Assignations

My outwardmost flaw--
save perhaps my rotten teeth--
is that I hold the ones I love
to impossibly high standards.

I am constantly let down by--
and pissed off at--
the squandering of potential.
Yours, mine, and ours.

You will never achieve
the greatness
I have assigned to you.

And neither will I.

The Mire

All the dreams

I've left behind are lying

in the midden heaps of my mind.

Senselessness

I'm dreaming, again,
of death and the dead.

Faces unblemished,
quiet in the quick.

I'm sorry, my friends,
I was never there.

I'm sorry I'm not there now.

Ineffectual

I don't know how I'm still this nervous.
It was supposed to work itself out
along the way.

I still have to force myself to deal with
the things, and people, that I don't like,
or like too much.

In many ways I still hold myself back
irrationally afraid of unforseen
consequences.

No choice but to struggle on,
as I've always done,
and hope that I still have a little
time to grow up.