Nathan Alan Schwartz- Two Poems

Hard and Sour

I don’t want to see
through hard and sour eyes

I don’t want frozen feelings
in the fridge.

I don’t want to smell rotten flesh
on my bones.

Don’t want to
listen to the news and punch it out

I don’t want to remember a life of regrets and
imbibe the disgust.

I never want to paint murals with dust on my fingers
as others give into smiles

Don’t want to remain a stem
as others grow into flowers

Don’t want to tell my children stories of
of my past life of a man who was happy.

I want to drink happiness
through straws

I want to know what it’s like to have
contentment feel like heroin in my veins

I want to align myself
with the stars.

& sail through the oceans with the same grin as
everybody else.

&  I want to feel loved.

It’s a strange occurrence

I should have started counting the days in
which I created my own prison

15 years ago.

I should have created a plan to escape
& found the perfect partner.

Instead, I am caught up in a smoke screen
created by own breath thick

cankerous cancerous fog
lost sailing on wicked waters

with no compass.  Deadlocked without
a first mate.

Should have noticed that my life was a series of
Destruction & illusions.

I could have spent nights

counting the ways:

I could make love to you
I wanted to please you
to destroy this enchantment I placed on myself

Instead I spend days:

As a crying clown walking lines.
I spend hours hating myself
As a nervous system threaded with old
bargain bin heart strings
As a hippie without the free love

II.

There is a circus of nails in my words
And I am running out of ways to remove them

I search for firewood to brighten up my day
in the          
clubs,
in bookstores,
in coffee shops

But there is nothing like you, to make my apartment burn.

Nathan Alan Schwartz suffers from a poetic syndrome in which he cannot help but write at least one poem a day. He is the editor in chief of Five 2 One magazine and his latest book Between The Empty Spaces can be found on Amazon.