointless

Thought is the bloom

Creation the greenery flesh

Parents love and owners test

There is nothing more irreverent than innocence

Past torture, murder and the attempt to define

Creation invites the disciple to be king

The everlasting emptiness to once again dream

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are not unsung

The sheets of Mozart wrung

The touch of God gone

We are in our very existence creation

Moving

On

To suggest we end is to confuse transition with loss

Price with cost

Repotting

Eternity

When I do not understand

I return to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

I let my anger sit in revery of growth

My jealousy know an oath

Should I be valuable and violent

I too will be silent  

[micahwachovec]

Something Sarah Lee Made

Something Longfellow it’s something thorough

Deeper into the flesh bloodless as a glow

In the tumult the times demanded

Bravery is going into a fight unhanded

Prayers each and all to Gods trajectory  

I know not what is worse

Sex secularly

Or otherwise

Imaginings of my traversing

A hate nursing

How do I keep myself from learning

That the corruption must be challenged

That not everybody sees the beauty in scars

You cannot repair broken mirrors

With yesterdays fear and tomorrows shards

No one going to war waits for the bard

My mind is like a web and not unlike a dreamcatcher

It snags passing pieces of brilliance and mundane memories of guilt

A mill next to the river of senility

Where grows every flower that into this agony spilled

You can say I affirm the truth but you cannot say I lie

It is not my fault that loss on the doors of weakness pry

You can say cheering the losing is foolish

DNA unstrings with none apart to pull it

Break people with language

And by the miles you unspool it

Truth serves the good

If you do not practice good

What use is the truth

[micahwachovec]

The Unbreaking Words

Ban them damn them

Breathing is demanding

We draw a circle for the self

It has no power and it brings no wealth

But it is a point of reference

The circle is a ring a dream a breathing thing

Changes forms melted smelted mumbled belted

It remains

So apparent our connection to not strings

But points of reference

The heart of hurt the core of the earth

If you study you learn if you listen you learn

If you suffer you learn if you grow you learn

If you create

You had better attach a point of reference to what you create

If you watch persistence reset and beauty splinter and catch

If you were its cupping hands or its match

You

You flirtation of the waves unbreaking

You intoxication of anger at loves forsaking

You know as I know our points of reference soak matter through

View the equation differently and find

The gully looks different beneath the canopy

Than it does from the worlds highest peak

Beautiful that mangled freak

I did and firstly thought myself cheated

But who in death is defeated

Who in existence is nowhere

Who in love can lose

[micahwachovec]

Do You Have A Light?

You cannot confuse sacraments with illegal paraphernalia

Unless the Holy Grail is found in a dry county

Rules and fools

Lessons without water

Children in schools

I am convinced your pain is real

I am equally convinced their pain is real

What I remain to be convinced of

Is that I can self-mutilate my way to love

Fish on loaves

They’re only worth living for

A life for an art and rags for clothes

 

Tell me it’s a process

Tell me it’s a scientific equation

Tell me any of us know what we’re doing

Because I can see the blocks but not the building

And we all go through the throws

But whose got the feelings

I have your eyes on my sordid and unworthy flesh

My broken and bankrupt brain calls you to my mind

Know me but not too well

Worship me but expect nothing from me

Obey me but it’s not my fault

Clearly God isn’t interested in dictatorship

So what fucking right have any of us

There is no promise to be promised

On the waking I’ll fight the fight with you

Not against you

I’ll read the bones

Not break them

I’ll expand mercy

Not dwindle it

I’ll guard the hope

And my children will guard the hope

And those who believe I know anything about the circumference of existence

They will know to guard the hope

[micahwachovec]

Like I Should

If we stop believing in forgiveness

We choose the end

In all ways

In all means

In all energies

An I for an I

A pain for a pain

I will let go of my fear

If you are determined to be sane

A protection for a damaged

A seal for a crack

An injection after a sandwich

I don’t always want the future

Often I want what never was back

It is consequences we must believe in

Justice is the fairytale

The ideas of reality and truth do not fit together snugly

It is an imperfect system with an ever evolving understanding and ruleset

That I would not presume to force upon you mine

But that others scolded and scalded my senses and spirit with their ruleset

It has caused no end of confusion and detriment

That there was no law to forbid the breaking of a human mind

Broke my everything

At the beginning I need to forgive myself for doing little

Little more than eating, crying and shitting

Little of the work

For doing so little of the vast everything that is to be done

At long last I need to forgive those I hate

My impulse is to think of hate as a sin

When it’s just a fact like the color orange

The only way to really defeat the past

Those who hurt us and what they did

Is to be stronger than the hate

Stronger than predatory psychology passed down

From victim to victim to victim

To victim

Stronger than what we think we want

When we know it is only what we crave

And not what we need

I crave to feed myself everything that tastes good in copious amounts

I crave to cuckhold a maximum security prison population

I crave massive displays of emotion

I need to drink coffee, write poetry and spoil my dog

Tell me about you and your ruleset

Because I’ve been angry

I want to celebrate you

[micahwachovec]

A New Animal

Thunder splits the sky that’s the smite of your eye

On the childlike predators

Who’ve come around to pull the meat from my bones

As it rains on the grasslands

Of a new pride tonight

There is a loosening of every pull

A release of all things full

When you are sure the beauty has gone silent

Nature shows the vicious violent

And when you think God is dead

She is making her bed

How well will you sleep?

You have had a truly blessed existence to fear oblivion

The pit of vipers slithering on top of each other

That is competition

Be it communism or capitalism

It is the evening of the scales

When the trust breaks and the empathy fails

The light of creation itself pales

If I drink at the well of nihilism

Selfishness bound me long before the bars were my prison

A lather of secretions oils

As I rest beneath the foil and coils

Trying to help those above and below me cherish

As if my den of erudite delights were a parish

And every existence not so very nightmarish

It rains on the grasslands

Of a new pride tonight

The breath of the winds pour the prairie about

Misery is never a mystery

Power this power that

Carnivores, herbivores and creators at their craft

[micahwachovec]

The Attempt Itself

In the entropy of action

Stretching my body out towards the arms of a faction

I have become aware that the ego takes

And the soul needs

That the mind chews

And the heart swallows

I do not know what it is to be you

But the heart follows

The ego is millions of thoughts

Millions of termites

In this living sequoia

It grows on the coast and loves the lights

But God help the paranoia

Orchards and mountain life

Smoke and residue caking

We must be aware of what we are taking

Eagles and seagulls

Is that a vampire or an oil well your staking

Madness isn’t unique

Insanity isn’t beautiful and strange

Concerted and harnessed thought is the rabbit

Power is a continuance for control and comes in a habit

But leaves a heretic

You will know love by its quantitative good accomplished 

Wether you love a life until the parasites take it

Or reinvent medicine

 God is the idea that the attempt itself matters too

[micahwachovec]

The Perpetuity Of These Affections

We’ll say the fight was fierce and the wounds gory

That heaven fell and God has lost her glory

We will say the love isn’t worth it

That we’re tired of the hurting

To never say goodbye

I would burn the blue from the sky

To never say goodbye

We’ll scar our faces

Break the bone of our skulls

Lose every tooth

Rupture organs until deaths want will soothe

But when the air is constrained

As the oxygen evaporates in our brains

We will forever be each others names

Muscle rots

Fortune crashes on the rocks

Beings talk

I will find you in the swirling astral joke

Because when I could no longer move

You spoke

You have to leave to die

To ever say goodbye

I would sacrifice my vanity and go mad in the name of sanity

Put down a high

Let the barbarians fly

To never say goodbye

We will feel the chill freeze

Lose love to greed

Make money off disease

Into the mist maze of eternity rage

If they burned a book

I memorized a page

Same quiet boom

Fuck doom

We will hold onto the waves

That the soil thought could be our graves

We will never say goodbye

We will never say goodbye

[micahwachovec]

On Guard

Thunder on the heels

Rain as the Indian kneels

Do the woods speak to the bear

Does the darkness the crow scare

Not really

Sorry hardly

Goodbye Vietnam

What is a factory to an artist named Charlie

I will not be afraid of my fellow man

Driven to the blade or through it ran

There is no liberty without the sentinel

There is only slaughter without the war

It is these gaping wounds that we were born for

Struggle with me In the attempt for peace disclosed

Without our ideas vehemently opposed

In bloody violence deity after deity will be deposed

The struggle and friction of right and restriction

It is the saw that cuts the firewood

We burn to warm the winter

And my God made vast woodlands

Through the quirkiest of erosions

When he was frustrated with the oceans

The point is

The point is up to you

[micahwachovec]

Burden Of Power

The gills reach is the sand on the beach

Pebble in the shoe and a mountain out of reach

Slight of word cut of hand

Comfort is not God and comfort be damned

With my ankles at mud and lips at blood

Love is salvation torment the toiling

You killed the game but whose stew is boiling

Wonder, wonder years of plunder

Not a mystery that misery

Thirsty men and not the worst of them

Souls worse off than Kalashnikovs

Choose how you answer the bodies demand

Under the influence is under command  

Demon divined

What you witness you design

[micahwachovec]

Cruelty Beckons Death

The skin breaks and paper burns

Lord help the ego that lessons cannot learn

Transition is the sky to fog

Is the grass to animal to oil to smog

Is it our destiny to be blind

Or to tread water until the pipes align

Then sing be we sewers or aqueducts

Befriended or given not a fuck

I can smell the sliced grass and rotting leaf

Like a dead belief

In the justice and genuineness of humanity

The love of sanity

We must stand before the taking

Or add our weight to the breaking

Bridges take hands and soldiers take stands

The judge and jury have collected

We are not always in control of how the truth is neglected

In the imagination

The indigo fields and platinum seams of immaculate dreams

We can fix and change the world ourselves

But often we must wait on others

Often we must suffer the crime of wrongful power and cruel time

This doesn’t make us evil

It makes compromise a reality marketed as just

Sometimes it is

And when is it not

Sentinels in the path crowning the life in the math

I am a simple shine

A wanton Plath

Do not sheer the light for you will need its half

We need the matter for the smallest bowl to craft

And the bowl that holds life that bowl holds fury

Waste no ones love and be not in a hurry

A great lover doesn’t need to love many

They just love who they love exceptionally

[micahwachovec]

Lux Again

The crux of the flux

Is that on some trails you only have what you can carry

Someday the despair will crack open

Hope emerges like inevitable little geese

A culture solid Greek

Eventually the nearest West is the ambition of the farthest East

Perfection is an idea perfection is a disease

The crux of the tux

Is that there’s this ideal and we’re measured against it

You do not belong to me or my mind and I am certain

I do not belong to you

Break the bonds and let the children sing their songs

It is the act of force that I so totally and furiously hate

To ask, to plea, to beg at the bottom of the world

Can be great

But to force

Is to undo every second of evolution that has ever crossed the threshold

Of the pain

The pain that waits outside the well worn circle of comfort   

The pain that stretched the belly

The pain that killed nine of ten

The pain that turns life into a deli

Pain promised but when

As the sheer prism of joy softens then

Then

What walks with you

Does not need your anger

Does not need your guile

Does not need your oppression

But moves heaven and soil

To make itself available

Wave and coil  

To make the serpent sailable

[micahwachovec]

Somewhere Out There

The worms in our tequila candy sweet

The error in our heart keeps the beat

Build and falter then we alter

Build and falter then we alter

Build and forth leap the culture

Worshiped until sacrificed upon the altar

The cycle of society is exceedingly complex

It only appears simple

Fabricating genius is not done

But genius fabricates all the time

Am I so different than the bee the ant

The flower the steel of the tower

The candy in our cinnamon liquor sour

Like the illusion of power

For we realize many places inside

From ankles to spine to kidney and lung

This existence is each other

In a world empty of companionship

We would dream of it

Alone

Friendship as elusive as it may be

Is the bond of family

Is the bond of God

Is the bond of lover

Is the bond of company

It says careful now

It warns watch your step

Friendship is the hand that wants not

The back to back

The shield to shield

Running with you in the open field

It is barking

It is fighting

It is drinking

It is cooking

And it is everywhere

Underdeveloped

But not unrealized

It’s why we look for opportunity

To be friendly

To smile

To laugh

To do the right thing

To stop the wrong thing

To take in stories

To pass on stories

Our story is not just a creative flourish

Nor a way to propagate our survival

But intellectual stimulant

That tells me you’re out there.

[micahwachovec]

Chiseled Features

As creases wrap our skin like closer fleeces

I want to wander west to see how close east is

I want to burn my skin to feel the water well

I want to be gentle with myself

Because we put ourselves through hell

 I don’t think it’s just me

I think everyone is secretly painting the chapel

They’ll never use

Secretly paying others premiums

On policies they want to lose

 I don’t think it’s just you

Sometimes I ache to be held

And you get used to the absence

But you never get used to the ache

You get used to the bleeding

But you never get used to the cuts

You get used to the honesty

But you never get used to the truth

 So I eat brilliance and shit metaphors

She says with the voice

Of a million roars

 So I take the beating and get back to eating

Am fitted and the last balloon is shitted

 How will you use your words

How will you use your weapons

How will you use your power

How will you eat

How will you chisel into the void

[micahwachovec]

Consistent

Warmth doesn’t mean no more rainy Tuesday afternoons

Being loved doesn’t mean the snow will no longer

Stick to the skin when you dance in Colorado

Safety doesn’t mean fire no longer burns

And I’m so thankful it doesn’t

I count on both edges of that sword

If you want the army you’ve got to feed the horde

  I know the mortal being lavish and amazing

Through the immortal and impossible phasing

But caught in a factual and mundane reality

That cannot be traversed

How warm the hell if this woe the worst

How purposeful the bones of heaven

When we leave the future in the home of our brethren

  Leave them where they stand

Mother cannot spite the motherland

Excellence doesn’t mean an end to failure

When I was a pirate was I not a sailor

The foundation of our creation

Is based on mistakes

We’re just warring with all we muster

Comparing ourselves to lies of each other

  The breeze doesn’t block the sun

Just because you failed doesn’t mean you’re not

The one

The devil is a drink the drink is a crown

To simplicities love is bound

I won’t hurt you

Try not to hurt me

We are in this together

When cometh the chaos

I shall follow faithfully

  A smile doesn’t mean the sewing won’t hurt

Consistency informs what we put first