Thursday, July 25, 2013

Forward is the March

All around us moving parts
Alert me to the feel of crunchy,
Manufactured, newfound ground when we part ways, for now
My guiding heart cannot pump
Fast enough up to brain cells overworked this purest blood
Of joyful push
That keeps the line moving
The sound of drilling,
The wear of cutting corners close in this tiny, little, reworked frame on the fly forming
Conforming only to what is best for all those we care about,
For now it works—
I’ll settle, willingly
Because it is forward on to the march
Of a beat too long subdued,
You renew something true in me,
Scores gone missing
From a higher song that when played was always in key
Return home,
Notes lost in the tossup of experience,
What comes out on the other end can never be predicted,
But I’ll take my chance with you,
Every chance I get, over and over again, every single day, for the rest of my life.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Gods of Men and Women

When I’m out of hope
And the keys to my heart in hand
Loosen from their grip
Slipping through quivering fingers,
As I stare You down, feel the full surge of Your blood coursing through my veins, see You all around me,
Hundreds of billions of years that is life,
I know that I am no match,
For if a red storm should cometh it will come
And if You only think it I would come undone
Though through no fault of my own, rest assured
I will not fight You
No I will not fight You but I will see this through,
Few can say that they have fought You and that they have won,
Those that do are either liars or Gods,
I am neither
Even the stars expire,
A mortal man, deep in the cavernous ravine that is life
With a mortal woman by my side, surely a gift from up above, my future wife
I have given over my keys to her because I want for her to have them,
She has given me hers too, they are beautiful
We hold onto one another as if it is all that we have,
Human life preserves in a sea of red, our best bet
Wait, dream, cherish, love
Work for what we want
Be humble and never flaunt if we should ever succeed,
Do good deeds for one another in this red sea journey ride
Give it our best shot
Take with gratitude this gift we were given
Go on living
As it is what You intend, for now,
To be.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Strength from Within and the Power of Love


If it is a war you want

You cannot win,

If it is a wick you have lit

You will flicker at fault and fade out like a sin—

In her there is fire that still burns

Though you may secretively yearn for it not to,

You could not put it out,

You could not put her down,

For hers is a strong fire,

Endothermic, ice melting, plants in bloom, breath in the air and in her lungs she gasps now for only the right reasons,

Seeing the seasons through with vibrant gloss renewed and earthly vigor in her every step

The tundra comes unfrozen,

There is room again for life to grow,

For love to flow freely,

You will see how easily two outstretched trees

Can bring the wilderness to its knees

Can tame the beast

Can feast in famine in the absence of sin

Can extinguish exothermically summoning up from within

Reserves of strength,

Borrowing if need be from the other tree

That each fell so easily in heart and mind and soul for the other,

As two leaves of the same twig still intact fall swiftly at the urging of heavenly hail,

Then melt in to the Earth,

Their imprints

Their love

Their beginning,

 Eternally bound,

Emblazoned forever in the ground.

 

Thursday, July 18, 2013

A Creak in the Room (Jamesian story for Grad School)


            The table they were situated at was stained with the residue of earlier experience, and served to reaffirm their current state of mind—by all means a recognizable and normative state given the company, and the place, date, and time of present setting. What remained, at the culmination of an evening of sin and consumption, were the production line bottles, most nearly empty, the embedded ashen lineage of the leaves of the Nicotania, and the corpse-like figures of four friends, presumably in their prime.

            Pulling out the money owed, to the leisurely pot built in good faith and in part represented by the plastic poker chips neatly stacked in front of each player, he was seemingly struck by a chord of remembrance, propagated by something found inside of his overly stuffed wallet; he hesitated before handing over the cash, holding for a moment longer than was typically usual in his hand, a folded up piece of paper.

            “Ehhh, like pay up or something.” The combination of downers and psychotropic drugs, that would for any normal person act to subdue those impatient moments akin to race, as the potency of such an indelible elixir could never come into question by those having partaken, and in choosing to partake had felt for themselves the reverberations entwined with consumption, had somehow done little to ease  his friend’s general state, and this could be noted in the tone by which his friend chose to respond to so seemingly an inconsequential delay, even at so fine an hour, even after the innumerable hours of exploitation and abuse were in the rear view and the sobering up process had begun to take form.

            “I had meant to say something earlier,” he said. “But it seems so now, that it should very well work out to my advantage, me having forgotten and you as my audience. I have something wild to share—a little terrifying, but more wild and bizarre and eerie than scary for sure.”

            “Ehhh, like shutup or something.”

            “Seriously, what does it all mean? If I dare to ask, please elaborate on what it is you’re saying—I’m somewhat intrigued.”

            Clutching the paper still folded in hand, he continued. “I found this in the library the other day. From what I can make out, it seems as if it’s from some person’s daily journal log. The writing is in script and very faint so it took some inferring and considerable review on my part, but I was at the time doing all I could do to avoid doing what it was I should have been doing, and so this person’s journal served to fill my immediate need and then take me away from my schoolwork, for better or worse.”

            “Seriously, shut up already. The way you talk makes my brain hurt.”

            “Hahaha, dammit Gerard, let him speak. C’mon man, as you were.”

            Unfolding, rearranging and scraping off some of the table’s grime, he de-creased, ironed with diligent hands, and laid the sheet of paper out off to the side, in front of one of his friends, barely long enough for this friend to take note of the writer’s penmanship, though this friend would not begin to mentally map the uncanny significance of the cursive word till much later.

            He pulled the sheet back and continued. “The paper was like so, unfolded at the time and to the left of my work station. Note the thick, professional looking paper. It’s different. It’s what initially caught my attention. I picked it up and examined it. I aimed to decode what had earlier been written by someone either dreadfully weak or without sustainable ink.”

            “Any luck?”

            “Yea. As it turns out most of the words were legible, and those that were not, I was able to infer their meaning as a result of good sentence structure on the part of our ghost writer.”

            “This sucks. I feel like I’m in grammar class or something. Please shut up. Let’s play video games or put on a movie. Something, anything but this.”

            “DAMMIT GERARD!!!”

            “Yea seriously, shut up already dumb. Anyways, I typed up the letter so that I could at some point read it to you and see what you all were to make of it.”

            “Dammit, okay. Let’s get this over with already. Can we at least speed things up?”

            “I dig, giddy up man. Read away.”

            He slowly and methodically folded the original, much to the dismay of his one impatient friend, eventually reinserting into wallet before reaching into back jean pocket to pull out the printed version. He then read aloud, uninterrupted, that which he had before typed.  

Oh my, what a lovely day today had indeed proven itself to be! I awoke to the light and the sun was so bright and the sky so very blue coming through my bedroom window I couldn’t wait to get outside! I thought about what my friends would tell me whenever we’d go to the movies or when, on the rare occasion, we’d venture into the city to take in a show, they’d say: Grannies didn’t have to brush their teeth or wash their face! At least that is what their response would be whenever I’d question one of their appearances or make a face at one of their scents. They’d tell me to blow off and that no one bothered to look at or care about them so why should I? Maybe they had a point. Today I gave it a go, as not a moment’s time was to be wasted. Not on such a beautiful morning!

I rolled out of bed and set out to walk around the community. Oh, but how wonderful I had felt, and how wonderful I still do feel! Adventure and uncertainty were in the air today! I went for a spin, not bothering to tell the children I had gone out.

I parked at a dead end I had many moons ago frequented daily on my walks to and from school. Oh the familiar sights and smells! The dead end opened into a field now a state park and the creek; oh the creek! It was the same cutesy little creek babbling just as I had remembered it had. They had put a fence up to serve as a divide between creek and path. There was some garbage in the brush in and around the water: beer and soda bottles mostly. Maybe the kids were hanging out. Maybe they were trying to clean up the place. Oh, but it was still my creek!

Oh, to walk along the same path with such vigor as I had some sixty some odd years before! To know that not so much had changed, that I hadn’t so much changed, that walking in this same place as I had, way back when, still offered to me nearly identical surroundings, and thus gave me comparable joy to that which I so vividly remember feeling long ago. My word, what a deliciously uncanny feeling!

Oh, and there was Robert! Sweet, handsome Robert. To see him riding his bike without a care, wearing his debonair grey flannel suit and looking as young and as handsome as ever. Oh, what a marvelous sight to behold! To cross eyes as we passed one another, again—he looking so innocent, me feeling anew—so very alive and reborn. Oh, what a feeling!

Why he had chosen not to speak to me on this day, though I do recall him giving me a look of distinct recognition, neither mattered to nor concerned me. Just to have the opportunity to live out again the little joys of my yesterday, those taken for granted, experiences never fully realized until years afterward—oh what a treat!

Had Robert ever really been one to act shyly though? He was never one to not say hello. He loved me from the moment he set those big beautiful blue eyes of his on me, and had said on several occasions to me that he would sell his soul to the devil, but if for only to have a word or two with me.

But of course! Robert couldn’t have been the boy I saw today down by the creek. He had been dead now for ten years.  

            “That’s it?”

            “Ehhh, what?”

            “I know. I thought the same thing.”

            “Oh yea, so like, what’s the same thing?”

            “Why does the journal suddenly stop?”

            “Oh yea, right.”

            “I couldn’t figure it out either. I’ve reread this thing a hundred times. Why end a journal entry one could already dub as beyond peculiar, in such an abrupt, unusual manner?”

            “We are certain this is from some old woman’s personal journal right? That it’s not some form of abstract fiction?”

            “Professor?”

            “Perish Gerard. Let’s put it this way—if it is some new form of modernist fiction, I’m neither hip nor privy to the types of literary devices our ghost writer is using.”

            “Like, what is a ghostwriter anyway? I thought it was someone who took someone else’s ideas and worded them well and got paid for it or something.”

            “Dammit Gerard! He means ghost writer—two words. He means he has no idea who wrote this thing, and neither do I for that matter. I also haven’t a clue as to why he or she chose to end his or her journal this way, and I have no idea what to make of all the other whacked out shit going on. Feeling young? Seeing kids on bikes in vintage suits? I mean seriously, what the fuck!?”

            I had managed to go unnoticed for some time, my silence unquestioned by friends, which was good for me, as I was incapacitated, the mind soaked in booze, my speech bound to sound drawl. I must say though, the journal did captivate me, was to me uncanny, and did lead me to places here on earth and to those imaginative parts of the brain I had prior to this night regarded as long since deactivated. I felt the handwriting of the original journal entry come back into focus, however my wet brain, unable to mentally zoom in on the date before noticed at the upper right hand corner of the original’s body, instead searched for and strung together words in the phrase of a question.

            “May I see the original?”

            My friend went into his pocket, pulling out the document and forking it over, it now becoming my job to unfold and decode the nature and message of our mystery ghost writer.

            “I know this handwriting. I can feel it in my blood, this knowing. It’s dated Thursday, March 8, 2012. You were at the library yesterday?”

            “Yep.”

            “So the journal was presumably written on the same day you were there, which was in fact the same day you found this sheet of paper—yesterday, correct?”

            “Yep.”

            The words that came to mind thereafter were to the brain shuffled and presented in question form, and yet, upon the mouth choosing to open for communicative purpose, the quivering vocal chords, much to my bewilderment, now presented those very same words as an undeniable statement of truth. 

            “My grandma wrote this journal.”—brows furrowing, expressions of the room changing, as I continued.  “We recently discovered she kept one for the better part of her life, all the while without us knowing it. She passed away last Friday and was laid down to rest on Monday, god rest her beautiful soul. You were all at the wake last Saturday, remember?”

            “Ohhhh yea.”

            “But if she had already passed prior to the letter having been written…”

            “I know.”

            “And the library—who brought the letter over to the library?”

            “No one, I mean well, she—my grandma did. She was writing it there. She always went to the library—we thought, to read—but clearly it was also a place that she went to do her daily journal writing.”

            “No one was in the room with me when I was there.”

            “Okay, assuming all of this were possible—your sweet, little Grandma having written a journal postmortem—what about the ending? Why does it suddenly end like that?”

             “Ehhh, well maybe she didn’t know she was dead yet.”

            My brain to this day still has trouble with the full scope of implication necessitating from Gerard’s statement of profundity.

            If the story here ends once the author knows she is no longer living, once she understands she can no longer be, here—I’m left to consider the ones like Robert, those that never got it—and wonder, will they ever?

            As I reflect, I choose now to think of my grandma in this way, as young and innocent and happy and free from all the pains and loneliness that come with old age; in a world not found here on earth, in a place that offers to her the familiarity and joys of her youth, in a sphere that soothes the soul, in a land where the uncanny are wholly pleasant.

Store Away

There’s a shed I know
In the winter stands alone
Holds the things that no one knows
Though outside the green still grows—
It’s my mind and mine alone
In this shed that stands alone
Where inside I store and hide
The parts of me that have died—
The bad and the good
Under the hood
That once were
But never should

Transparency

I have a friend that hides his fears,
Pops his pills,
And loves his dear—
Part of me is jealousy,
To see a them where we should be,
The other half is as if a stranger at the windowsill,
Watching a lie from afar and knowing it’d kill
Me slowly over time,
You, each and every time,
You did not get the full of me,
Which is something I give to you so easily—
Ones and threes abound,
But I know the two of us are bound
To end up as one,
In time just like the
Sun eventually sets,
Which for now allows for me to rest,
To be hopeful
And to feel so blessed.
 

Conviction

I need to write,
It’s how I fight
Through dark to see the bright,
And let my light shine finest,
But there’s more to it than that,
And more to me than you,
So when you came into my life
I knew for certain this openness
Was my blissfulness,
And in spite of fear, anxiety
Over losing you my dear,
I never second guessed myself along the way,
And so let me say to you, respond to your question,
By clearing the air, and saying to you I’ll never go there ever again,
Won’t scare you, now or forever ever again,
So when I took myself off that media,
I closed the book for you to my encyclopedia,
Because I knew that you’d browse and allow for
Yourself to wonder aloud inside your mind
What kind of guy, is this man that I love,
How could he put me through this
If I really am his angel from above,
And the truth is I can’t.
I need to write, for me,
But as you know, there’s more to me than myself,
And that’s you—
As for either part,
There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do

Heart's Desire

We answer to right and wrong,
Don’t you long for that familiar, phosphorescent, full moon light?
Does fearful, frightful dazzle still behold and frazzle you
Before the boldness of our bright?
Truth, ruthless is this disease,
Love panacea surmounts, revels in the fight,
Fearless, feathered glittered splendor,
Bending brightness to bat down bitterness of
Falsehood beaten, to the brink of no return,
Bank steep, black hole of dead sea leagues deep,
Tumble over edge of fear of banishment fear,
Release from your cackles she, woman, of blackened callous heart,
Burn through shackles, shored, bright, artful true, so that we may start anew.  

Pain in the Closet

I don’t speak true to you out of fear,
If the wet balcony could hear, had ears
And heard the splat of lateral flattened flesh,
A crime scene tape job, robbing you, unfit for your two eyes—
It’s a risk, to hide this hurt from you,
I admit, it’s a risk to be so untrue,
To protect you from the pain that you are do.
Colliding with the ground emotional pound,
Departure from the sky, I fall so many times
Then climb back up.
The wear and tear of weary war torn worry heart,
Mind and body part with soul,
Droll disaster humor type does mold,
Welding hell-bound hurt to heaven’s structure,
The swell ruptures and concerns,
There is cause for pause.
Is there room for fern or ficus
In this space? will I give it room
To breathe or say a waste?
I’d like to think I’ll never put you on trial
However trying these times are,
I’d like for you to never see my pain if but only from afar.  
 

From Above

So many little clouds of truth pass,
Your mind through mine, mine through yours,
As they always do—drops form, it rains, giving life to a dried up plain.
Renewal, the golden rule of preservation.
The darkest, blackest cloud now hangs,
Neither yours nor mine, yet somehow it is ours,
To share, to bear, to weather, to wear.
In the thinnest air, breath opens, the senses attune to fated song.
Bodies dance, some free, some fight.
The night we first met, I fought fate back down, intending to put out,
To drown, with fiery, emblazoned ax swings of ferocity,  
Now I fight only for us to be free.
Let it rain.

Pristine Woman

A knob turn, slight creak,
Left to wonder what his little hands can do,
Why he should only be so lucky as to knock upon her door,
Walk with her inside—
Frame strong, delicateness hanging, one of those peaceful wreaths, a welcoming floor mat, inviting—
The golden ratio of strength to fearful beauty, unsure surety, deliberate, polished, refined,
A child’s heart in search of adulthood love of life and self, from within the daily tussle, the Transgressions of others messing with her mind, the grind and weight of the world pressing,
Her fortitude prevailing
Her soul wailing,
His wonderment waiting
In the wings,
On the wings
Of angels,
She,
Pristine woman,
Beaten, broken down by darkened forces passing through,
Perceptible,
To heaven and
Hell,
Fell down with the rise of heated flame
Torch in the wrong hand,
Disbandment in her breast,
Cleaving conviction in the still beating part of her chest
She chose to walk away—
So has stayed with her, this fiery truth,
This devilish risk,
This wishy-washy whisk,
Turmoil and
Blood boil
At her every turn—that if tempted, men will burn bonfires to combat
The flickering candle of her hopeful goodness,
That which stands to consume,
Pristine woman,
Built back up again,
Renewed and true to her as she is,
As it should be.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

A Take on Modern Consumption

Collide off the mountain
Collide off the mountain
Fountain of truth
Waiting
In the wind praying
The fall slaying
Uncouth demons lurking in the dark
Blotting out the spark of youth,
Innocence is bliss,
This is what we live,
Ruthful world
Ruled by the night unbeknownst to natural light
Day curled up
Inside the bellies of men taking, taken
Brethren of the same origin
Guilty of different sins we make our own
He who hath reaped
Has shone blood red brightness,
The eyes kindle,
Nature changes,
Grace dwindles
In the face of likeness newfound lightness
Free to feel nothing,
Zombies to the well,
A newly inborn pull born out of wrongful repetition spread out over time,
Natural instinct overcome by greed,
Processing speed of righteousness stricken
Little more left than an empty bucket
Loosely tied to the slack, knotted threadbare line of lineage faintly traceable,
Similitude in kind deflecting
Fracturing raw emotion
Reflecting back a frozen over ocean of truth, cracking
Our lives, what we have become
Fueled by the hunger
Fueled by the hunger.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Connection and Fight


You whispered life to me,
Life are we,
Shoulders round with comfort,
Hand in hand,
Lip-locked lovers
Eye to eye
We look out for teardrops,
If only to wipe away,
Warming up with surprise, to one another
In day and night,
A natural flow of
Sun up, sun down,
And like a jigsaw archipelago for children
Fragmented and scattered,
The waves of soul carry us
Back to a place of connection and connecting along every side of ground thought gone
So that it is clear to the both of us we will not come undone,
You and I, we are the mainland
Born out of the same sky that holds the moon and holds the sun,
Both fearing sea surrounding we, and that is one
We will fight side by side,
No different from anything else,
In that we will forever together weather and wear,
Warm up and care,
Love and look out for one another.