a mission worth dying for.

She walked slowly at first, ignoring the brisk wind that slapped her coat around her, her sneakers making the cracked sidewalk sound like eggshells. Her heartbeat was in her ears and pumped furiously into her fingertips and she asked herself again if this was a good idea. Loud sirens and angry car motors whipped around her face, burrowing into her ears, implanting themselves in her thoughts. She breathed deeply, exhaling loudly and touched the pack of cigarettes her pocket held for her. She touched her other pocket, looking for the green Hula girl lighter she hoped it still held. It did. She took out both, ripping the cellophane off of the box's outside, and crunched the foil that stood between her and the package's contents. Flick the lighter, pull on the cigarette, exhale, she reminded herself firmly. Her hands shook against the cigarette's filter and she drowned out the whispers in her head telling her to turn back with the rhythm of her fresh sneakers against the gravelly sidewalk, listening for the inevitable scrape that would tell her she of course was nervous, as though the sound of her heart in her ears wasn't enough. She put her mind back to waking up that morning, her balcony door open and the crashing waves cooling her heated thoughts, the way the sheets and he held her carefully, and how the stillness vaguely reminded her of the streetlights flickering glow on the benches below. There was something else, but she couldn't remember what it was. She remembered hearing the phone ringing, his low voice asking her collarbone what time it was, and then the voice on the answering machine, the same voice that had forced this adventure upon her. She chuckled to herself. Adventure. Yeah, you could call it that. She walked faster now, reaching to her back pocket to retrieve the slip of crumpled paper that explained her final destination, and told her she wasn't far. She flicked her cigarette into the busy street with the resounding snap of her fingernail. A shiver shot down her back from her shoulders all the way to her tailbone, and she reluctantly started up the stairs. The door creaked open, the same way her mind was creaking open to let in the realization of what she was doing, and it slammed against her back; forcing her and the realization inside. The round plastic impressions in the floor were meant to give the walker traction, but instead reminded her of a pirate ship. The deck swabbing, the clink of the rum bottles, and the constant taste of greasiness behind the molars. Brazenly, she proceeded to the desk, and a woman resembling a dinosaur asked for her name and purpose. She set her backpack down softly, hearing the weight inside shift. The drought in her throat only allowed her to croak, "These." She unzipped her backpack slowly, letting the sound echo through the room. She plunged her hands inside, knowing it was too late to run, and pulled out the contents, flinching as she placed them in front of Dinosaur Lady. Dinosaur Lady pulled the stack toward her, and opened the top one. "Overdue, I see." She spoke over the top of her glasses. "I'm sorry. I just had to know what happened in the end." She fumbled in her coat pocket until she found a five dollar bill. "You can keep the change." She placed it on top of the stack and grabbed her backpack, on the defense. Dinosaur Lady smiled, a smile that seemed like it might crack the dry skin that surrounded the hot pink lipstick. "It's okay, darling. We all forget to return books sometimes. Nothing we'll take your library card away for, though." She smiled back, and followed the exit sign back to the safety of the sidewalk, and away from the chaos of dinosaurs running a library.

-LBR

swallowing rocks.

The day tasted like it was going to be boring. The air tasted stale, the store was stagnant, and I was only half awake. Then there was blackness, covered in dirt and the smell of old food and pavement. The jacket hung around the drooping shoulders of a man with a huge smile and a wildness in his eyes that I could not make sense of. Unlike the woman recklessly flipping through kid's jeans like dog-eared magazine pages, he was not clutching a Starbucks cup of caffeine that tasted like money, wasn't trying to get better cell phone reception by shoving a Blackberry three quarters of the way into his brain, and wasn't carrying any packages that should have been made of recycled credit card statements. There was a mysterious bulge in the side of the coat that protected him from the infectious materialism that hung lightly in the air, threatening to trap anyone who let their guard down. He spoke frantically to Justin, desperately trying to figure out whether or not he could have the black backpack that hung over our heads, like the guilt that hung over mine. As they talked business, I drifted into my own thoughts, regressing heavily into the guilt that washed over me in waves, wondering yet again, if I could have saved her, had I just noticed that she needed me. The clicking of the computer keys brought me back, forcing the guilt back into the bricks that rested on my shoulders. "$44.67, please." Justin spoke softly, an intonation that I rarely heard in his voice, and as I turned to look at the two, I saw Justin's ghosts of the past drifting out the door. The man reached into the inner pocket of his coat, and to both mine and Justin's surprise, he withdrew an envelope of cash, and laid the requested amount on the counter. I grabbed him and held him tightly in my arms, whispering in his ear that I was proud of him and that no matter what he had lost in the past, no one could take that away from him. He looked me in the eye, the wildness in his gaze almost intimidatingly real, and told me to stop judging people, and realize that the goodness of people would come out if I set up a proper stage for it. He began to slip out of my arms, fading into the floor, and I screamed-cried-begged him not to leave me there, but he continued to fall. I clawed angrily at the floor, determined to help this man and get him a better life, shouting at the top of my voice that he was a good man, that whatever miracle had brought him the envelope had made him good enough to spend the money on something useful and had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. Drugs and alcohol, the two things that could have made his reality more bearable, but no, the money went to a backpack, a container that would hold the things he held most dear, hold his stories and his answers to the questions I had not even thought of yet. I was wasting it, throwing away what he probably had dreamt of for years. He was falling faster now, smiling and telling me not to worry. My frustration was growing exponentially, ticking upwards on the bulletin boards of stock prices, and I screamed louder now, offering to help and give him anything he wanted, if only he would stay. Thousands of pairs of hands grabbed at him now, pulling him away into the darkness, my tears forming puddles around his ankles, covering his sneakers that looked like they might share my date of birth. I fell to the ground crying, praying that my tears would bring him the luck he needed. "Have a nice day, sir." I blinked, and Justin's words brought me back to the scene before me. The man thanked Justin thoroughly, waving, smiling, nodding, gratefully. I watched him turn and swagger out of the door, feeling the pieces of my heart that he'd left shattered in my chest poke bones and organs. I stared at where he'd stood, at the nonexistent rivers of my tears where his feet had been planted. I prayed for someone to take care of him, and walked dazedly into the back room.

-LBR

fireside gambling.

A distant star in the sky,
Fades with time, like the glow in your eyes.
When you push back the curtain, with your fingers shaking
Wondering if looking to the star is the first mistake you’re making.
Feeling the glass against your nails, thinking to all the thoughts snaking
Through and through your head.

Lean back and breathe deeply
Take the time to get your head straight
In the midst of time, it won’t wait
But you can’t either, it’s time for you to initiate
The change that will rest your head easier in the night.

Breathing the blue light, watching the light from the window fall
Across the floor and the ceiling and the sky and the tall
Curtains that want to ban you from seeing something so small
That is in fact not small at all
But will one day fall.
The light that glows is the one that comes out at night and shows
Everyone what they need to see, for one night it
Covers the holes and makes the good seem to grow
And multiply into a real equation that everyone can see
And then know that they can be what makes us all feel so free.

The change is always the hard part,
But in the end it’s inexcusable to ignore all the holes
Unless you sew up the holes in the bottom of your souls
Down to the soles of your sneakers that have survived all of time’s tolls,
But they’ll stay on, just keeping on with the roll
Of adventurous spirit.

It takes a special sky to change your mind
To show the parts you try to ignore, only seeing the pieces that are torn and
You can’t seem to fix with just one kind
Of desperate measures of change with the only things you find
In the back of your closet under the clothes and snow boots and tennis rackets.
Deep in the depths of the reds and blues that twist and wind
Around each other and through a strange terrain of tiny pieces that build a puzzle
Deep in the puzzle there is a bit of seamless good
That should make us look past the dark black and put
The green at the top of the list simultaneously unclenching that fist and I know you could
Just see it if you look hard enough past your self-effacing mist.

The adventurous spirit is the troublesome one,
Because it’s hard to put away, it’s hard to time it out, it’s hard to know when its time is done.
But the time is now to pull back the shade
To look to your poker hand, and win with that spade, seeing them all
Laid out across the table, smile on your face
Proud of your victory, proud of your pace and the fact that you never left a trace
Of truth across your lips to bluff your way into it
Into the spirit that will make it all worth it.

-lbr.

A Dream Transcendental

Saturday morning, eleven o'clock,

The sunlight cascading through the branches and treetops -

From the heavens to my window -

And all I can think about is the way your hair catches the sun,

The way it lays on your neck when you sleep, rising and falling

With each breath.

All I can think about is the way your voice sounds,

The way your breath feels warm and soft on my neck,

And I wish you'd whisper your first words to me when you wake.

In sleepless delirium I saw you here, but I lay alone.

When I rise - sleep clinging to me like static electricity -

The overwhelming sense of gravity offers much-needed lucidity.

Here, on this wintry Saturday morning, somewhere in the midst of suburbia,

Standing half-naked, half-awake, still transcending romance and reality

Like a dreamer set loose in 'real life.'

I see that there's something different about you, something that I can't quite

Put my finger on, something into which I'd desperately like to lose myself,

Disappear.

The First Draft of Forever.

The waves in my ears
And the soles of my feet
are the only things I really need
To get by
To get to you
Salt breeze in my teeth
Sand on my knees
Let me come get you for my adventure.
The trees seem to glow
My strength seems to grow
With every step that I take away.
I'll never leave you this way
This step step sprint way
You're the part of me that never goes away.
Swirl of flames
Your favorite drinking games
Our old band names.
You never get old
I'm not getting younger
You flatter me when I have a drink in my hand.
The drink in my hand
Takes me to dry land
Or maybe nowhere close.
You though
you're always close
Between the strands of my hair
Behind my eyes stuck in my ears I really don't care where
You'll always be there
Like a photo album of all time and I swear
That you'll never get damaged, I'll take such good care
of you, each part of you like a part me even though that just
makes "us" into "we"
Take it easy, you're just my memories.

-lbr

cartoons in black and green.

It starts with a letter
That I can't quite remember
Not here
or Now
or Tomorrow.
The draft gets so strong
When the stairs won't stay still.
The movement makes me spin in circles
Until my head is dizzy
and my brain won't stop scrambling.
Connecting the dots
With a neon line
that trails from me to there.
Finish the line
Find all the dots
I dare you.
Such things can't be discussed without a Long Island Ice Tea.

-lbr.

the day the planets shifted.

Spherical skies spilling with comma shaped clouds
Spin doctors to witch doctors
To which beat doctor to rhyme doctor.
Spherical skies spilling with metaphorical mist
Free your mind let your mind be free
Trace the tops of your teeth break the barrel of time
Trip and trail away.
Spherical skies spilling a golden glow
Breathtakingly blinding binding belonging
To the spin doctor to the witch doctor
Unexpectedly also the beat doctor and the rhyme doctor.
The weather prediction says bright and shiny
Breezy and cool and honest
And that’s what it’s all about.

-lbr
(this is supposed to have a beat behind it)

A Footprint Loosely Carved

You seem to hold it in so well, but sometimes when you exhale

I can smell the fear creep from your nostrils,

And sometimes when you speak I hear it sneak past your teeth,

An uncontrollable yelp, desperation crying for help.

You wear faux-confidence like a mask,

Hiding the void saved for whatever identity you hoped to find -

But never did.

You pretend to be a real person, but I see through your glossy facade,

I've got you figured out.

You traipse linearly through time looking neither forward nor back,

An empty shell in search of a new set of insides,

One to replace the set that departed as abruptly as youth.

So when truth finally hits you like a torrential rain,

Don't masquerade that void with your learned obscurities,

Let it fill the remainder of your half-empty glass,

Let it wash you away like a footprint loosely carved.

-a.l. knox

harvesting some sort of feeling.

We were meant for this.
Meant to look out the windows into the sunset and see the whole future laid out before our eyes
Laid out to show their Sunday best pinned with flowers to coat collars
Holding in place what may never move anyway
The security of the lake
That will never touch the ocean’s sand
That will never interfere with the annual penguin march.
We were meant for this.
Meant to hold our heads back enjoying the lights and the trees and the smell of the breeze
That floated through our smoke to tell us it is time for autumn.
The responsibility
Of shuffling lightheartedly through leaves
That we can’t let upset us for fear of getting nothing in return.
We were meant for this
This time of need and of hope and sadness and struggle between ourselves and our new molting skins
Because everyone knows that there’s nothing more frustrating than your stripes being crooked and in the wrong place and wondering why we were so drunk the past four nights.
There comes a crossroads in the path to what is real and what should be real
Where it’s hard to let go of what hurts and helps and harms and horrifies and hastens and halts.
But in the end, things always looks better from the beginning.

-lbr

shaded but lingering.

Shades over my eyes, my eyes are disappearing into the flaming floor. Where are they going? I am wondering lamely, as I watch Golden Eyes walking into the sunset, being swalled up into Forever Forest. I wonder now if there is anything to make those eyes of solid gold turn around and start running but I can’t think of any particular reason I would want that so I shrug and follow my eyes once more. We journey along a ruby covered road. The rubies glint at me, daring me to challenge their senseless glow and I am about to when I feel it. Soft prickly rain. The kind that makes you wish you had worn something with a hood to calm the hairs on the back of your neck, tell them to stop standing quite so tall. The rain takes me by surprise but it is such a relieving surprise because it shoots down my guard like an empty backpack does to a full stomach. You can never be too sure where you’re really going, but I stare into an empty purple wall and think of those two beautiful blue candles anyway and take off upwards. I’m soaring, shoulders spread like a morning stretch waiting for the sign that it’s starting. But I am just waiting, waiting, waiting and to pass the SK waiting game time, I part my lips for a cigarette and close them tightly, unable to wait for the next breath to fill my lungs to capacity, the way those fire engulfed blue candles burn my dreams and turn them to ash. In the flame of my fire I can see the candles’ cousins, nieces and nephews…which will never be quite as great but great in a gentler way that I know I can keep up with. I have trouble keeping with grace placed before me, following it through x-rays that show perfect bones and ballet excercises that will increase the flex in the grace. I cannot see this for what it is only for how loud and long it echoes in the back of my head and how heavily it weighs on my conscience that I have treated you so badly. And equality lessens nothing, just gains strength against me, resisting seamlessly, trickling through porous quilts stitched from a pathwork of lost love and the inevitability that it will bite again. Your happiness will never pay for your love, only sacrifice words and lung contractions for something as impure and immoral as a ruby encrusted road. Your tears are metaphoric and they will drown you as the Titanic drowned its own propellers. The sounds of hollow hearts are not meant to be heard but hidden on one of the two paths you must ride down. The mirror of the stars is huge and I am as tiny as the sand on last 4th of July’s beach towel that no one will ever find because I am too small to matter to such an incredibly exquisite mirror. But I don’t like this and before I can reason with my hand it time travels in light years upwards and shatters the glass and the heart of the mirror, so tall and telling. The glass and hearts shards fall into my eyes and I wave goodbye to the once beautiful expanse that has become nothing in my eyes and I know in this frozen second that I will never change. I see a swimmer, smooth capped, slick limbed, diving divinely through the waters of cold innocence, looking for some sort of treasure so I hope and hope and hope and hope and cross myself quickly for luck. Time, time, time is coming back and I rush into the tunnel that will take me to present time, a safety net of sorts that scratches at my sheets and pulls at my necklace while I sleep soundlessly, reliving what I hope I didn’t just observe.

-lbr

Needle in the Hay

Tomorrow's the day.

I've been anxiously awaiting and dreading the day

For weeks now.

Tomorrow we are no longer what we've become,

Rather, we'll revert to what we once were.

After all the leaps and bounds we've made,

We'll be home in our boring suburban towns,

Spending time with our boring suburban friends,

And I'll miss you.

A moment of silence is probably deserved.

A moment to silently wave goodbye

To whatever it was growing between us

Like marigolds growing in New York window boxes,

A lucid profession of beauty

Swimming in all this sludge and slime and pollution.

They grow it thick enough to swallow a person without chewing, you know.

So while I stand day after day and night after night by the window,

Curmudgeonly cultivating,

You wander the cracked streets and broken sidewalks of this cold, polluted city,

Planting chemical imitations of tulips and hydrangeas - little pieces of yourself, really - 

In piles of sand and decomposing garbage,

Only to burn the seeds and sprouts in a futile attempt to replenish heat lost

As a result of that guy

And all the things he took with him, the way he left a void somewhere deep inside you.

So search,

Crawl on your hands and knees if you have to,

Scour the earth like a haystack,

And if you ever find your needle let me know.

In the mean time, I'll wait

And watch as our marigolds grow, whither, and decompose,

Feeding life like wisdom to the soil

So that someday a garden may grow so grand

That it clears the pollution from our minds

And picks the garbage from our hearts.

-a.l. knox

I Tied This Brick To Your Letter, For Sublety

You really ought to be shaken,

Held tightly by the wrists or shoulders and shaken

Until sensibility returns, finds some orifice through which to enter.

Hell, I'm not asking you to read my mind,

Maybe just stop getting so lost between lines.

I'm lost between your eyes,

Each deserving more attention than I can offer without neglecting the other,

Each reflecting things about myself that I'd rather not be exposed to.

If you ever bump into your lost, wandering senses

On a city sidewalk or the inner workings of your mind,

Know that I found the answer quickly

And have been patiently awaiting understanding,

Awaiting reciprocity.

We were made for this.

-a.l. knox

2 Days and Counting

Sorry about choking on you this morning.
I felt my lungs seal up tightly
Not wanting to allow the feeling to enter.
They resisted, fought the good fight,
But in the end the snow will always be dominant over our human needs.

Sometimes resistance will keep you powerful
But sometimes you have to recognize that it’s not worth the fight.
When the fight consumes you
Holds you to the ground
Choking you because it’s got nowhere else to go
That’s when you know the path is getting too overgrown.

When thickets surround you
And you’re ensnared in vines that hang from trees
When they just want to pull you up by the wrists and shake you
Shake you senseless
The same way your friends want to
That’s when you know its time to throw in the towel.

I’m still sorry about choking all over you this morning.
It must have been gross to watch.
I just couldn’t keep the thought in my lungs
Maybe i should have excused myself to the bathroom to cough like that
Instead of spewing you with a cough that now just worries you
Especially when you see it in me.

We’ll be okay, kid.
I’m not too worried, and you shouldn’t be either.
We’ll get through it, kid.
We always seem to come back.
I’ll watch your back because, shit,
I know you’re watching mine right now.

It’s just the way things have become in the here and the now.
And it’s nothing to lose sleep over
We’re something special, kid
And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

-lbr

Love Robots

I've seen stronger men than me fight and fail for you,

But I won't be deterred by their bodies strewn

Lifelessly about the pathway to your eyes. No, I'll march defiantly past,

Guided by a noble heart and noble intentions.

Unscathed, I'll let you fix me.

Locked in, confined by our bodies of steel and aluminum,

The battery powering my heart runs dry, and my pulse falls weak,

But when we kiss our glasses click like a metronome

And my new, love-powered heart begins to beat.

Here I wake, 'lone again, ponder visions of robots and love,

And wonder why I torment myself, wonder what's happening in my head.

Every dream is similar; we live happily ever after,

But the façade is jarred to reality the same way every time;

I awake, alone in my bed.

-a.l. knox

The training wheels are Coming off.

There must be something in the water
That's throwing off the sunrise
Making it dull and unnoticable
to all the people walking by.
They walk by and sneer and
talk about how much nicer it could be.
Well,
I think they could be nicer
There's nothing in the world like seeing the
start of the day splashed against a boring backdrop
That comes to life when we smile at its truth
Nod wisely at its hospitable gesture
And understand that it's only there for us to stand under.
The banner of the day
Dripping slowly down our spines
As we sit
and watch
and wait
For the message it has already sealed in a personal envelope
One for each who dares to observe
No one will go unnoticed
Not unless they turn a cold shoulder
When all they had to do was lend a hand or a word where it was needed.

-lbr

Seventy-Five Percent

Sometimes, I feel like a huge mess, 

Like a wash of chemicals and neurons and atoms

And all that other sciency stuff, 

That 'stuff' that makes up the human body.

We're seventy-five percent water,

Right?

It's all just mixed in rough proportions,

Piled up on top to give me dimension.

I feel for the first time

Like the product of millions of years of

Random events,

All shaping the evolution

That lead to the present-day

Human being.

Not modeled by any divine being or reason or order,

Just a random chain of events.

Myself, specifically, the one in question

Must have snuck through

The defective detector,

Snuck through and escaped, disordered and dismembered,

A mess of chemicals and sawdust, probably,

A mess, no doubt, a mess.

-a.l. knox

Holograms and Bedtime Stories

Sometimes things vanish because they don't fit into the puzzle, so they disappear as quickly as they were dropped on your doorstep. I can taste unimportance behind my back teeth and I can feel an eraser on my back always, taking a small enough piece of me that I probably won't notice, but sure enough, it's there every day. I'm so exhausted but I'm never tired enough to let my eyelids touch and pure darkness is so hard to find these days anyway. My shopping cart just wants to check out on the express line because it doesn't care what it forgot anymore. Its list is as complete as it will ever be.

-LBR

The Moon and the Things it Failed to Expose

Rising slowly, high into the sky, the moon compliments the galaxy and the stars, displaying reflections on the windows of houses and of cars, leaving the daytime to struggle, to try to discredit “misconceptions and lies” about the temperature of the earth, and it’s unwavering rise. But at night, ah, the night, the lack of light tends to put the world to sleep, but not me, counting neither seconds nor sheep. Making not a discernable peep, I abandon this slumber and saunter secretly to the street, where I rely on my feet and their pace to lead me away into this evening’s lasting embrace. Disgracing my home and those who gave me life is far more taxing, considerably less relaxing
than a certain matriarch would claim concise. I don’t claim freedom of guilt or of shame but the blame, pushed by the hilt to my name is a vicious attempt to instill self-contempt.

This day, the sun stays away where it rests, and the moon fills its place like an understudy kept backstage, waiting for this fateful of days when the sun, this show’s star, instead of rising with a blaze remains, sunk beyond the horizon like eyes realizing what happened and what it is that they’ve seen: a scene, no doubt, of tragedy and travesty, death and disdain, the sun saw something, a silhouetted stain, a man in pain with nothing to lose and less to gain. The sun watched the pained man explain to his wife that he loved her ferociously and nothing would change, and the man’s wife believed he that she vowed to stand by, but the tears in his eyes blew a hole in his disguise, proved his words lies. Recognized, his grief would be lovingly received, but now the sun grieved, and the man’s wife lost faith that the man’s life could be saved.

And as I walked with my flashlight on the third straight day of night, pondering the inner workings of life, the rights and the wrongs and the maybes and mights, a sight fell before me, illuminated. Right on the sidewalk, piled up in a bloodied heap, as plain as day (had the sun not hidden to weep), laid a man, or what remained after three days of night, what remained after this man’s drunken struggle with strife, after this man’s skewed perception of life, after this man turned on himself the knife, and their he lay alone, collecting sand and stone eternally, concernedly pressing his arms and his chest straight against the ground, so that sand, stone, and the rest will, as long as he resides there, not be found. Be he moved, the bits of sand and stone fit snugly into indentations pressed into his rotting, elastic skin by the very bits of sand and stone held within, and the stones, like orphans, are torn and taken from their sidewalk home.

The moon, of course, playing the role of the sun shone brightly until dawn when the widow’s weeping was done, and the sun rose again, and the world again arose, and the widow wore black clothes, thanked me for the closure I’d exposed, and before she was gone she sang me this tune: “If I can let my life go on, then surely, so can you."

-a.l. knox

The Beginning...

This will, with time, become a place where Laura B. Reiman and I can post poetry, prose, short stories, and anything else that either of us feel at any time like writing. We hope that you'll find solace here, browsing between words and implications, and that maybe we can, in some way, inspire you to create.

-a.l. knox