Robert Burgan Poems

I sang so many songs in front of an audience of flaws
I broke so many skulls without laying a finger on their bones
I didn't apologize for breaking apart our family ties
I lay awake I'm out of time
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**I did not write this, my uncle did, I felt like posting it because it needs to be seen**
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Stand at the crossroads that darkened sky begins my story
Bereft of glory, I take my moral inventory
That's sure to cure me of my mental slips, relentlessness
And everything between the guy I was and who I am
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I sit perched over an Ocean of Emptiness
Alone and condemned, the world saw me for who I am
I stand naked, stripped of my reflection
Bare from the ingestion of the black hole beyond me
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When paradise got destroyed we were sitting behind our TV sets
Wondering how the world got this way
The generation gap became a gaping hole, the gaping hole turned into a void
The void became the soul
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If I would have died in that moment
It would have been ok
You are the world on an endless page
I am a moment in the flood
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This is how you'll get to know me.

When I learned to break free I felt like Andy Dufresne crawling through a drain pipe, I came out clean on the other side. When I took my first breath of genuinely fresh air I inhaled it like gossip, like promises and secrets, I let all that relief pour out of me and I had nothing to hide. For so many years I hid behind misinformation, melancholy and gut-wrenching nervousness. I used to pick at my fingernails until my cuticles would bleed until I learned to wander…
I bloomed from a garden of clay and rubble, I was growth surrounded by debris, I became debris blowing through an alleyway, I was like you but never truly me. I became transition; I was the ticking turn-pike clock rounding 12! Passing 1! But when I got to 2, I stopped dead in my tracks. Maybe I was moving too fast, maybe I wasn't ready to move on quite yet, nevertheless, when I heard The Pop in '02 and again in 2010 my eardrums busted open like a floor tom with a worn out skin…
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The sideways snow slices cheek bone
The hollow sound of disappointment lingers through the winter air
She stands outside the gas station
She is the cigarette smoke being exhaled
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Some days I feel like I washed up on the shore at a young age near my parents backdoor
Next to a stack of bad checks and a list of their flaws
Somewhere around 1997 my hands turned to claws.
Used to hear them yelling at night through a grate on the floor
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Thank you
With every ounce of the sincerity I have left
It's yours
If God was here right now
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