10,000 Children

Words so true

Lyrics:

"10,000 children and all I can do is just talk.
While my house is full of possessions that negligence bought.
Everyone tells me that I'm not to blame,
Why do I still feel the same?

Only love can save us all.
Only love can save us all, save us all.

10,000 children are my invitation to change.
To continue in excess now suddenly feels oh so strange.
Prayers and money should not be confused,
But I pray that both still are used.

Only love can save us all.
Only love can save us all

What will become of me?
Inside of history

10,000 children and all I can do is just talk."

The Dalai Lama's 18 rules for living

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs:
1. Respect for self
2. Respect for others
3. Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

The Law of Attraction

Here, Mike Dooley explains "The Law of Attraction": "Thoughts Become Things". It's so true!

The World

We are all connected,

though our systems

are not yet perfected,

there is a harmony

and a rhythm to life

in which each person

plays their own part

resonating from their individual heart;

it's sometimes hard to hear

when drowned out by fear,

so love yourself,

for who you are,

love is the key

to unbind us

and remind us

that WE can

save us all.

Gaia beseeches Anthropos

This is one of the songs from the soundtrack to the movie “ONCE”. The soundtrack is really awesome.

As a writer of lyrics myself, it never ceases to amaze me how so many people can listen to the same song and get so many different interpretations of what the song is “really about”.


I was just listening to this song, and then I had an interesting interpretation of the song that I would like to share with you. Think of this song, not as a love song between a woman and a man, but between Gaia (the earth/our Home) and Anthropos (Society/Humankind).

Gaia sings her song to Anthropos:

“I think it's time, we give it up
And figure out what's stopping us
From breathing easy, and talking straight
The way is clear if you're ready now
The volunteer is slowing down
And taking time to save himself

The little cracks they escalated
And before you know it is too late
For making circles and telling lies

You're moving too fast for me
And I can't keep up with you
Maybe if you slowed down for me
I could see you're only telling
Lies, lies, lies
Breaking us down with your
Lies, lies, lies
When will you learn

The little cracks they escalated
And before you know it is too late
For making circles and telling lies

You're moving too fast for me
And I can't keep up with you
Maybe if you'd slowed down for me
I could see you're only telling
Lies, lies, lies
Breaking us down with your
Lies, lies, lies
When will you learn?

So plant the thought and watch it grow
Wind it up and let it go”


"The volunteer is slowing down
And taking time to save himself"

Is the Earth slowing down its abundance to help itself because we won't? Are we in a Parasitic or Symbiotic relationship with the Earth?

Scars

The scars show you where you are:
where they came from is
where you’ve overcome.
You’re so far
Look at who you are:
You’re a survivor
So you can be someone else’s
Reviver.

Revolver
Turning up and down
Smiles and Frowns.
Sometimes over-painted clowns
Say “you’ve gotta be happy now”
But you don’t know how.

Let your bliss be real
Let the Universe reveal
After the fall of the hail-
After your skin’s turned pale-
Be thankful
That you’re still alive

You’ve almost arrived
No matter where you are
You’ve got the power of the Stars
No matter who you are
You drive your own car
To your Destiny:

Let yourself be free
Believe in the eternity
Whatever it will be
Be happy
Be happy.

Smile,
For a little while
Smile, Smile, Smile.

Only you know what’s
Written on the files
For the reasons your seasons changed
And why you’re smiling now:
Only you know why,
But you can share this secret
If you care
To tell me where
What went wrong
Is how you became strong
And what you left behind
Became your strength of mind

You’re so brilliant,
It’s making me blind,
Now that you’ve stopped
Hiding behind the petty excuses
And even the deepest of bruises.

You’re beautiful to me
Because you are perfect
In your imperfection:
And although our
Reflections fade
I’ll wade with you
In the pools of light
‘til the heaven’s take you back
As the star
I’ve always known
You are.

Journeys

I'm following the sound
that echoed
long before
I was born...

It's a shimmering wave,
Born of the 11th dimension:
Filtered down
through the cracks and crevices
of

infinite
invisible
strings

finding neural pathways
and the equations for

beliefs
and hearts
and supposed "Souls".


Pulsing rhythms and
dreamlike stages
make way for
waves and ripples
reflecting a life
I couldn't lead before.

I am just now
tip-toeing into
the tide pools
whatever will happen,
The Universe knew long ago
and so I go

"Once upon a time"
begins now
and I'm turning the page...

Sins

If you look for sins in people,
You will find the supposed "sins".

What is sin?

Merriam-Webster defines it as "An offense against religious or moral law b: an action that is or is felt to be highly reprehensible (it's a sin to waste food) c: an often serious shortcoming : fault"

The more laws you make,
the more you can break.

"Waste"?
"Highly Reprehensible"?
"Serious Shortcoming"?
"Fault"?


"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” ~Matthew 7:1-2 (NIV)


“You, then, why do you judge your brother? Or why do you look down on your brother? For we will all stand before God's judgment seat.” ~Romans 14:10 (NIV)


"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." ~John 13:34-35 (NIV)


“Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." ~Luke 23:34 (NIV)


Do you think you know what you are doing?
Sometimes our best intentions,
Our supposed “love”,
Harms more than it helps.

We are all human
It means we are fallible:
We are toddlers learning how to walk
And we all fall down
Scrape our knees
And feel like there is no point any longer.

If you look for “sin”,
You will surely find it.
If you look for the light
In a sea of night,
You will find it.

We are eager,
Sometimes misguided,
Humans that make mistakes,
Desperately searching for
Joy, understanding, and acceptance
In a world that seems
So unwilling to give us
any of the three.

I won’t call your mistakes sins.
I love you too much,
And I guess,
It’s easier for me to know
How to show you
I love you
Than for you
To show me
You love me?


I love you,
Mom and Dad.

But sometimes… it hurts.

The Lesson

Pouring through the pages,
Hieroglyphics in every sentence,
Her eyes squint at the “LYD”
“MIX” turns and churns
in a cognitive voice that attempts English,
but ponders in Korean.


Her eyes glance up
To images of yellow sunflowers
and windy green fields of summer grass.
Through the cerulean blue sky,
The music calls to her,
Beseeches her focus and attention,
A promise to her heart’s song
That this word will get her closer
To the Tonic she modulated to
When she first believed in the magic of sounds
So many years ago when she left
The Tonic home to which she was born
So many years prior.


“IAN”, I explain,
Can be pronounced
Like a person’s name: “Ian”.


Echoes of music resonate the Halls of the CFA:
Somewhere there is a cello
Somewhere there is a trombone
Somewhere there is a guitar
Somewhere there is a piano
Somewhere there is a voice

Somewhere there is a symphony
Battling for the attention of the gods
Against the herald angels
In all their pitch perfection:
Our human frailty makes our temporary structures
Most precious because they are so fleeting,
Thus, the rarest treasures the Universe has to offer.
Those echoes
Float down to me
As a promise that only the Piano and I know


"'LYD' is pronounced like the English word 'Lid'"
So many lids on so many dreams.
Artists beating themselves up
Because we keep falling down:
We need a constant reminder that
We all fall down, and that the bruises
Give us explosions of emotions:

Entire Universes are created
In a big bang of fury,
Or a single tear,
Or a silent chuckle at the absurdities
That daily life throws to us.
Without falling down,
We’d never appreciate the miracle that is walking:
When we make it to our destination,
We have tales to tell of the times
We wanted to give up, to give in,
And we pursued our dreams against all odds:
Those are the stories that warm hearts
And give hope.


She slowly rises and then stumbles:
“MIX
O
RID
IAN?”


I help her up:
“Good! You’re almost there.
MIX
O
LID
IAN”


Her eyes gaze right,
In her mind she is sitting on the floor.
Amidst the cool breezes
And warm feelings of yesteryear,
She begins to form a haiku in her head:

“Your words are foreign
I’m deaf, must learn to hear here”


I lend a hand:
“Mix o lyd ian”


A pregnant pause.
Somewhere there are Angelic Overtones
Watching over we, the Tones and Semitones of the world.


She crawls, and stands holding onto a table leg:
“Mixo… Mixolyd…”


My eyes are not judging
Or expecting her to fail
Or staring at a clock to see when the moment will be over.


She walks: “Mixolydian”
And runs: “Mixolydian! Mixolydian! Mixolydian!!!”



I taught Lily to pronounce Mixolydian
Lily showed me my North star:

I want to teach:
I want to hear and play everything
Under, Over, and Through
The Overtonal Heaven.
I want to become the best that I can be
And journey all over the Sonority Sonar System
To the Tonal, 12-Tonal, Atonal, and Beyond,
But through all of the modulations,
The cadenza always has me flowing back to

A centric coincidental cohabitation I have with humanity:

My life is not my own.
My life is for you, and you, and you,
And for those who died before I was born,
And those who will be born after I die.

I am warding off an unspoken debt
Of which, only the Piano and I know,
The Universe’s cycles and systems
Had cast me as a character
I was unwilling to play
until now.


“Your words are foreign
I’m deaf, must learn to hear here
Water Lilies bloom.”

Society Says...

Society Says: "Do Jumping Jacks"

Society Says: "Raise Raise Your Right Hand"

Society Says "Pledge Allegiance"

Society Says "Go to War!"

Society Says "Agree With Everything We Say"




Raise Your Left Hand. You Lose! Society didn't say so. :P

A Momentary Thought

Life really is all about the moment.

All of the moments strung together make this thing we call life.


It goes in a wavelike motion.

Life is not stagnant,
Life is always moving.

Smiles go with an acceleration up towards the sun.
Frowns go with a deceleration and then a rapid plummet towards the earth to the cold hard reality that gravity sometimes keeps our most lofty ambitions from breaking through the atmosphere.

Nothing stays the same. We can build structures against the sands of change, but everything will change eventually.

We cannot always be happy, but we can pursue happiness. We can help others in their pursuit of happiness when they are on “the downward wave” and maybe, just maybe, when they are on “the upward wave” they can help us when we are on “the downward wave.”

What you have now, will not always be,
So love who you can,
while you can,
with what you can.

"All Men Are Created Equal"? Really?

This sprang from my pondering of the key phrase from the Constitution:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_men_are_created_equal


In the Wikipedia article, I came across an interesting concept:

"Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase in the Declaration of Independence as a rebuttal to the going political theory of the day: the Divine Right of Kings"


What is the "Divine Right of Kings"?

Wikipedia says:

"The Divine Right of Kings is a political and religious doctrine of royal absolutism. It asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving his right to rule directly from the will of God. The king is thus not subject to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or any other estate of the realm, including the church. The doctrine implies that any attempt to depose the king or to restrict his powers runs contrary to the will of God and may constitute heresy."


and then:


"The theory of Divine Right was abandoned in England during the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. The American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century further weakened the theory's appeal, and by the early twentieth century, it had been virtually abandoned."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Right_of_Kings



So Thomas Jefferson was trying to liberate himself and entire nation away from the concept of Kings just deciding that they could rule the world, just because "God's will" supposedly made them "worthy of the crown."



I, personally, do not believe that "all men are created equal:

According to my research in Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology, as well as in many personality theories, most people have accepted the notion that just because you are a human and there things you have in common with every other human (Usually physical things such as the fact that we all have bones and skin... but even some people have less or more appendages because of unfortunate events), there are many Fundamental ways in which people have things in common with only SOME people and then characteristics, beliefs, perceptions, and judgments that separate them from every other human being that has ever been (often referred to as "Personality").


When people say "All of us are people, therefore 'All men are created equal'" they are putting us back with the issues that lead Jung to create his theory of disambiguation between types in the first place:


“This work sprang originally from my need to define the ways in which my outlook differed from Freud’s and Adler’s. In attempting to answer this question, I came across the problem of types; for it is one’s psychological type which from the outset determines and limits a person’s judgment.” ~C.G. Jung


I believe that many times, although people may realize that there are vast differences between themselves and others, the reason people support and will argue the concept of "All men are created equal" to the death is that what they want to say is "All men should be treated with equality".


And here is a fundamental difference:


"All men are created equal" says that fundamentally we are all a huge "=" sign.


"All men should be treated with equality" says that although we may have diversity in Age, Religion, Sex, Gender, Sexual-orientation, Ethnicity, Culture, etc. there should be a perceptual continuance in how people are being treated.



"Playing with Perception" can be a fascinating game.

One movie example of this is the musical "My Fair Lady", you should watch it if you haven't already.



Near the end of the movie, Eliza, tells us how our perception of things and people can change the labels that we give those things or those people:

"You see, Mrs. Higgins, apart from the things one can pick up, the difference between a lady and a flower girl isn't how she behaves, but how she is treated. I'll always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will. I'll always be a lady to Colonel Pickering because he always treats me as a lady and always will."




I don't think that the concept of "All Men are Created Equal" or "The Divine Right of Kings" got it right... it's sort of a mesh of the two (as it is with most cases taking two extreme sides of perception):


I agree with the last part of the sentence in the Constitution regarding Men's equality: "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" being something that people should all be able to have... but I think there are times at which people "lose" the right to live, lose their liberty, and the ability to pursue their happiness: If they are killing or harming others, we do KILL them, TAKE their liberty away, thus thwarting their ability to pursue their happiness! It happens. It's been happening since the beginning of time.


So, in summary:

Although, idealistically speaking, it would be great if we lived in a world where everyone would be treated equally, we do not, and I don't know if you can ever truly treat issues that contain "diversity" in an equal and unbiased manner.

There is a clear difference between saying "There is no difference between White People and Black People" and "White People and Black People should both be treated with dignity and respect" because there are obviously differences in our skin color, our anthropological and sociological backgrounds, just for starters, however, there is something to be said that our Diversity does not need to Divide us.

The sooner we admit we are all NOT equal, the sooner we see differences as strengths (Like the X-men have different powers... they're not the same but the work together as a team!), the sooner we can all Live our Lives, have our Liberty, and Pursue our Happiness.

dots... . . . . . . .

the world is a funny place.


a scary place.


a place.


a dot.


.



the world is a dot: a wonderful wondersome blue dot the size of the smallest dot you can imagine... and then even smaller than that. Upon this dot, live many, many, MANY dots:


There are

tall dots
short dots
round dots
square dots
even horizontical dots... but they don't get out much.




There are dots you can

SEE
SMELL
TASTE
HEAR
FEEL

feel happy about
feel sad about
feel angry about
feel... something about.


Some dots are called animals

Some dots are called people

and some animals are called people
and some people are called animals.


These people dots are peculiar sorts of dots: they sort themselves out in the strangest of ways:

There are certain invisible nets that these people-dots throw to catch some dots that they desire to keep, and to catch some dots that they want to get rid of.

color-nets
language-nets
expression-nets
thinking-nets
speaking-nets
and sacred-law-nets of 17-forever ago that are still in the process of being decoded by the people-dots of today... Their great ancestors of old "knew best" when they threw some certain invisible nets and decided to write down the process in big menacing books so that the younger people-dots would never forget these important invisible nets that they placed around the big blue dot we call "Earth". With newer dots came better information about the big blue dot so... the people-dots living upon the big blue dot COULD make better nets based upon this information, but some certain people-dots cling tightly to the old invisible nets because they are used to them. Change, even for the betterment of the big blue dot and all of the people-dots that live upon the big blue dot, is too scary for these sorts of people-dots because, to them, a bad invisible net is better than no invisible net at all.

"The big blue dot would fly to pieces if there were no invisible net holding it together!" they exclaim.

These people-dots are very confusing aren't they?



... . . . ............... . . . ...... . . .................. . .. .. . . . . . . . .... ..................... .............. . . . . . . ..

A sound-dot appears in the night-tides next to a lone beach. This sound-dot is a lonely dot. Another sound-dot skips over the crashing ocean waves to the first sound-dot.

The first sound-dot says "Hello".
The second sound dot says "Hello".

A sort of pleasant greeting harmony is created between these dots: an invisible ambient string between them. More sound-dots appear. Invisible strings bind them all together into an intricate web of resonant waves next to the great ocean, rising and falling, rising and falling.

A people-dot sees this web of sound dots with his ears. He sits on a smooth rock, holding his palms to his gruff face, the salt of the ocean waves is something he can smell and taste at the same time. The people-dot listens. The people-dot sighs and thinks:

"What invisible webs we weave, to practice to deceive, and hurt and harm, when all by themselves, these sound-dots charm."

Calm, he felt. Goodness, he felt. He thought of better days, when invisible nets could be used for something beyond attempting to control other dots...



Some dots are seen as merely crusty pepperoni on a cold pepperoni pizza, while other dots are seen as stars making up a grand constellation of stars guiding the way to a better day... . . . . .

Personal Pronouns

If they walked right through the doorway, I think I would be shocked. They’re not supposed to be tangible. They’re not supposed to cross over from the land of daydreams and heartthrobs and romantic notions. No. They’re supposed to stay in the mists of fleeting thought, dreamy twilights, and warm hazy dazes.

It’s sort of funny I guess. Funny in the way that you laugh after you fall down. You think to yourself “why am I laughing” and you realize it’s just your instant reaction after the fall. It’s the most instant way your body knows how to react to the absurdity after surprise and the pain have faded into a sense of normalcy. In the same way, I’m laughing, a crazed laugh perhaps, but it’s only because it’s crazy: you keep getting pulled by those strings magnetized by attraction to all the things you can’t have. I’m cursed. It’s a curse of inverse torment: I attract everything that I don’t want, and everything that I do want isn’t as much repulsed by me, but doesn’t seem to find me. Not that they necessarily don’t find me attractive; who knows what people think in the colorful, noisy chambers of their innermost thoughts? They just… they just don’t find me. Whether it is some cosmic force keeping us apart, or some sort of apathy, or that islands are meant to stay disconnected from other islands.

If they walked right through the doorway, I wouldn’t know what to say. I would probably make some sarcastic comment, the only way I could deal with the ever-growing anxiety that there has to be some sort of punch-line somewhere, this is me we’re talking about, the guy that wasn’t supposed to actually be found.

Maybe it’s that I have exerted so much energy in looking for someone. I’m looking at them looking at me, and “knowing” that they are looking at me because they find me attractive. They “of course” continue to glance at me in the classroom because “they can’t keep their eyes off of me.” I allow this sort of nonsensical flight of fancy go for as long as my boredom stretches on. I see them in some random location outside of classroom: the different context wakes me up to the fact that the flight of fancy isn’t really fun anymore. It’s just… stupid.

I don’t listen to Physical Attraction anymore. My first instinct about THAT is usually wrong. “well, they look honest or nice or amazing.” Physical Attraction dangles sex in front of people’s faces. After sex is when people wake up and awkwardly retreat to where they were before: sometimes they wash themselves over and over hoping that the night before was just a bad dream, they talk to their friends about how confused they are about what just happened “I’m not that kind of person! I don’t do those things!” All those love songs they were singing a second ago, now seem like honey that was used to lure them into the trap, and traps, even if you escape them, often leave scars. ‘

“This scar is my pride” they show the tallied scars as the amount of times they have “won”

“This scar is my reminder” they say proudly, “of a place I never wish to return to”

“This scar is the red ink that corrects my faulty longing”



It’s all tied up to the notion of perfection, something that those shining, filled-with-light images cannot stand up to: we’re human: it means we make mistakes. So loveably falling down over and over again only to get back up again like a toddler: that is us, human beings.

They come through the doorway, smiling, with some sort of nervousness, a remnant from a few relationships gone bad. They don’t have a sense that I will complete them because I already told them that I wouldn’t do that.

I don’t want to be idealized or put on a pedestal. I just want to be seen and heard for who I am without Photoshopping the flaws away.

They’ll look at my scars and chuckle and say, “Yeah, I have a few of my own too.” I’ll close my eyes and not want to open them again, because I am sure, if I do, I’ll wake up, and waking up is all I ever seem to do these days. Between the times of waking and sleeping is held all the dialogue and stage directions needed to portray what we perceive as real. But to me, they seem unreal, and that is the heart of the problem: I desire heart above all else, but even the shape of a heart is a lie: It’s not really bright red and tapered off at the bottom, it looks more like some squishy messed up pear that escaped from the circus. The real image of a heart is more in line with what I’m searching for: this indie individual, separated from the rise and fall of the tides where everyone dwells. Intentionally living, pensively pondering the puzzles, saying something to me about the importance of flickering lamps and that annoying unraveling thread from your knitted sweater.

He’s sitting next to me with a smile on his face and I’m still afraid to smile, but we talk for hours about him and about me and about the time I fell backwards off of the stage and it felt to me like slow motion. His words are slower now, the ambient sounds of the birds outside my window have slowed in their frequency. All of the world around is perpetually slowing down to a frame by frame account. I’m looking at these images, one by one, examining closely the creases in his face that show the smile and in his eyes a certain glimmer of boyish optimism.

These personal pronouns remain most important to those who wish that “they” would always replace “he” or that “he” would always replace “they” in this context. But it’s not ok to be personal anymore, because the difference between she and he is the difference from a smile and a frown on the face of the reader. The difference between a happy ending and a horrible twist unexpected.

Stop expecting and start living your own life, then I'll tell you if I want a husband or a wife.

This Is My Face

There’s a rusty tin hourglass sitting over there on that corner table. It’s trying to stare me down. The heavy maroon curtains fall off of the curtain rod unceremoniously. It’s so random that all I can do is laugh after the slight moment of apprehension passed as quickly as the curtain had fallen. The stars are turning their backs on me. It isn’t a stormy night, but the stars are barely visible. I focus my gaze on one of them, hoping that the longer I stare at it, the brighter it will become, in this moment I feel as if I believe it will become brighter then it will. The opposite happens. Stars seeming to close dark eyelids around themselves leave an empty sea of darkness. I collapse on the bed.

What’s it all for anyhow? You are educated until you can bear no more and then you are sent to a much weightier institution which is somehow treated more as a joke than the more juvenile halls of learning. You get inconsequential job here and another one there to make enough money to support your education that is supposedly going to your great life’s work. So many people get caught up there it seems. They get caught up on the side roads, getting more prestige and raises in the side-quests, that they adjust their thinking and find themselves justified now that their cognitive dissonance has subsided. Of COURSE they wanted their career to be in nine to five shoe stores. They say it’s the smell of new rubber. I say they’re too afraid to go after what they really want because they’ve become comfortable in something that was “good enough”.

A crimson line flows out from underneath my bed. I fall to the floor, compelled towards it as if a large magnate resides within my gut and continues to pull me towards the crimson line that is still making its way to the large window now naked of its maroon curtain. Illuminated numbers appear above and below the crimson line and as I gaze at 1987, the first number, a heavy booted foot nearly crushes my fingers.

“This is everything and this is nothing. This is good and this is bad. This is unlimited and this is limited.”

If the dark hooded figure were not enough, then, floating towards me, a woman dressed in white lace and silk says faintly, “It is near that time”.

Sweat begins to bead on my forehead. I’m too young and too old all in an instant. I have seen everything that I have seen and I have not seen everything that I wanted to see. The images of happy times and sad times fall from my brain to the crimson line, organizing themselves into their correct order as memories strangely never seemed to do for me when they called my brain their home.


“And what if you had died here?” The dark hooded figure bellows at me as its finger points at an illuminated number. I try to reply, but no easy answer comes to my lips. I find that odd. The question has entered my head countless times before. I should be able to murmur at least a theory, something I learned in that moment, something I wouldn’t have learned.

I finally manage to say something “Well… I wouldn’t have realized how interested I am in people I suppose… and… I wouldn’t have seen how those large foreboding figures known as adults are just old children who have learned to play games as their hobby; they wear their invisible masks like it’s Halloween every day.”

It continues to point at dates and demands me give the significance of that specific date and tell it what happened.

“But what if you had lived?” The graceful, floating woman points sadly at some different dates and some of the same dates as the hooded figure.

I’m perplexed. “What do you mean by ‘but what if you had lived’? I’m alive aren’t I?

“Yes,” she smiles, still with that look of sadness in her eyes, her lips fervently trying to retain that shape of a smile, “but, you let yourself die inside here” she points at an illuminated date “and here, and here, and here. What would have happened if you had lived in that moment?”

It becomes too clear all the times that I had spent just surviving, just drifting from moment to moment, my senses dull to everything around me. Those moments of feeling truly alive were few and far between. I’m thinking back now to that night sky, the stars, all so faint. I look back to the night sky and the dark void remains as dark as it was a moment ago. “If I had lived,” I now decide it would be a good idea to respond to her question, “then I would have arrived here, or somewhere else, anywhere really, much sooner. I think I would have been happier. I think that my metaphorical “goblet of life” would be more close to being full than it is now; right now I feel close to empty. “

The hooded figure takes off its hood and to my astonishment it is, I mean, she looks identical to the floating lady. They both smile at me, a little less sadly than before. “We are called The Perspective.” They take up the illuminated numbers in their hands and toss them at me. The numbers transform mid-air to the shapes of puzzle pieces. “What? Am I supposed to put it all together? Am I supposed to put all these dates together so that they make some sort of ‘big picture’?” I laugh loudly and sarcastically, throwing the pieces to the floor. Some of the pieces break and then most of the pieces vanish. One of the floating ladies picks up a broken piece and puts the pieces in my hand.

“You see, all of those other pieces which are the moments good and bad in your life, could not come about without this piece being here. It all connects, you see? There are ups and there are downs, yes. But it’s all moving and breathing motion from your lungs, sight from your eyes, sounds from your ears. No, you cannot always be fully alive, but isn’t it something grand that we can all strive for?”

They were gone as soon as they had appeared. I put the puzzle piece in my pocket and crawled into bed after putting the whole pieces together as best I could. From the looks of it, it was beginning to take the shape of staff paper with music notes sprawled on the side and frantically written lyrics popping up through the five lines here and there. It was a mess, but it was my mess. I’m sitting here, holding the broken puzzle piece in my hand, sleep over taking me in slight waves. My loss of consciousness is ever so subtle and ever so gentle.


And I can’t tell if I dreamt this or not, but I still have the puzzle scar to prove it. The broken puzzle piece, at the very, least “seemed” to grow hot in my hand and I hurled it at the window to keep it from burning straight to the bone. The glass shattered and the puzzle piece exploded the darkness like a firework.

Tears run down my face, but not in disgrace, because this is not my mask, this is my face.

Tchaikovsky

It’s 11:00 at night and Bach is still playing in the background; I think it's a sonata that he never got to finish. “The faux flowers are falling.”

“Write that down.”

Beethoven has a mad way of making a theme out of four notes. Those notes on the page became the Braille for his ears to run over and make sense out of the black and white. “She covers the blemishes on her skin, but she never tends to the ones within”.

“Write that down.”

Mozart looks sad. His hair is left unkempt, a wig lies next to him on the futon. “Mozart looks sad”

“Don’t write that down. Say, ‘Mozart, near his final breath, waiting for the silence, hears all the violence, and hopes that the music he has captured from invisible angelic things will give wings to the hearts of the unconscious sleepers in their beds of future tired winkings and thinkings of mounting apparitions they know not how to quell.'”

This separation of body and conscience, what does it mean? Our preoccupation with love and the pursuit of life and being happy when the waves of up and down, smile and frown, continue dauntless to our feeble attempts to be happily ever after. There is an after the happily ever after and it is a downer, but there will be another sunrise too. How do you capture that melancholy moment in a sound? How do you say “I love you” in your own timbre, your own pitch, your own existence and somehow still connect afresh with new lives in a way that the old sounds didn’t? Categorizing songs into purpose and person “I feel… You are… We all are… He was… She said…”. A complaint is always something people can relate too. This suffering , these blues. The tinkling of piano keys rattle old locks and turn the hands of clocks forward and backwards so that for a moment I am caught in a euphoric moment of ecstatic joy. It doesn’t matter that I am in debt over my head, sinking, sinking, I’m putting musical parenthesis around my soul like a force-field. My mind is in another place, where my soul is, and my figurative heart that looks like a heart, and not that botched up thing that really resides within my anatomic warmth amidst my bone-cage.

“Write what you feel.”

“But I feel too much.”

“Write what you think.”

“But I think too much.”

“Write what your senses are saying to you.”

“They won’t be silent.”

“Then I don’t see why you are so distraught”

“There isn’t time. There isn’t a podium and a pedestal and I feel like this should have been bestowed to someone else who was more capable”

“Ego.” A chair is there and it’s Sigmund Freud’s face as a mask, Mozart is laughing at me now, a childish grin. “Tell me about your mother, tell me about your father, tell me about your childhood.”
Blinking lights, a child, laughter, tears, two oak trees, a castle in the woods, a caboose in a football field, audio voices in the darkness warm as theatres alive on Christmas Eve.

“You are here now.”

The dizzying cycling has ended and he’s holding a glass music box. He drops it and it seems to be floating on all of eternity. Gently caressed by the warm and cold inhale and exhale of life, it falls closer and closer to the ground and there is an expectant glisten in Mozart’s eye. “And what if it does hit the ground, who would care? Someone else would catch it of course”

“Or perhaps they wouldn’t”

“Perhaps. But, what would it matter. You see, this music box is only visible to both of us; no one else would know”

“But I would know.”

“Well then.”

I stay stationary; it’s still falling. It could either be a gruesome explosion with a thousand little pieces, or it could be a gentle crack, but that music box wouldn't be the same and neither would I. The more I ponder it, I wonder who will save who, and who will prevent who from getting cracks and from falling all to pieces. One fell swoop and it’s in the palm of my hand and I begin to fall to pieces. “It’s New Years Eve, it’s a cold and cruel world, and I’m weeping over an apparition in my hand, but I’m holding onto this, because It’s holding onto me, and somehow we are both keeping each other from apathy’s misery”

“Write that down.”

Pieces of Cake

Life is too short to hold onto little things that don't really matter like grudges, pride, and our opinions that others cannot change even though we see ourselves change every day but we're "different than everybody else" which makes it OK to hold everyone else to a nonhuman standard of perfection.

What if people pointed out your good qualities just as often as they pointed out your faults? How would that make you feel? What if people pointed out your good qualities more often than your faults? Would that make you feel slightly better about yourself? Sometimes we are so caught up with being right that we forget that this occasion is a rarity if it ever fully happens, because for every right answer there are at least two more that could have been just as right as yours, you just never thought of those before.

We are twisted and forced into black and white thinking. Black and White; Good and Evil; Right and Wrong. The shades of gray are really the stuff that life is made of and I thank God for that: without the shades, we would live in a two dimensional world of bland circles wishing to be spheres.

We aren't bad people. We argue that "we think highly of that person" or "I think that she is the best writer in the world". So often we let our fleeting unimportant thoughts become known to unwilling ears while letting these most important of thoughts slip off the tips of our brains into a bin called "well of course they already know" or "it's so obvious" or "everyone already tells them this". But, you see, no one ever told you that everyone has already assumed that "everyone already tells them this" so no one has ever told them that they bring light into their day and that they appreciate them.

We laugh and joke as we daily tear each other down without ever bothering to build each other back up again. The towers fall as we laugh amongst the debris, leaving them with their sad hammer and nails to reconstruct what once was high with self-confidence and is now barely above the sea with a state of near-self-loathing.

Giving someone a compliment is like giving them a piece of cake that you have made. Your thoughts become a tangible sweetness that leaves them a little less empty inside
.
The people who do not deserve pieces of cake need them all the more. The people who think they deserve them need to examine if they are hording all of the cake to themselves.

Here’s to the human condition of imperfection. Here’s to trying so hard to get through the day even though everyone else thinks that your life is a breeze. Here’s to people not understanding you and blaming you for things you can’t help. Here’s for all the good things you do that no one will ever notice and that you didn’t do for the acknowledgment even if they did notice. Here’s to the mistakes that you have corrected and the hurts you have tried to mend and the hearts you have tried to heal. Here’s to you, because you are alive and you have life and a light within you, and a chance as long as you are alive to change and become every day closer to the person you want to be. Here’s to you. Here’s a piece of cake: you are amazing and never let anyone else tell you otherwise. You have a purpose even if you haven’t found it yet. This is your life, and this is your piece of cake.


If you find it difficult giving someone a piece of cake, it's probably because you're having to take more time to make it, and in the long run it will have meant more because it's not something that you could just bake in an easy-bake oven.

These Awkward Walls Between Us

There are 7 levels where it becomes increasingly difficult to connect or reconnect with someone.

Before the 7 levels, the only difficulty that may be involved in meeting someone is that one person may be shy and not be comfortable meeting new people.

This is all from the viewpoint of the person trying to break the ice and talk to the other person.

1) I have heard a lot about you but you don't know who I am.

2) We have both heard a lot about each other (sometimes you can tell this when you hang around similar friends and the other person's name keeps coming up).

FACEBOOK- gets it's own special and magical level. It is not numbered because it is not real. If you become friends on facebook, I'm sorry to say, it means nothing. *gasp*. More likely than not, if you have not met the person in real life, if you see them in real life and are like "Hey! ..." they will give you a blank stare and then you'll just have to pretend like you're meeting them for the first time... because... you WILL be meeting them for the first time (this has happened to me multiple times, sorry!). More likely than not, those random people friend’ing you probably are just taking their stalking tendencies to a whole new level. Sad, but true. Laugh away stalkers, you know who you are, and I don't, let's keep it that way, unless you think we have a chance at being BFFs forever and eternity. *Then dial 1-900-838-9279-38274-982734.

3) I was in some sort of group activity or club with you but we never formally met (i.e. a play, a musical, camp). In this scenario both of us KNOWS that the other person KNOWS who we are... this is when you can feel those awkwardness walls as an almost tangible force-field. The "Pseudo-Amnesia effect" effect may begin taking place. Refer to my "Pseudo-Amnesia effect" rant in level 4.

4) I actually met you at one point. It doesn't matter who initiated the handshake or who broke the ice. Now we are no longer friends for one reason or another. It's probably due to the fact that we never were really "friends" but more like acquaintances. We more than likely met at some party or you were with one of my friends and they introduced us and you forgot my name the second after we stopped shaking hands. The “Pseudo-Amnesia Effect” now has about a 77.6879% chance of occurring, but realistically it is probably more like 89.7324921%. THE PSEUDO-AMNESIA EFFECT is a very tricky matter as it has only been recently discovered by Dr. Yours-truly-don’t-ask-me-for-proof-of-my-Ph.D.-because-there-is-none M.D.. It is when either you or I pretend that we have never met, when the fact is, we did, and either I know this or you know this, but more likely than not, we BOTH know this. I will assume you have forgotten who I am or you will assume that I have forgotten who you are, but their lingers an air of questioning the encircles the awkwardness force-field like barbed wire. Reestablishing contact can be difficult because I am wondering why you don’t say hello, and you are wondering the same thing as we both walk by each other. Each time this happens, it further solidifies that possibility that the Psuedo-Amnesia Effect will become full-blown amnesia the next time we meet and that you more than likely will forget what your face looks like when you are 87. The Pseudo-Amnesia Effect can be often used in as either an offense or defense strategy against someone trying to reestablish conflict. This is called the “Pseudo-Amnesiac Dodge-Ball Defiance.” THE PSUEDO-AMNESIAC DODGE-BALL DEFIANCE is when you ignore me on purpose when I look at you to say hello. Blank stares are often the first symptom.

5) We were good friends. We aren’t anymore. Why? You tell me. You won’t? Ok.

6) We were in a relationship. We aren’t anymore. It wasn’t a clean break. “How can we be lovers if we can’t be friends?”

7) You have a grudge against me. This is a very tricky and unstable level- quite as unstable as you are as you shake your fist at me with your bloodshot eyes attacking me with mental crowbars. It can occur even if you have only heard about me as in level 1 and I may not know you… or we could know about each other… well I do now. This level goes above and beyond all the other levels, because at this level you are actively doing all in your power to loathe me and get everyone else around you to hate me as much as you do. Sometimes things I actually did may got into your long energetic narratives of why my soul doesn’t belong is some place as merciful as Hell. My friends tell me that I should just ignore you. How do I ignore the constant hate-mail? I will save them in a time capsule so that my grandkids will know what comedy was like at the beginning of the 21 century. You may or may not . It’s more than likely that you will be more conscience of my existence and let me know as often as you can that “I know where you live!” and “Yo Momma’s so fat (but there is no humor in the way you say it)” and most often “Who do you think you are, a Super Star? Then have no fear, the camera’s here…”

These 7 levels are very difficult to break, but if you really feel that we could be friends, then by all means, break the ice.



















*For those of you who just called that number, congratz, you have been successfully mind-controlled, how does it feel?

Groundbreaking

Groundbreaking. The ground is broken now and I’m falling through the spaces left. “Keep swimming” they say from atop high towers that they have built themselves from paper clips and old sand paper, “You’ll get to nowhere as soon as you open your eyes.” But my eyes are only slightly closed, not willing to let them become the cliché “Eyes wide shut”… they have taught me well.

I stand there among the mud angels given the blue ribbon along with the toilet in the art museum, the vacant flickering room, the blood-covered statue of Mary titled “Bloody Mary”, and the dying dog tied to a wall in a far off place where it’s tears are artfully appreciated as tall men and women gaze at it and say “How refined are we, those that understand that this is not a dog dying before our eyes, but indeed, it is art, a representation of the human condition.” The human condition fell a little more from grace the day that dog died… and a little more when the artist was asked to repeat the masterpiece once more for an art convention of featured works of the year.

“You will be graded on how original your pieces are,” says he the Grand Wizard of Sound. WS likes to be referred to as WS because these two letters are not actual Chords to be played in the traditional world. He tells me that he would cut off his head to be different as long as he could survive… because all hair colors have been taken and shaved heads are overdone… he insists to wear a cardboard hat fashioned in the shape of a half-rest. The words “ART is TRA… figure that out and you have understood all” are written in yellow and blue ink on the front of the cardboard hat. I think he made it. It looks like he made it during his office hours at the University.

Pulsing light and sound fall into a jigsaw puzzle glued together in an alternating pattern of “Jigsaw piece of sky” and then “Jigsaw piece of popcorn kernel”. At first I am confused. Then I slowly am realizing that different puzzles are involved here. There is an Autumn Tree, A New York City skyline, a rusted truck, a procession of killer whales, and a broken window. Somehow the composer managed to decompose these images of sound into a mosaic of pieces that are stuck together with globs of glue and frayed tape. I’m looking around the room and the ones with golden hats are nodding. Nodding they smile and grin to one another “Ah! This is refinement! This is the cutting edge! This is Art-with-a-capital-A!”

And I understand that art is all around us
That the world itself is Atonal
And that my usage of a semi-colon here; makes; me seem. Groundbreaking.

:,,,;.,.;,:,;…,;; but I was sitting in the kitchen once, my hands holding the cool glass of lemonade, smelling the slight scent of peaches on the spring air as a faint tune wafted in through the screen door from the backyard… and it was my grandmother’s soul singing to me… and it was old, and it was faded, and it was crumpled, and it was beautiful. Beautiful. Like a prism scattering light all around the room before the mention of tombs. It went with the silver records and the jukeboxes that people used to gather around. The beautiful is dissected to say that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” … it is, but do not hold my beauty in your eyes, please, do not tell me what MY beauty should be.



But beauty doesn’t matter. It’s the meaning behind the madness that is what you want from me. I will vomit on canvas and outline it with my toenails. Groundbreaking will get me an A, indeed. But; as, long_ as the tones of souls linger, on, the, air, I will rather not be here.;.,;;; I would rather be there with my grandmother at the kitchen table, hearing my Grandfather recite old hymns he knew from when he once was a practicing Catholic, before he became an Atheist; It was the only time I ever heard him sing, and it was not Groundbreaking, but it did break my heart.

Words Whilst Mournings Mingle

We are all lofty judges with our bleached white linens accusing angrily those who have trespassed against the moral order of a well-filed world as long as the gremlins of desire aren’t yapping at our heals pulling us into things we never would have done ourselves, or so we tell our groggy faces in the morning when we meticulously run our eyes over our own visage trying to uncover the mystery of who that person is staring back at me at three a.m. Is it a man? Is it a child? Is it something tame or something wild? Does the breathing fit the frame of this space and time? Is the soul too old or too young? Does it wish to go back to the womb from which it sprung?

She screams “I am not inequity! I am but a lowly personage. A small. Dagger. Rests between my lips. To strike. To slice. To pull from within themselves something that they never knew before. Who knew that I temptress would be tempted myself to fall away from idle play to fill in these seats with memories of who that child standing there at 23 could or would be, if he just stopped? STOPPED! Stopped running from the world he could see if he remained blind for but a moment to what his comrades say will save him from his yesterdays.”

His yesterdays echo like water walls in the smallest cave you never saw. His mind is a vessel for an insane compendium of lies and truths in blue and red hues all waiting for queues from a larger mass that dangles below in branches and stems, walking sometimes, sitting othertimes, as too large ears to hear clearly dangle awkwardly on either side of it, taking a world in that he has never seen in an auditory capacity of reality. He lives there: on the mossy brain. It grows and seeks sustenance, but he desires to remain in it’s never-cracked shell. Some call it Hell. He calls it “well”, to not need a doctor (or rather, to not call upon a doctor) is a sure sign that one is not sick and that one has a complete control over the surrounding everything that encompasses all points of the compass, whatever magnetic world that it may be.

Lids open dawnlight to this place of forgot. And forget. And forgive the things he gave to them, all placed in pigs’ pens for the prodigal son to eat. To eat and eat and eat until he becomes sick. So sick. He throws himself into the vile bile of a world held in vials and achingly-white trench coats. “He is to be recorded. Documented. Words. Say, ‘I love you father’.”

“I love you, my five-line wonder of staffs and clefs, of fallen men’s breadth of misty morning desires for something more than a pittance at fairs, scouring the earth for someone to tell them that life can be a sunrise, even if that sunrise is in her eyes: a moment’s surprise. Life is not a fair, for if it were it would be fare and would be fair. But what is not there in the air is under the furthermost of the ocean’s reckoning.”

Faces darken. “Say, ‘I love you mother’…”

“I love you my wondering wit of wicks willing to wilt when whispers widen to sharpen and hide in the cracks of backs not wanting to be realigned. I love you words that make sense less than the pauper’s perusal of 1930s stock market crash world.”

What do you do when it’s all cottonballs instead of snowflakes? All glued to construction paper in a third grade classroom never ventured to. It smells of glue and paint and children freshly made up to be little parents’ prisms of pertinence to their pretty perfect lives. They are the cornerstone of marriages, born in carriages they bring the tides in and out, making those strange giants laugh with a smile and cry with a pout and frozen with a shout of “I am not a child anymore!”

“Children of the wilderness are we, born with locks without keys. Looking for the chambers that will give flavor to a world bent on savoring delectable doors leading to something more than ‘here is your diploma, here is you car, here is your wife, here is your child, here is your divorce, here is your teenaged nightmare, here is your mid-life crisis, here is your depression, here is your dread of the dead pulling you out of bed holding onto your breath because there has never been something quite so frightful as death.”

Coats are criminals now, their teeth glaring in the blueberry-green light. “So tell us what you mean by narrating ‘blueberry-green light’ Blueberries are blue.”

“It is the making of a truth: blueberries begin their infancy in the green rooms of dormancy only to find their infancy in shades of ever-wakening blues. ‘I am blue! I am blue!’ they cry… and the old man sitting next to the river sighs over them singing softly soul’s lullaby “I’ve got the blues” and indeed he has them blues all wrapped up in chlorophyll crusts, not yet blue, but he sings “I’ve got the blues” as if it were true.”

They say “interesting” as if it really were something quite perplexing and unappetizing. Meat loaf will become lobster tails on Henry’s dinner menu. He will take his wife out tonight. Lawrence will dine on spiced chicken instead of boiled carrots. All this talk of things green that ought to be blue has somehow rusted him from the idea that vegetables save lives when you eat them instead of red things with legs and lesser souls meant for dinner plates and lunch bowls.

“And they won’t understand you, you know that? Prose’ rose is not a gentle flower, but a one with the insatiable ability to keep one writing late into the mornings paying no heed to warning from the gentle snorings arising from the watchmaker’s tick tick tock alarm clock. Waiting. Waiting to wake the world from a solemn slumberland.” These glasses have never been thicker on the thinker and his friend the tinker.


“And the eternal boy sits in a dawning 21st year without tears in eyes bright with darkened years: “I will say one word to summarize the cliff, the mountains, and the world. And it will be loose and context free. No prisons of irony for me.

"Thinking they, the ‘eyes taking in symbols’, ‘who are these shadows dancing around white walls and black towers of looping syllables and dotted. Punctuation spread like, butter?’

"The guards ask for sleeping hours. Hours of sweet release from life’s never ending lease. ‘I like guarding this light, this word, this façade-breaking meaning of causing ineptitude to stand back and say:

"‘simple words have nevermore been heard like rain drops singing, even through the pain.’

“This they pause and wait for something to tie it all together. Make it worthwhile. 'Pray, make it something to think about long after I have left this page'.

This random zanity

where the word "Assurance" or
"Mystery" ought to have been placed

instead another word has left the others erased.
this small quip, tricked flick of a three or two syllabled word (depending on how you pronounce it):




Limerick.”

This Wavering Line

It’s all becoming clearer now: the drive to survive. It’s when we give up that the vivid colors that paint life as a pleasant tapestry melt off the canvas leaving nothing behind but a grayscale gum-forest of simple splotches that might have been left over from certain Grecian statues having a meal out of one of Da Vinci’s masterworks.

We go to classes. We concentrate. We drift away on pleasant thought clouds or bothersome thought storms or thoughtful thoughts like these:

“Why do those that we once knew now ignore our existence? We see them, greet them at least with smiling eyes, if not a gesture of kinetic force or some sort of sound escaping from our lips or vocal cages like bright yellow canaries. The light that once would have ventured out from our soul to brighten their lantern of recognition has now become a dark cave of cold collected coolness: their treehouses take in no more fireflies, and all you can do is feel the awkward wave as a slowly undulating force pass by your core as you realize that they are now walking with one less face in their menagerie of friendship.”

And then we laugh! Something he said, that man, there, in front of the classroom, sometimes standing, sometimes sitting, but more often than not he is writing strange symbols on a board too blurred to actually be a real stationary color. What was it that he said? What makes anything funny? They catch us all off guard: something rhymes, someone’s “untarnished” name has been put to shame, an awkward silence is broken; the laughter marks a mere token of words unsaid.

So what was I talking about? Oh, yes. Surviving: the plot. We are all searching for some overarching plot, some road that will take us to the exciting climax so we can rest on the denouement. So many up and down situations become the hills of happiness and the valleys of sadness; life is never a straight line. Well, straight lines lead to straight lines on medical monitors. The shrill tone says “He died on a Friday morning at precisely 5:37.” It says “He was done and the drive to survive drove away with his girlfriend of seven years. She never asked him about the source of his tears.”

Stories. So obsessed with stories are we the people of the threatening flat line. We thirst for modulation, so much so that even if we are crying on the last page or in the last 37 seconds of the movie, then we are happy in some small place within ourselves: a wicker house made of thicker things like tree branches and dandelion strings. Soap operas become grand examples of melodrama so laughable yet so addicting to so many housewives, lonely spinsters, and young girls longing for the line to shift, to change, to become a rollercoaster of ups and downs surrounded with the “yes” and “no”, speeding chases down street-lit nights and halting stops. Next to garbage trucks. In the high noon as the world buries, her, dead.

Dead roses in the cracked glass water bowl.

Some get angry when I mention this because they say I’m being somber. I’m just putting into words what is there just as much as the person viewing vibrant violets would comment about their “violet vibrance”. Through life, the painter is given the colors with which to paint his masterworks. You ponder Van Gogh’s life. No. You don’t ponder it. I ponder Van Gogh’s life. I make you ponder it. Or rather, I wish you would ponder it. Writer’s often speak for the reader’s as if they were holding the puppet in the tangle of strings. It is quite the opposite, actually. WE ponder Van Gogh’s life: a swirling night with an inferno of stars rippling in the sky-pond and Picasso with blue hued broken guitar man with fallen hands.

I’m sitting there, staring at the woman telling me that everything happens for a reason, that I have to take my ups with my downs, that we are the sum of everything that has happened to us. I look at the paintbrush clasped tightly in my hand and at the paint precariously plummeting azure planets on a celestial floor.


Is the pain worth the gain?

Is the brokenness worth the building of something whole?

Are the years of bitter silence worth the moment of merry music?

I think that it is worth it

Awake

What is it like to be awake in a sleeping world?

Shadows fall from trees like apples
the moon lights the lids of the departed-
not dead-
but dead to life-
dead to the world around them;
they are sunk deep to the bottom
of the fathomless lagoon
clasping tightly their sharp harpoons
to kill the monster's of the deep
lest they provoke them
to give up what they keep.

Their eyes fall into black and white tones:
movies from the 50s, the 40s, and
suddenly
there is no sound
just tossing
just turning
just breathes
slowly churning
the recycled air
over and over
dreams of four leaf clovers.

And I'm sitting here,
on this park bench
on the dawning of the morning's yawning
and I can't help but feel myself
fall asleep as the world wakes.

To them
I am but a statue in the morning-tides,

but they never stay awake 'til midnight
to see reality change
as dreams' ships set sail from twilight
to bring me to life
through night's orb:
always changing
white light
always bringing me awake,
to life.

from beneath the painted skylight

people are so preoccupied by death that they forget to live.

Songs sung by the idle ones lift spirits more than the plastic lips of rich idols laminated with their golden notes and circular trophies that somehow scratch so easily.

In everything it is so easy to find the ones you wish to become close with: the same soul-pieces somehow finding all the edge and middle pieces of the puzzle finding ways in which to strengthen their smallness and insecurities which never are expressed in any tangible form. And yet those round ones: rotund shapes unwilling to align themselves with any other shape for they have found it safer to be by themselves: biding their time with candlesticks burnt for only one darkness, forgetting any sort of cliché "inner darkness" for, to them, there is darkness, a REAL material darkness for there are no lights between guts and blood and bone; only on the surgeon's table are there ever lights, and those lights are blinding rays, an indication that the world is not in order.

Chance wears the pants that people threw away yesterday because it wasn't worth it. Fate is not quite unlike chance, except it pulls you more: you feel the rightness, that egg-white jubilation, when those keys unlock those rusty doors and there it is; but how deep and tumultuous is that feeling when what was supposed to happen does not happen after all, leaving one wondering whether such pillars as Fate are as stationary as once thought and who, indeed, was the blind Samson who pulled said pillar down?

The closed minded will never admit to it, for they are closed from themselves primarily so how can you expect them to be open to anything else? Locked in the Everdeep they pray only to sleep so that such bothersome things like conflict of interest will never occur. The open mind is sometimes a dangerous thing because a truly open mind does not exist: for being truly accepting of everything and everyone you become everything and everyone and thus no one at all.

Triangle tears fall from rhombus years and the shape of things cannot be compared to any sort of adjective you can modify... the Introverted stay the Extroverted stay... but somehow I don't know whether they can see through the thinnest of veils between them: one letter off Ann and Anne, but it makes all the difference in the world because one is in the depths of the well, and the other is crying out above the well, but they never do meet because one is afraid of fallacies whilst the other is frustrated that the clam won't open.

Oh, Sense! Never common, but divided amongst Adam, Eve, and their children. cast down down down the tunnel of eternity to the Nowlands stretching to the soon 10,000,000,000 souls on one spheric surface. Overtones, you hear so clear, but you follow the first pull that you never really stop to look around you , to pause, to hesitate. PLEASE, hesitate. Those undertones you never really listened to, because your music was the ALL the great lumiscope to take you to your one star, brighter than the cosmos in one illuminated dot at the end of the tip of your soul.

Yearning,
you forgot the learning,
and felt blindly
on the pavement
so hot to the touch
and burning
but you never found
the dirt.

"Be speckled. That's what you are, you know. None of this, PURE CONTRAST nonsense... even black and white movies are really in what is really "gray scale" . You land so lightly on that scale, it seems, not making a real go of it... colors colors colors that you drink night and day the contrasting conflicts that make you giddy and drunk with the sheer madness of it: Swirls! Van Gogh swirls, you say. All these heads painted with only one ear. It seems you like Picasso then? Well, what is this then? 'A Zebra with no stripes?' But, that's a horse, silly boy. Don't look at me like that! What do you mean 'fine then'?"

Fine lines bent to make way for things not wishing to be confined:
the dreams of new lights
try to fight
but so often
they never find a source
to help them on their way
these paper boats
so swift and eager to spread words down
in the endless ocean
never hear the sounds of
"I believe in you"
because everyone else is too busy
tearing each other down with
"Just Joking" sledgehammers.

An Ordinary Saturday Night

On Saturday nights, he walked behind the library as she would have done had she not had to stay up past midnight studying existentialism. From the library’s floor to ceiling window she felt she was peering into another world, not quite unlike Alice with her looking glass. “But he wouldn’t know such things” she thought to herself, her lips moving to match the invisible words, for she was in a library: her future so it seemed. She was majoring in political science, but she knew her future wasn’t in books with such tangled and twisted language that it would spring up and attack those who dared go against its fiery letters.

It was her father, yes… the man standing there, picking up fallen things, reminded her of her father. “Young man— funny— what does that really mean? What’s the cutoff point” she wondered. “When does a young man become a man, become my father, the accuser abuser.

She stared at him from the window. When he turned around and looked up, as if some audible nightingale had betrayed her presence, she did not look away. The thin layer of glass between them was her shield. She needn’t cast her face down to the ground as she always did when looking at the faces of the people who surrounded her every day. And she wondered, “Is that football jersey a reflection of who he is, or is it something he uses to try to cover up his light?”

Two Poems

if this all made sense
I would just float...
float...
down
and

down

'til there was no more sound
and then sing a single note
to pierce through this feeling,
bursting through the ceiling that
confines me.

--------------------------------

A wish on a fish
constellation
fills the imagination
with all the wonders
ever beheld
fallen to the wakes
of sleeping men
writing words
without pens
in their thoughtful silence.

A Patchwork Now

I stand alone on a sidewalk of glass, a spotlight dimly flickering on and off — Off and on, as if it were to point out the already obvious fact that life is fleeting: “Tempus Fugit” (which really means “Time is fleeting” but to me, here in this silent, sorry, sad place, time and life are the same ever downward-spiraling clock. Memories float up to the surface of my mind, like corks they are filled with holes… but curiously, the more solidified they become, the gaps of forgetfulness remembered, the more those memories weigh down upon me like great boulders.

The circle of light widens, and I find that, now looking up at the sky, it is night. There are no stars and there is no moon, only a small pinprick of light from whence cometh the spotlight that continues to wash over me. I feel exposed, and naked, though I can see that trousers (such a better word than pants) are covering my legs, shoes are covering my feet, I don’t look at my chest, but the existence of sleeves on my arms allows me the bound of faith that the rest of some semblance of shirt is covering it. But, my soul feels exposed too, and there is no way, faith withstanding, to know whether it is covered (whatever that might mean) or not. There are trees here: warm colors spring forth from among their branches amidst an ever-decreasing measure of coldness in the air. Leaves fall— their colors seem to have lost some of their vibrance now that they are strewn across the mud and the glass sidewalk.

A slight wind passes by my face, and I feel as if my soul-strings are unwinding. In front of me, I see a man knitted in my form from the strings that have come from within me. Empty. I’m not quite sure how I’m supposed to take this: Is this the image of what has always been within me, what I am striving for, or some sort of generational continuance of a tapestry never quite finished with each link in its sewing… only worked on as time goes on? I think back to when I was only ten years of age and wrote down on a piece of college-lined paper the outline of my life. First major job by age 22, married at age 25, and kids by 30. From there I had projected all the way to the age bracket of 80-90 after which I had placed three question marks in succession with a very bold and underlined exclamation mark. So much of life is cycles: water cycle, day and night, seasons… life. I just didn’t want my life to follow the same old cycle: Birth, school, job, marriage, kids, mid-life crisis, grandkids, Death. I feel that by the time we are bringing life into this world we haven’t had scarcely enough time to figure out our own lives. But I digress, children are our future, and we were children once too, but, somehow, although I still feel as a child, I feel more like I belong to the past than the present, much less the future.

Drum beat with beauteous voices of cellos, guitars, and piano waft from somewhere off in the darkness outside of the slowly growing light around me. Oblong rectangles of light appear hovering in that darkness, and the circle grows to cast light on the old building holding those shapes of light. The music weaves its way between the heart-string image of a man before me, and he vanishes. My heart-strings are my own once more, but the feeling of emptiness, of despair remains, though something from within the seemingly empty recesses of my heart begins to beat.

A strong current turns me, heart and soul, to the vast darkness, looking away from the building and the light and the music (though the music seems more within me than without me now). I don’t know how I know this, but I must venture out there, to that absence of light from amongst the flickering light where I now stand. I wish I could bring one of those fireflies in the oblong windows of light from which the music seems to be flowing with me… but somehow I feel that it is not right, at least not now.

Flesh become flesh and bone within flesh and skin on flesh and heart within these and soul amongst them all. I can’t seem to move beyond the glass sidewalk, my heart beating fervently to linger on, years have past, but I have grown, and the pathway I have prayed to see is there: lit more dimly than the spotlight in which I stand now, but there nonetheless. Somewhere, amidst the music and the oblong lights, the fireflies (which have enlightened the darkest depths of a despairing soul, which I could not have done without) four years have transpired. Four years of ups and downs and all arounds. Four years of hellos. Four years of goodbyes. Four years too short. Four years gone, already behind me, I have nowhere else to turn but out into the darkness— but somehow, that heart-string image of a man is who I have become, thread after thread.

And although I am leaving this small place in time behind, I have faith in this: Fireflies bring what light they can to the world they cannot see; if they were disheartened and downcast, thinking that the little light they cast meant nothing, then the night would envelope us all; but I am so thankful for those that believe and lighten those darkest of dark times for those of us beyond the belief that that little light could make a difference— and I will come across fireflies again, and maybe not for a long length of time, perhaps some from the four-year past will come beside a world-weary traveler after a time.