Valentines Day Locker Room Speech
(To Be Read in The Voice of Samuel L. Jackson)
by Kyle Suchomel

Science could be made to imply that true love is a lie.
For those of you cry bullshit
For those of you who distrust science
For those of you that don’t believe in hormones, and chemical reactions. 
Galileo went to jail for saying the world is round. Don’t distrust your instruments-
Your two fingered compass twirling over the map of your lovers back. The stethoscope of your ear pressed to heartbeat. The satellite of you tongue you keep sending deeper into the void. 
You are all ahead of your time. Your science is as right as it is out of fashion.

For you poets who have been preparing for this day like Santa does christmas.
But find yourself alone again.
For those of you who sneak by the valentines day cards at the pharmacy stealing looks like perverts do the dirty magazines
For those of you that chase cupid with a butterfly nets and chloroform.
This is halftime. And I have a plan. 

Do you feel ugly, and fat, and uninteresting
Than lets take a field trip to the zoo and watch
The ugly possum sex, the fat hippo orgy, 
Try and tell me they aren't having fun
Jumping into the unknown disqualifies you from being boring

But dammit you were never any of those things
I prefer the growing and living of wallflowers that never made it to the dance
Than the stunted death of the embalmed corsages piled on the gymnasium floor
You are a garden of untaped beauty

But if you wait for it to find you, play dead on a bar stool
Don’t be surprised at cruelty of the vultures that do come 
to tear you apart

Get off the stool. Get off the bench. 

You have all the power
Because hearts hold energy, hearts spark lights
Hearts are batteries and you have been charging the longest
Tonight, lean in to kiss a stranger if for no better reason than to see if it makes their hair stand up

They don’t know what they have coming, our kind of love will be a revolution
It will be horse to car. Letter to cell phone. Sword to gunpowder
Candle to electricity.
It will make them wonder how they survived in the dark ages before it

And if someone seems to like you back
This isn’t the little leagues
Don’t close your eyes
Don’t be afraid of the ball
I’m not going to lie to you and say it wont hurt like hell if it hits you the wrong way
But dammit kid, best way to stop that from happening is keep your eyes on the prize
And put your fucking hands out 

The difference between an ambulance passing being an inconvenience or being absolute devastation- is knowing the person inside it. 
Heres to knowing. Heres to devastation.
The difference between a place that serves caffeine being a coffee shop or being the place we first met- Is also knowing the person inside it. 
Heres to knowing. Heres to flirtation.

Stop worrying if hearts are like pianos and go out of tune if not touched
Stop worrying whether or not condoms have expiration dates
Stop missing someone you never really had

Get off the stool. Get off the bench.

You want this
Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about
Your hearts have been rehearsing for this everyday like an actor with amnesia

And I am not talking about getting laid people, 
Don’t settle for one night stands that only pump you up like a holey bicycle tire
Tonight treat yourself to new wheels. maybe a sports car, 
Fuck that, An airplane,
No fuck that, A rocket ship, 
No fuck that, Tonight your Mr. Spock beaming where you want to go. 
I’m talking about love, I’m talking about making cupid your bitch,
Pulling his wings likes ears till he shoots that arrow where you tell him to

I am your coach: Samual Fucking L. Jackon. And this is the game of love. 
Dare not flinch. Dare not duck. Dare not dodge. Catch it.
You people on that field tonight, 
That bar, that coffee shop, that book store
Not a single one of you is dull
You are all bright and beautiful. You are all stars. Its time you meet.
Let I love yous pass between you like hallowing comets. 
Be a meteor shower of passion.
Go make constellations. 
Give God and his angels up in the heavens a night to lie on their backs and admire us.
You are not alone. There is a whole Galaxy of hopeless romantics just like you. 
You are just cowards each.
Heres to bravery. 
Heres to eyes open. 
Heres no longer wishing on shooting stars, but being shooting stars
Heres to Love.
Now hit the mother fuckin field, mother fuckers.

Shutter 
by Kyle Suchomel

I don't hate you. I only pretend to. 
I have been known to feign a shutter at even the utter of your name.
It's the key I hide in a plastic rock,
Only I would know this frown of disdain
Is not just one of the same.
When I think your name there is always the phantom expression from our winters little flame 
When you would induce a smile on my face that could not fade 
As if your legs and arms wrapping around me made a picture frame.
I logically didn't know you long enough to be in love,
But to be in love is to be insane. 
All my life's sufferings were diluted to setbacks in a silly game,
Like a carnival gun with a bent sight, I would have missed no matter how I aimed

I knew I loved you on our first date, 
between ordering drinks and six hours later when the check came
I knew that through tremendous joy or unspeakable pain,
From that moment on
My life would never be the same

And I was right. Not in the way I would have dreamed. 
You unraveled me like my lip you snared in your teeth was a thread pulled from the seam. 
But in the scheme of things being brought down to nothing was really not so bad a thing. 
Naked, cold, and pondering what it all could mean. 
To love another with all your heart and him not feel a thing. 
It made me want to be a better man, it became my nefarious little scheme.
I want a flawless mind 
I want to read every book you've ever touched and rewrite your every theme, 
I want a heart so pure it's made of bone,
I want a spine of solid self esteem. 
I once knew your naked form
Towering above the showers steam, 
And though it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,
I only ever wanted to deem my own naked body 
Worthy to be seen.

This reinvention of me. It's not self loathing, 
Or that there was all that much missing. 
Its just finally knowing there is more I could be. 
It's finding my greater value, 
Like the clean reappraisal of dirt covered diamond or a soot covered ring. 
It took your lips and fingers on these hollow bones and holes to know I have a voice, 
That something carved out can sing.
I thought I was standing tall, but learned I was still on a knee
I never imagined my untapped potential, beneath the ruins and debris 
Its like not understanding the concept of a boat without first seeing an ocean or a stream.
I want to traverse your heart. 
I want you not to flee. 
I see the canyon that divides our love,
So I close my eyes and count to three 
When reminiscing of our time, I insert the stronger me, 
The better man that knowing you
has lead me to want to be.
And there is a side effect to this whole self improvement thing.
I'm starting to love myself.
And it's something I wish you could have seen. 
This poem is a thank you.
Babe you have know idea what your name has come to mean.

I Think I Understand Georgia
by Kyle Suchomel

Even as a dumb kid I knew
The trees in Georgia aren’t good for climbing 
Need a ladder to grab the lowest branch 
Brittle and filled with cones
I think its an evolution of sorts
Trees don’t want to hold hang ropes no more
‘Course there were some branches that hung low
Peaches grew in those trees like human hearts
A reminder

The earth is hard in Georgia, thick red clay
No such thing as a real basement in the state, yankees don’t know that
Maybe its evolution too, something that happened during the Civil War
The earth itself said, “no more, can’t fill my belly with another casket”
The ground could crack an undertakers shovel in half 

That’s why folks in Georgia are so quick to tell you they don’t believe in evolution
They are protecting a secret. But aint no hiding it. 
Hills rise like fresh welts on a slaves back
Train tracks and pavement slip through them like chains 
Slave songs were never cut into the grooves of a record
But role up a sleeve and stick your arm into the Chattahoochee like a record needle and you’ll hear them
See the Chattahoochee’s too mud cloudy to see what’s buried just below its surface
Mud cloudy like the eyes of people rocking on their porches their hate boiling into something solid like grits
Their Plantation homes adorn mammoth grass lawns, like no one ever grew cotton here
The schools are still segregated, but only by socioeconomic lines,
Just happens poverty seems to only come in black
Folks round here say there aint no evolution
Maybe they’re right

Georgia she don’t like ugly. Shes just been unlucky. 
I get it. A history can cling to ya like kudzu. Choke the life out of you if you let it.
Sometimes scars give character, I’m haunted beneath a dignified surface like a plantation house. 
No one wants to spend there nights here, and I don’t blame em
Can’t shed it. I don’t got an accent. But every now an than I get a pine cone in my throat. Don’t know what to say to folks. Don’t know what to tell em. 
Just role up my pant legs and catch a poem like a crawfish

I like Georgia, cause I like a place with an ugly history
My fathers fists and my mothers lips have given me my own 
I fold my birth certificate like a confederate flag
Hate it, am ashamed of it, want to burn it
But I know its where I came from

Georgia doesn’t like ugly.
I wish she didn’t bite her tongue so much.
But sometimes even she reaches her breaking point
She cries into a downpour, howls like something wicked,
Throws pine trees through buildings in tantrum
Once when I was a kid five tornadoes touched down in one night
She was remembering 
She wanted to be new, to be untouched, untainted
Taking down road signs and mailboxes like she didn’t want people to know who she was or where she came from
She raised hell that night
Rivers swallowed bridges like they were food placed on a wild dogs nose
She pulled old grave stones like loose teeth 
Plucked lampposts from her flesh like bullets
Crossed and recrossed fields like there were blood stains she still wanted to rub out her patchwork dress 
She licked plow tracks like she was closing a wound
Angry Bitch circled Atlanta like Sherman should have done more
And by morning it was over
And the daylight exposed her destruction and her futility
She saw the past was a venom that could not be cut out
So she settled into a humid grieving, a weary fog

I think I understand Georgia

The New World
by Kyle Suchomel

I remember the first time your long fingers found my shaking hand
My lonely digits split and covered, like pieces lost in the sand
Its not something I wished for, pondered, or even planed
Like some Elizabethan vessel stumbling on new land
Seems my notion of where I was in this world, I didn’t truly begin to understand
Now all my maps must be redrawn, my globes I must expand

I want to go explore you, and see how I would fare
Past the deserts of your skin, and the forrest of your hair
Your eyes like tribal fires, and your breaths of mountain air
Your hands are constellations, a twirling, cosmic-miracle pair 
Floating above the grassy hills of your chest, and above your muscles canyon tear
The highest peak of your nose, induces silent prayer
Amidst the many forces in this new world, for which no science can prepare
Like the gravity of your skin, and the current of your stare 
Drawing me closer to your primitive traps, and dangers I must beware
The quicksand of your abdomen, and your mouths waiting snare
And your cold feet are shifting Arctic tundras, I must learn to bare
But your feeble attempts to fend me off, can hardly begin to compare
To the beckoning calls of every covered crevice of modesty,
Every forsaken treasure filled lair

I hear the birdsongs of your laughter, and the native drumbeats of year heart
Your dreams are cities I want to find, your memories are ruins I can’t depart
To me your naked body is a canvas, and its the scars that make it art 
I want to make cartography of your pours, I want to find every blemish I can chart
I don’t know where the journey will finally end, but I know where it can start
With the naming of my ring finger Lewis, and my index finger Clark
I’ll drift my hand down your back, through the river valleys part

But be weary of me, for all settlers have a greed
I want to drink of your nectar, and on your fruit I want to feed
I want harvest your fertile body, to fulfill my every need
I want to plow your earth, and I want to plant my seed 
I want to bury my flag in you, and spread my law and creed 
Your grasses will surely flatten, and I may break some reed
For even if I choose to conserve, there’s no accounting for my steed 
The primal animal of my passion, or loves domesticated breed
So though you have chosen to embrace me, beware how you proceed
The flora, forests and the river beads, may one day recede
Into the pollution of my passiveness, or my self-centeredness disease

But know that I am loyal, I will burn the ship in which I came
You have lit a fire in me, and I’ll gladly feed all my choices to that flame
Know that I am brave, and will defend my earthly claim
I would bleed a war for your grace, and at every border hold my steady aim
Know that I am passionate, and see God and you as the same
In the every song I write for you, and every pledge that I proclaim
Know that I am foolish, and please harbor no sense of blame
That I dare think I could ever posses the beauty and majesty
That are inherent with your name 
And that my human arrogance, that so often fills my soul with shame 
Could even begin to imagine
That a world like yours, I could ever tame

Gods Favorite Record
By Kyle Suchomel 

And I'll try to destroy with words what does not love me back
But when the fires are gone it always grows back
And I’m reminded of all that they are and all that I lack
My face can form stone, but my eyes are puddles in the cracks
My heart is a hammer beating out daydreams where I have them back
Where our breaths are heavy and our arms contract
And for all the power of pinkie swears in my six year old past
The tangling of two adult bodies forms and unbreakable pact

I taste my lie when I blame them for all that doesn’t last
Just as I know these tears are not caused by a stray eyelash
Is there blame in bottle rocket romances that rise and crash?
Time is a tornado and we all stand in its path 
Seems every treasure turns to trash, every love turns to ash
My bed is more an urn than a place I crash
At night I try to make sense of love with my poetry stash
I cling to it like a calculator, like a boy who doesn’t understand math
I think of that place in Florida where we watched waves part and laps
Even the ocean seemed to say nothing lasts
I envy the roots of trees that reach into the earth like hands clasped
The only thing I’ve ever been able to hold onto that tightly is the past

Prayer is supposed to help me feel less alone
Sometimes prayer makes me wonder if heaven is in a different time zone
But perhaps silence isn’t the same as a dial tone
Maybe God hears my prayers and prefers the sound of me alone
Perhaps there is music in the sad sound of falling rocks on hallow bones
God put the world to spin so he could mouth the words to the records moan
Some vinyl comfort as he sits in heaven so alone

But they tell me love is a human need
I have crossed too many deserts not to feed
Nothing grows where I plant my seed
Here broken, thrown again from a mechanical steed 
I feel not a tear. but know that’s where a lover bleeds
And I wonder if love is all I need
I listen for my soul every time I breathe
Wonder if in this puzzle it is the piece I need
And worry over the six year old me, if caught in the spell of new bicycle greed
He handed over my spirit like worthless beads
Wonder if I need to find the devil and take back the deed

Why else would love not grow
Is it the season, is there too much snow
Does the ozone have a whole, does human love pour out like a champagne flow
Do we sleep with people we can never know
Do we rest our heads on hearts, places we can never go
Do all flowing sheets have an undertow
Do hallow promises stand like streetlights that do not glow
Has cautious cupid hung up his bow
The earth a place angels dare not go
Leaving man, the devil, and the things we owe
Is this world, this time, 
So void of soul

My dreams for monogamy can raise eyebrows like an untimely fart
Friends quaintly laugh as I pair mankind off two by two as if to shuffle them towards an ark
But I wonder how it is more wrong to look for one diamond than to need to fill a whole cart
This from people who claim to not even buy bath tissue in bulk or to even shop at Wal-Mart
And I think its cruel of men to compete with cupid in throwing darts
The eggs they carry blindfolded on spoons are human hearts
But some men could only mark their drivers license to give someone their heart 
Some men should not presume they are not blind unless their optometrist uses poetry for his chart
If time can turn graffiti into works of art 
Imagine what time can do for a promised heart
Unlike dogs, men need a gunshot for the race to start
In 50 years I wont hold my hemorrhaging heart wishing I had someone to help me with dying part

I’ve been told breaking up is a victimless crime
That all that is wasted is time, 
But all any of us really have is time
Am I the only one who thinks it unkind
To find I carried things that never were like a sidewalk mime
Thinking my love is safely hooked by some invisible line
And I know I will run into these lovers again in time
Paint a smile and say everything’s fine
But some mornings I want to shower with bleach and lime
Remove their stains from my skin and my tiles of time 

I close my eyes and my lips are perched
Not to kiss but in unquenchable thirst
I see his face as if for the first
I see him say yes, I see him flirt
I see my heart fill as though its about to burst 
I see friendship blossom, I see bodies traversed 
I see him whispering in my ear, I see the end of my search

I see love buckle. I see affection grow terse
I see communication get worse and worse
I see infidelity open its doors like a coal black hearse 
I see time moving backwards and love reversed
I see my trembling hands unheld
All but cursed

And I think of love, 
How it is human skin that makes up most of dust
How I’ve spent nights crying by open windows hoping for a mighty gust
I know I should say enough’s enough
I know I should learn what’s painful to touch
I know there are lights too bright to trust
But like a cat with a crystal I’ll keep trying my luck
Like a boy chasing rainbows with a bicycle
I wont give up 
Like a prisoner with a paperclip in my handcuffs
I’ll keep at it as long as I must
Hoping devotion is the difference between love and lust

No Less, the Cycle
by Kyle Suchomel

It had been the coldest winter of my life,
and maybe he was never as warm as I thought,
But I was waiting for it, like the heat in my dads old Buick
I kissed him with my contacts out, seeing him through windshields caked in ice
Warm breaths threatened us under sheets, like some invisible exhaust
Conversations faded in and out of noise like static, like a radio trying to tune
He kissed me like my heart was a dead battery, his tongue was jumper cables, 
And soon I was slamming on the brights

It is kindness to say opposites attract, 
it is more true to say we are attracted to all the things we are not
I’m trying to be a school teacher, 
For an interview I recently taught a room full of adults about the water cycle, 
But fear I stumbled, when I noticed its continuous rises and falls, 
Its emptiness and its replenishment
Speaks to my heart as the saddest metaphor for love
Another man in a K-mart suite and gray hair taught homogeneous mixtures, 
I want to kiss him, its the most romantic thing anyones said to me for a while

I think on things I was taught in school, by such broken people as I may soon be
How I should “enjoy it while it lasts”
Like youth and everything that goes along with it 
Would soon disappear

What they never told me is- there is no less, no less of anything

No less moments, that take away what we think we need,
Breath, hunger, gravity,
No less feeling nervous holding hands 
No less hopes that fall back on the hinge that is your tongue, fall back deep inside, 
Because they are too important to you to ever speak out-loud
No less tears, nights spent lonely and wishing on window-pain raindrops like falling stars
Because going to the park, unfolding a blanket, and looking up to the heavens 
seems a silly thing to do alone
But you push on, do just that, find yourself at the museum exhibit or the movie you really wanted to see, 
and sigh at how brave and spirited you are to do these things alone 

Im alone again tonight, and no less alone either
If one more person tells me “Its not you, its me”
I’m going to think love is some kind of raffle where both names go in, 
but there can only be one asshole

No less,
No less heartache, no less love, 
And this is the pain of getting old, as the loving space in your heart feels like rows and rows of oil derricks on a national park, 
And you wonder when its no longer right to keep drilling, 
Wonder if the whispers of forever and finally
Must meet each other in telephone lines, stretching over states and continents,
When the people they were meant for can no longer be reached, and feel ashamed.
How some first names, start to send shivers down your spine,
Like retirement home mailboxes with names scratched off

There are no less crushes where a strangers smile stops you like an invisible wall
And no less baffled friends putting you back together like you just fell off a wall 
As you get older there is never less
There is even no less getting older

I wish some teacher would have mentioned, the no less principal
So tonight I’m planning lessons
If I teach science, I will teach love is a flightless bird, hold it close, 
don’t let it be tossed out a window by someone not knowing any better
If I teach math I will tell my kids adding a negative number
is the same thing as subtraction
If I teach music, I will be fired, 
When the kids go home, not singing “My country tis of thee”
But in the hurt words of Leonard Cohen and the aching voice of Jeff Buckley
“Love is not a victory march, its a cold and its a broken Hallelujah”

A Night Remembered 
by Kyle Suchomel

When I felt he finished I fell to my side, like a cow tipped over
Soon his arms came from behind me like the loving, misunderstood tentacles around Nemo’s sub
His fingertip glided across my tangling stretch marks like he was plotting a course to Union Square on the MTA subway map.
I started to apologies for my body, explain how I was overweight in highschool 
But he didn’t seem to hear me
His plotting finger stopped at my navel
He smiled as if to say 
“Oh... there it is”

“Whats that?” he asked
His finger ice skating over what could be a tattoo of a very small potato on the inside of my leg
“A birth mark.” I say. “I am told that when I was born my grandfather said I looked just like General Omar Bradley. Who he met once”
He laughed and than rubbing my chest like he was magnetizing my heart 
He pointed to the white rice marks scattered on my chest plate
“What are those?” he asked
“Chicken-pox scars”
“Wow” he said
“I had the worst case in Georgia history. The pediatrician had to sneak me in the back door. He said so as no one would catch it. I knew so the kids in the waiting room wouldn’t cry at the awful sight of me”
He laughs
He kisses the scar.
“I’m glad you survived.”
He kisses the back of my neck, down to my shoulders
His lips traversing my skin like a skipping stone over still water 
“And those?” he asked me
Silence.
“One summer by the pool. My dad told me to come over to him in his chair. He held my wrist like a bear trap while him and my uncle put their cigarettes out on my back. Said I needed to man up. I was six.”
Silence. 
Squid arms grow tight around my hull.
I shouldn’t say things like this outloud
I know if I keep showing him my cards I will soon be playing solitaire 
I want to apologies for it all, every inch of me, inside and out 
Scars on my body, holes in my heart

I twist out of his embrace, roll over to face him
He is perfect. He is impervious to naked scrutiny. 
His body half dipped in blanket like a chocolate covered strawberry.
A large muscle runs through his shoulders strong and wooden like the hanger I use for my thickest winter coat. And I wonder if thats how he lives like his feet never touch the ground. 
He is face down on his belly, 
His arms are wrapped around his head like a table cloth around a crystal ball
Holding out a future for me if I want it. 
I see it in his glass face. He loves me.

New York, New York
by Kyle Suchomel 

I can navigate the classifieds and absorb the cost 
Nothing can overshadow what I've already lost 
What went to the shityard before my furniture was tossed
I just pray that the lights of 42nd street find me and not the shanty towns frost
And that the subways can whisk me below
The streets I have already crossed 
The homeless laying over the concrete like moss
Trying to defrost, Standing still as a cross, 
Accosting every stranger with tales of a dignity holocaust 
The parasites of civilization, the lonely and lost. 
Is that 16 year old child wearing semen and lip gloss?
When she should be dating a boy on the lacrosse team
Oh god thats obscene! 
Like schemes of the 57 year old mans gleam 
When he beams, wet dreams at me and says I have pretty eyes, lies, sighs,
Pulls his hand out and tries to get me to shake it, 
makes me not smile but fake it, take it, 
cause I'm homeward bound and I want to still make it

Will the cities legendary hardness, do what is just, what it must,
Take this little boy and turn him to dust 
With my Midwestern dreams and my big city lust, 
with the rush of all my chips in for the bust
In lady liberty I trust, in God I cussed, 
and in time "for my fucking chance" I must Wait in a hushed concentration
for a gust of goodwill
Like the ruffled pigeons perched on statues of rust, 
hoping for subsidence or a piece of the crust,
Like prewar buildings that must combust,
because however unjust
Something more robust and glass
Should house the New York trust

Can I lose the echo of my past in Broadway's chorus,
spend my present in central parks forest, while placing my future in the exchanges touras, 
but with my thesaurus Still write poetry under the porous ceiling of my Brooklyn apartment
Just another compartment, 
lost in a city where hungry eyes flow toward the well fair department,
As upereastsiders with handbags argue what art meant, 
And the buzzing microphones in Greenwich ponder where heart went
But while selling their souls to pay there plastic tarp rent.
In this place of pool hall banter and the power to dismantle,
My idealism is is safe as a little girl with a candle,
Out to make friends with rapist and vandals, a bundle of knives missing the handles, 
Or newborn babies playing in landfills
.
But I need this. The chaos and clamor. I want to be as New York as Mickey Mantel. 
Take whatever soft and give it hammer.
Come out stronger than if I'd been in the slammer. Gone are the days I shuffle and stammer. 
Gone is my quiet inoffensive manner.
Gone are illusions of love with a fairy tales glamor, 
Undying loyalty and other delusions of grander 

My bones will be New York steel, My heart will be New York real , 
And my mind new york ‘s modern art surreal
Spouting out my misery like a time square Howard Beal
Even my loins will have a new york zeal, 
When I shove them towards any man who will give them a feel
Walk by saint Patrick's and in a strangers apartment kneel,
All part of the circular wheel of the dying romantic, 
searching for a last meal
Desperate to deal,
or seal
Or at the very least conceal 
That there's anything left of this heart to steel, 
Though the ashes of which I keep in my heel
That squeal and peal on the fluorescent teal subway line 

I'm still looking for a sign,
Divine in the smoke rings of sublime,
Not silent like the blackbeareded 5th avenue rabbi
lost in time as well as yidish rhyme, 
Or saints like mimes whose stone eyes watch the grime, slime, violent crime, the moral strict 9 
But don't leap or climb from there archways to chime in
Not a surprise in my mind, This is the city of the blind, the unkind, the weary of the daily grind,
Or the so damn well bread, well fed, and refined 
That no one can stop and give you the time, 
Hear your prayers for a fucking dime,
Even be inclined to be offended by the maligned language,
Or mankind's untimely decline from their Godly design

I saw a rag man with food in his hair,
On the New York City Library stair, he would swear, and flair
And shot mortars of profanities through the air
Shrieked he was a fucking millionaire, 
But what was most rare wasn't the man or the filth he did wear and bear,
But the way when he collapsed down the stair, 
people kept walking 
As if unaware of the entire affair, 
The man falling in frightened despair, 
Without a prayer, And than than lying on the stair beyond repair,
With an unconsious mist in his glare, which I will dare 
to compare
With the blank stares that walked by the mans pair of cold and fair Human hands 
without stopping,
A moment so unfair I keep puzzling over it like a game of solitaire

I told my new fag friend, sporting the newest sunglasses trend,
He intends to extend me a lesson he penned, 
So i had to pretend to listen as he began to condescend,
Says I'm too new and will understand in the end,
That I need to ascend beyond tourist, And that smiling is the first thing I need to amend,
He himself contends with this every day, and says I tend to send the wrong message 
Which I struggle to comprehend, as he says I need not attend to a strangers needs
Or try mend the worlds wounds,
that you don't know what coming around the bend
Or what's blowing in the wind
I need to spend my time defending my own person in the end.
Why did I befriend this nat who's very mannerisms offend me,
And this is all I intend to amend in the end, But for now I just listen, and try to see his eyes
Behind his sun glasses glisten 
I do this because I'm a gay Christian.

Alone now I listen, 
and I write my first days in this new place,
And wonder if its something I should completely embrace, 
Whether that midwestern romantic is such a disgrace, 
whether he is really something to erase,
And I know I don't want to shed the smile from my face,
The memories of my old love Chase, The ace in my sleeve,
And that this new life, is only a base, this new pace
A chance to escape the bouts of sadness that race and lace through my mind,
To find some a trace of strength, 
And discover by the will of Gods grace, 
That there is space here for me
This microphone gives me a voice, a hoist, a choice,
A moist oasis for my sanity, 
which most candidly, Is something I no longer have in me, 
But its OK,
Its a side affect of humanity, 
And I pray God does what he can with me.