a quiet night morning at home

It's not that I hate sleep -
I just can't bear to do it.

There is so much time to waste

and sleeping is rational and useful.

Yet I crave sunrise,

watching the world ignite

while I sit burning with exhaustion.

I want a reason to sleep

instead of the insomnia of freedom.

-Zero

the salvaged ghosts (poem)

The ghosts that haunt me

I am afraid to name:

what if my name is uttered?

What if the truth is pathetic:

a man tormenting himself for nothing,

who can't recognize his own hands?

What if they truly are gone

and I have built new corpses

to fill a hole I dug?

-Zero

The Lament of the Drowning (poem)

The bright florescents burned

and the room was cold and noisy,

but it was better than isolation.

Home was a one-bedroom apartment

overlooking a university town's center.

Home was loneliness in a crowd,

watching all but invisible to most.

What else could I do but hide in public?

I searched for solace in strangers,

in all the possibilities that lay between us,

but the distance was insurmountable,

and it came to torture me.

With every wonderful night I had,

the thought of its impermanence crushed me:

every good thing was a sandcastle

and the tide was always rising.

Adrift in a murky sea of my dreams,

nothing but the infinite all around me,

I struggled to stay afloat, to hold on,

searching desperately for land to save me.

An island was all I needed,

a mass of reality among the fantasies,

maybe just a sudden kiss in a dark room,

but enough to keep me from drowning.

-Zero