Achilles’ Choice

What course of action would you choose when your dreams are subverted by a personal inequity – when you can but sit and watch as biology destroys them? A ticking clock, a beating heart, with no rechargeable battery.

Dos Mas Dos Equis Por Favor

“You look like one of those angst filled neo metropolitan anime characters.”

A Kingdom For a Cobblestone-

"People believe what they want to believe. They find meaning where they can, and they cling to it. In the end, it really doesn’t matter what’s a trick and what’s true. What matters is that people believe."

Moleskine-

“Like a creep or solar center
Ooh, a dirty little sister
Wow, I’m gonna kill it
I’m gonna kill it, dead.”

People become bound to a way of life, the way things should be in the future: the arrangement of the cereal bowls at breakfast, the clothes, the car, the Christmas lights. You emulate what you see.

“Do you know what it means to feel like God?”

Flicker-

"After dark vapours have oppress'd our plains
For a long dreary season comes a day
Borne of the gentle south and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The ancient month, relieved of it's pains
Takes as long lost right the gift of May
And, with a passing coolness plays
Like rose leaves with the gift of summer rains.
The calmest thoughts come round us, as of leaves.
Budding, fruit ripening in stillness, autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves.
Sappho's cheek, a smiling infant's breath,
The sand that through an hourglass runs,
A woodland rivulet, a poet's death."

Matters of Interest-

The most boring things in this world are nudity & honesty. They leave nothing to the imagination. The trick is just enough of a veil: a silken chemise or an ambiguous metaphor, the half step from the edge, one coin from all the wealth of the world.

Glass-

I look at your eyes
And see the gears in your mind,
And the furnace in your soul which drives them.

-

"I’m coming home to burn, coming home to be reborn."
But how many lives does a cat deserve?
Breathe in the fire, breathe out the smoke.
Another piece to move.

Something like realization

“Sometimes the realest things in life are the ones you can’t see.”

You drown in faith or you learn to breathe the water. There are more things in this life worth believing than there are worth knowing, and only cold air can be seen.

Merry Christmas all.

Bells-

The bells create a note, a wave, a perfect organization of chaotic air. Beautifully they harmonize, drifting in and out like the tide. Overlapping, weaving, relentlessly nudging the imagination.

The snow descends with the muffled sound of winter, on the edge of notice, comforting like a blanket of calm and wonder. And the voices, rising and falling, dancing with serendipity, like children on a trampoline in warmer times. When the body is cold, when the world freezes, we must rely on an inner fire.

-

I have begun to understand the role of dominance in life, and how I gave up my dominance without notice. I stopped competing in life – a fatal error. Life can be relaxing and fun and worthwhile, but it is always a competition.
12/21

Great Minds

“Doubt everything, find your own light.”
-Buddha

Waves

"He's the one who likes all our pretty songs and he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun, but he knows not what it means."

Explosions collide with serendipitous abandon, a cluster of stars firing like popcorn on a hot stove. Education in plastic and words framed in air, speeding through life like a decaying fruit, from seed to splendid ripeness to decaying husks left in gutters of street corners.
Beware the evolution in which you are a step, the light at the end of the staircase is not your own. The revolution built on waves and steps, flowing and crowding like so many pixilated lemmings hanging by umbrellas over the abyss. A ruse that can only be explained as a perpetual hourglass in which you are the grain of sand.
Ride the waves or you will be swept away.

4/14/5

Unlikely Sages-

“All I suggest that a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”

Scythes-

Children playing house,
Adolescents playing God,
As if a forgery would make you an adult,
As if age meant anything at all.
I am guilty of many things in this life,
But I do not regret,
And I hold no grudge,
And I only fight to kill.

12/16

-
And the chapter is over. I'm done. I can diminish and disappear, having accomplished something. The only things remaining looming over my head can't cause mortal wounds. And I could use a vacation. Suprisingly, not only did drinking last night not cause me to fail my exam, but neither did only studying for a grand total of one hour and going to Floyd's Diner for an hour and a half before the exam.Its a strange feeling knowing that every opportunity that comes your way was taken full advantage of. That and I managed to successfully coerce half of the registrar staff at school to remove an F from my transcript, and I in the process learned an incredible amount about their vacation plans and recent vehicle related mishaps. That kind of thing is much harder to do with a mohawk though, at least on middle aged women. Overwhelming success? not quite - I know that I didn't get an A in the course, B- at best. But I am supremely content. Now I need a good book and some simon and garfunkel to drown me in comfortability. maybe a papasan and a moshi too.

Prose-

I wish there were more place in this world for a jack of all trades. I do not wish to be the king of some obscure hill. And according to a poster I saw recently it is inevitable. It was a cross-section of occupations and the levels of mathematics they required. My two favored choices had marks all the way down the page: aeronautical engineer and physics researcher. Almost makes me want to be a cosmetologist, second only to bank tellers(on the list at least). Level of mathematics required: basic calculator skills.

In other news I recently came into possession of some fantastic images of a violated wedding cake topper. Thanks to the groom - that shit is priceless. If the other addressee were not bereft of me at the moment I am sure she would agree.

Addendum: I don’t know if the last 3 hours were spent wisely, drinking expensive liquors and playing pool with people from Toronto. I do know that it was a lot of fun; I also know that the 25 or so people that were at this party consumed untold volumes of alcohol. There were enough 1.75L bottles of Absolut to make geometric shapes. I plan to wake up in 7 hours and study for my exam, I plan to go into it under such a strangely substance induced state that my beverage will practically write the test for me, and then I will collapse. Perhaps forever. I can enjoy fighting this engulfing darkness for only so long. A man can grow, but there are limits. A man can be all that he ever could be and still not be enough for some things. It feels as if those things, the ones that I will not have yet conquered, are things I will never seem to grasp, even if I never stop trying.

But this, my message lost at sea, my ever present log, it allows me to vent these impurities. It is here in my frozen forest that I release my cold words; here from my nameless soapbox I can be what I suppress beneath my skin. Thank you.

Now, as I am drunk, I am going to sleep and forget.

Under the Magnifying Glass

Testing, and testing, and testing me.
These examinations seem relentless,
I live for them. These tests are what define me,
They are the fire I must pass through to lose the water fat,
They are the gauntlets I must pass through to lose my inconsistency.
Bring the skin closer to the inner fire.
Let your light illuminate this often dark world.

“Feed my will to feel this moment urging me to cross the line.
Reaching out to embrace the random.
Reaching out to embrace whatever may come.”

Cracked and Dried

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
-Oscar Wilde

My inkwell seems to have dried up for now.

From Blake's America

`The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrappèd up;
The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk and dry'd
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing, awakening,
Spring like redeemèd captives, when their bonds and bars are burst
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field,
Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air;
Let the enchainèd soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open;
And let his wife and children return from the oppressor's scourge.
They look behind at every step, and believe it is a dream,
Singing: "The Sun has left his blackness, and has found a fresher morning,
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease." '

Another bottle in the sea.

And the day passes, and the future moves. Fast cars and dyed hair can’t pull me away from this isolation.

The choices that I had all but disappeared – today was the perpetuation of choices made before. I could not alter my path. I wandered into verdant fields and sunny days in my mind, while the steps I took ate up concrete sidewalk with no chance of turning back. It would seem my chosen path is delayed again, causing me to lose my waning focus. People say that you don’t always need to restrict yourself to the sidewalk, there are other ways of getting where you’re going, less traveled paths, but certain responsibilities bind me to this fate. Contracts signed in ink and words alike.

A strange array of worlds has been shown to me lately. Some new and daunting, some old but solid, but I’m still shopping. I haven’t found one I like yet, maybe they’ll grow on me, but I don’t see myself a Californian club kid for a few years yet.

The colors are bleeding, the ink poorly printed on this world. It was nice to see grayscale but there must exist something real beyond apathy, something that lasts that doesn’t scar, or maybe I just need to learn to trade pain for pleasure, to reset the balances more frequently.

Falling Petals

A world opens like a door,
And closes like weary eyes.
A world tests you, it rewards you,
It punishes and fights you,
It subdues and is subdued,
Like an impulsive tide.
And if you keep the door open
Just long enough
A cherry blossom will drift through
And leave you, with your closing eyes,
A memory of the waking world,
A memory of emotion.

All work and no roleplaying games...

It’s the day of my first final and I’m up at 4:30. There are demons in my head with jackhammers. Why if I am Prometheus am I still chained to a rock, if the fire that I give has all gone out? Maybe my people just use lighters these days, using my gifts just long enough to light a cigarette but not to burn their fingers, and me: still trying to hold up the world. I would kill for a normal sleep schedule; name your enemy.

Self taught lessons.

Drink them in as penance,
Push them away as nightmare,
Try to rearrange the pieces,
Reshape them to fit.

And after you have abused them,
After your memories are bruised,
And the images are battered,
And the echoes are confused,
Are you ready to accept them
As the part of you they are,

If the pieces of the puzzle,
Still fit that picture they once were.

Tequila

Beauty is a doorway, something in your soul that is not itself, but a doorway to something outside, something beyond, something better and greater than yourself, something that must exist for you to exist. Something that causes you to be more than you are, to be more human than human, something that inspires and creates perfection. Beauty is what doesn’t make sense, what doesn’t need to make sense, what you understand without knowing, what you see without looking. Beauty is the anticipated note, the silence after the haiku, the tempestuous torrent or the perfect calm. It is what the voice within demands.

My Scrying Glass

Take a look around you. Your perceptions of the world are distorted by a scrying glass.
All of us are blinded. This glass exists on all our thoughts, shifting our point of view, changing how we see the world.
Changing us.
We are made by our surroundings.
We are not ourselves,
We are what we have seen,
What we have heard, tasted, felt.
We are the sole embodiment of our own universe.

We live for the future,
We cannot relive the past.
We have a memory, for it serves us a purpose.
We remember the mistakes of others.
Turn the rubble of another’s failure
Into the temple of your success.

4/8/2

My Gasoline.

"Some people have given up all hope of anything in their lives ever changing. They just go on with it day by day, and if something were to come along and make things different they probably wouldn’t even notice it right off, except for that kind of nervous feeling you get in your stomach. My mom and I used to call that “the car trip feeling,” because it was how I’d feel whenever I knew we were going to go somewhere far away or somewhere new."

The Bottle.

And the smile of a laughing child
Calms the beast within,
And the way of gun
Drowns in clarity.

Can you win against this tide,
If you don’t know how?
Can you defeat the raven
Waiting for your sleep?
Can you drown yourself in the sea,
Lest gravity do it for you?

Can you lose by winning?
Can you die by trying?

My Guardian

And you, the relentless calm, the perpetual shadow, not always looking at me but always walking with me. To you I turn to now, to you I would entrust my soul, for you I will return.

From Cerberus to Your Very Feet

"We're all standing on the edge of a cliff, all the time, every day, a cliff we're all going over. Our choice isn't about that. Our choice is about whether we want to go kicking and screaming or whether we might want to open our eyes and our hearts to what happens once we start to fall."

-Steven Spielberg

Fiery Confessional

Its this place.
It cartwheels,
Head over heels.
It is controlling the wind,
It is a spinning hourglass,
It is the fog and the mist
That swirls at your feet
Like hands cov’ring your eyes.
It is the world spinning
The opposing way you’re walking,
As if things can’t get any more wrong.

The setup.

And so, on the 12^th day of December, a recipe for hilarious disaster was created:
30x 5-inch screws,
18x 12-inch diameter ornaments,
12x 9-inch nails,
12x boxes of Christmas lights,
12x pieces of wood,
3x 100-ft nylon ropes,
2x painter’s ladders,
1x sledge hammer,
1x table saw,
1x chain saw,
1x Ford F-150 (which has killed an old woman),
1x 27ft. Christmas Tree

Mix contents. Add at least ten adult males, several females (for decoration), and liberally apply coffee and alcohol until something resembling holiday spirit emerges.

The accounts are balanced.

“Take what you want”, said God, “Take what you want and pay for it”.

The color of blood and silver.

And I saw a man in the darkness,
On a throne of ivory words,
Over granite earth,
Naked hands gloved in flame
And his eyes burned.
His face no longer masked with flesh
But released from its cage,
Like a soul from its shell.
No longer bound in blood,
But released from his shackles.

And he stood and looked in me,
And my frozen eyes glowed,
And my skin burned away,
And I beheld the truth,
And returned to my place
On the throne of ivory words.
Over granite earth.

To the wooden walls of your sanctuary.

Darkest night,
Coldest blight,
Carry demons
On the whispering wind.

Truest dawn,
Loving hues,
Bring the reprieve
Of the lifting veil.

Golden rays,
Deceiving days,
Carry cancerous poison
In their fruit.

Dreary dusk,
Lonely hues,
Take from my soul
And smear on the sky
The blood I sacrifice.

A Jewish Prayer

I stand before you and before my neighbors - pardoning, forgiving, struggling to be open to all who have hurt and angered me. Be this hurt of body or soul, of honor or property, whether they were forced to hurt me or did so willingly, whether by accident or intent, whether by word or deed - I forgive them because we are human.
-Levi Yitchak of Beditschev: Jewish Prayer

Let your eyes blaze with the world you feel,
Let your emotions be ripples in the frozen lake,
Let your ideas be storms in complacent seas.

Lullaby of a Broken Heart, by Lisa

We were a puzzle:
You the answer to me,
I the question to you.
Apart, each a jagged-edged riddle.

With each sunset
I come more fully back to me,
Though never to the start again.
My pulse is now off-beat,
My eyes a different shade.
Outside mirrors inside-
I tumble through the days.

A Kiss

Two comets:
Passing in the deep,
Sensing each other,
Altering their paths to one another,
Orbiting slowly in the coldness of space,
Their clouds touch.

Closer they drifted,
Faster they swirled,
Their atmospheres becoming one,
Igniting,
Becoming a shooting star across a distant sky,
Before drifting away,
Drifting apart,
Finding separate paths.

12/5

Photosensitive Reality

I came to a strange realization through a discordant train of thought. I was thinking first of how I dislike photo albums. They’re used as tools to remember the past, but they only remember the fake happy moments, never the sad moments. I was then drawn to my next point, that within the last week I have unearthed certain things about my past that I had all but forgotten existed, parts of me that were necessary for the person that I am to exist, and they were so buried that only then was I able to find them. It is, I believe, a matter of negative reinforcement. Human beings, and in fact all life, has a tendency to, when set upon by something causing pain or distress, suppress it, destroy it or run away from it.

This suppression of pain creates a vision of the past which at a cursory glance is a utopia. It is believing that the world is better than it is that inspires hope, for if we see that we are constantly below the curve, one could easily suppose that things will get better. But our comparison is fallacious. Hope is an illusion created by the inadequacies of our minds to fully grasp the truth. But we need it. We need this ambition to continue on our destructive path to the sad cold loneliness of death, because without it there is the truth as cold as the death that we delay.

We need the photo albums for they inspire the impression of an impartial past. Shape your own world with the sepia hues of your design.

12/8

A Thread

Romantic poetry is rarely about someone, but it always starts with someone. A seed from a particular fruit that becomes its own flowering entity, but the ancestry is always apparent.

12/6

The Path

Organic tendencies, motivations, like a work horse at the mill of my mind, drive me to my natural place, driving methodically, unerringly to everything human that I despise. Let this broken plough let me exist beyond my means, let me become something better than human. Let me find a rose in this wasteland; let me find a beauty again in this scarred flesh.

12/5

To Fire or Cloud

I watched a man dying on the road today, having hit a telephone pole. I saw twenty faces grim with resolve, and forty eyes as pools of despair, looking as if they could will the pieces of glass whole, will the broken body back to life. Is this unthinking compassion proof of Kant’s Vernunft, his free will, his angelic quality in man? Or were they doing what the world told them to lest they feel as weak and powerless as the poor soul who just went on vacation?

12/7

Modus Operandi

I circle truths. I am not the kind of person who has original thoughts, though i like to say otherwise. Most of what i know and do and feel and think isnt mine.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts someone else's ideas, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

-Oscar Wilde

What you may get, however, from my words, after hearing enough of them, is the truth which i cannot seem to see. It is here between the lines i direct your attention as i sway your senses and emotions with these overly wrought words. I am a machine of creation, and you - you are my tool.

11/13