Red dirt and rock, 

Just an empty place, 

Surely there is something in another direction, 

Picture after picture, 

Still an empty place, 

Just loneliness incarnate.

Sometimes you just don’t know, 

If something will scratch your itch, 

Or just get you killed, 

Or worse yet, 

Land you in jail, 

Or worst af all, 

Let you get away with it, 

To eat at your conscience, 

For fity or so years.

Tuesday night into Autumn, 

Darkness falling more, 

Things are really changing, 

Here along the shore, 

Words are prone to wander, 

Much like in a dream, 

Music flows like whiskey, 

Things aren’t what they seem, 

The waves lap at the jetty, 

An image under clouds, 

The village soon will slumber, 

Beneath the snowy shrouds, 

Waiting for the warming, 

Returning sailors to the sea, 

When it comes next year, 

Will we still be free?

All the broken people waiting, 

For one to fix their life, 

More getting broken every day, 

In manufactured strife, 

Turning on each other now, 

Driven to it in their pain, 

Too busy with their fighting, 

In the manufactured rain, 

They can’t see the ones who broke them, 

They can’t hear each other’s cries, 

Because they have been blinded, 

By the manufactured lies, 

They were told somebody broke them, 

And to blame them for their fate, 

Makes them a ready target, 

For the manufactured hate.

Down by the old canal, 

On that night time city street, 

Just listening to the music, 

Wondering who I’ll chance to meet, 

Quite a while into the sunset, 

But still alive and kicking, 

Never thought that I would still be here, 

And the plot begins to thicken, 

Lots of those poor choices, 

Hard years fading in my wake, 

Lots of time lost getting better, 

No clue what it would take, 

Took a wrong turn years ago, 

When I was maybe twenty two, 

Took thirty years of trying, 

Just learning what to do.

Seeking justice in an unjust world, 

Setting out with sails unfurled, 

Leaving all my hopes to fate, 

Weathering the storms of hate, 

This course I’ve sailed on all my life, 

Although sometimes it causes strife, 

Sailing on the waves of time, 

Seeking love and life sublime.

All the dreams and nightmares, 

And things we never did, 

Words that weren’t written, 

Feelings that were hid, 

Memories fade to fiction, 

Reality starts to fade, 

Feels like we’re forgetting, 

Some due that went unpaid, 

From before the age of conscience, 

To consider what we’d done, 

In the blissful arms of ignorance, 

We we’re basking in the sun, 

Now regrets come flooding upward, 

The sentence has been passed, 

Some said “forgive yourself”, 

But it seems the die’s been cast.

At the End of the Day 

When the sunlight fades, end of the day, 

What last words will we all say, 

We had the garden, threw it away, 

Now there’s only Hell to pay, 

Wise men and sages all down through time, 

Tried and tried to tell us war is a crime, 

But never heard since we crawled from the slime, 

Just kept on hating, no reason or rhyme,

Eye Of The Beholder 

Another night I sit and write, 

The same thoughts bend my brain, 

The world, the sky, the people's cry, 

Are we really all insane. 

Madness here psychosis there, 

Everywhere are minds a smolder, 

Sanity is only in, 

The eye of the beholder. 

We beat our young, spoil our pets, 

And hurt each other wholesale, 

We make up rules to smother love, 

And sell our bodies retail. 

We work each day to build our death, 

On both sides of the planet, 

Never learning from our past, 

Though we never quite outran it.

Tears on each other’s sleeves, 

Hugs for the one that leaves, 

Out the storefront window, 

Scene played in the heat, 

Sad songs, sung inside.