Courage
By Joel Clonts
You see,
it takes courage to love someone
as violently as I love you.
Thoughts of you enter my mind like a swelling rage
full of intensity.
Hollow.
Echo.
Time slows until there is nothing but the sight of you.
I feel you
in the pit of my stomach; the top of my senses.
Your smell, your body.
The smooth of your skin, the small of your back.
The touch of light reflected in your hair.
The seduction that is you.
It is as if everything in your faculty is a string
attaching you to me.
Twisting and intertwining
Tangling.
You see,
It takes courage to lie beside you, beneath you
To hold, to taste;
To hide in you
I love you violently
As beautiful and untamed things are to be loved.
Wild and frantic
Completely, in ways that I often can’t understand
…and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Somewhere I’ve been.
By, Joel Clonts
Its somewhere I’ve been, not somewhere I go.
Where the saints, sinners, and winners meet.
Where the drunks remain and the regulars came,
To see how the black lights glow.
Different faces in different places,
Different ways, with sexy names
Clever letters rearranged,
but remaining unchanged
Is that black light, exposing stains
On your clothes, and on your soul
On your veins and up your nose
Feelings that show
only under a black lights glow.
Clear liquor, clear eyes open,
gazing-looking for something
Drinking, chugging, hoping and looking
But no touching.
She tells stories of circumstance, of innocence as she lies
To herself...as what she will
and what she want
Are compromised, besides…
It pays.
Easy money in easy ways,
But there are other ways debts are paid
She pays hers with pieces of herself that she can’t have back.
You see it and you find it,
Buts it’s different than when you left it
As a familiar stranger stares back from her reflection.
You see, it’s what you know, not what you see.
As the sun gets to bright for neon lights
And she is no longer “destiny.”
Her name is Nikki and she grew up on Taylor Street, around the corner.
And she’s got kids and bills and a mother who prays for her.
Under a black light,
She’ll try it once and she’ll love it twice.
As it makes everything in life, right. Everything better
She says it helps her
With rude businessmen, and slack boyfriends
With drunk college kids who have bi-curious girlfriends
“It makes it easy”
She’ll let herself believe.
If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas,
She’s starting to see
As her nose burns, and that line blurs
Between who she is and who she used to be.
Her name was Nikki from down the street. I was friends with her brother.
But she’s high now, a little numb and a little dumber
Mind trances, and lap dances, and she lets those hands begin to wander.
Lost in a moment, with strong liquor flowing
John boldly throws out a number.
She’ll swear its no habit, but she does have to have it,
So I try to get her some help.
All I can do is pray,
because it’s true what they say;
Baby girl,
I cannot save you from yourself.
You see, I’m an outside observer, just here for the show, caught up in the glow.
And even though, I may seem in the know,
Believe me when I tell you, this is not where I go
It’s just somewhere I’ve been.
