The Road Forward

I realize I haven't written anything on here in a while. I suppose that is due to my mind being otherwise occupied. I wrote this today and I could think of no other place to share it.

I’m at that place again. On that corner street underneath the sign that says understanding and acceptance. Another long lost relationship which fell to the side of the road we call love when fear drove it’s street sweeper through our dreams and washed away the hope we used to build that street. Once again standing on this dark corner with nothing but a street light, which I recognize as the future, I currently can’t move towards for the pain of the present whispers deep seeded lies into my mind which paralyzes me. It’s not an unwillingness to walk towards the light which leaves me stranded here but rather a physically impairing lack of certainty. If I walk towards the light on the road to acceptance and leave the rocky asphalt of understanding than I will eventually come to a fork in the road with two paths. To the left is the path I walked when I was a young man. A lonely road known only by the few who have lived there because every house on this sheltered street prevent others from seeing beyond the front yard and into the heart of the homes like the one I used to own. To the right is the road of risk that leads to happiness on easy street. But the road to the right has detours and roundabouts which lead off the main path and into dark corners and alleys with muggers and deviants who threaten us if we dare to continue. Too many times before I have walked nobly down the road to happiness before being deterred by the detours from determination to be sure I wish to walk that familiar path. So again I am at that place, stuck between understanding and acceptance without the certainty to move forward. For now I stare at the simple street light in the future and wonder if it’s not a mirage or some twisted reflection of moon light which only provides false hope of a world I cannot reach.

A Day In the Life

Every morning when I wake up I begin a battle with my alarm clock. I grab the white knight armor crafted from Egyptian cotton sheet metal and try to protect myself from the audio onslaught brought on by hundreds of angry decibel warriors; slumber thirsty battle hardened vocal veterans trying to penetrate my melatonin rivers and destroy the dreams of a utopian civilization that the walls of my eye lids attempt to protect.

Like the great warrior civilizations of the past when confronted by a worthy adversary capable of penetrating the walls of my cerebral slumber party I quickly rise up from my armory and prove that my walls contain a great army of their own. Behind the walls, in my sleep number war room, I initiate an attack strategy that inspires the decibel warriors and turns them into conscious mercenaries of mortal energy which I hire to help me take on the larger territory invading my individual sovereignty, the great tyrannical grandfather clock of the time stealing sun nation who conspires to strip away ownership of time which we value as currency in the land of the living.

Now, together, I reassign the decibel warriors to the marksmen in the twenty fourth vocal archery chord battalion and gather the forces of inspiration from my mental military militia and order them to charge into the fray of the day and attack the sun’s army of time stealing bandits!

The inspiration warriors are immediately met by the cynical criticism of the beaten down forces which the time stealing grandfather clock has brought along as allies in its attempted genocide of a life worth living. The vocal chord archers quickly repel the swift steel of cynicisms swords with a quick volley of witty feathered arrows aimed at the heart of cynicism’s criticism. My inspirational warriors trudge on through the battle of time meeting and defeating all the warriors of the day’s greatest conquered armies. Typically by days end the legions of inspiration have brought folly to such forces as the self-conscious cannibals from past relationships, the cavalry of intimidation riding on steeds of social pressures, the day’s own archery unit comprised of unexpected consequences from former bad decisions, and the occasional volley of unpredictability which the clocks personal attaché of inevitability tries to defeat inspiration with.

But inspiration marches on through all battles and tests of time the day insists our two nations have. With great losses and personal sacrifice, typical of every war, at the end of the day inspiration comes back home. In the recessed stronghold in my mind the forces of inspiration from my mental military militia meet the welcoming warming war weary dreams that only sleep can bring.

Love that lasts a life time.

I am in love with the most amazing person I have ever known. I want to tell you all about her! We just met you see and we are still in the incipient stage of love. You know the type where you sit on the phone all night talking to each other without saying a word, just listening to her breath and wishing you could feel it on your cheek. It’s in those moments of total silence when we are both just enjoying the inner peace that the other persons existence allows us to embrace when I realize, that I absolutely love this girl.

We just met but this love we have is fierce. It’s like that feeling you had on that first day of school when you were wearing all new clothes and shoes with lights on the inside; the ones that would shine every time you took a step in the right direction. This love is like those shoes, I want to wear it around everywhere and proudly show it to my friends. I want to dance in the front of a crowd and let anyone who looks upon me know that I have a love that can be seen for miles. Because this love doesn’t have dim LED lights made in china. This love uses the eternal flame handed down to man from god himself which could blind a small child if that child were unfortunate enough to gaze upon it.

So it's new and young and it needs to be nurtured. I have a lot of people trying to tell me this love can’t exist, that it’s some kind of fairy tale. That if I continue to express my love in this way eventually I will get a baby powdered hand print across my face leaving a shameful reminder of pain that everyone can see. Like I will one day realize that this love is a childish endeavor, a foolish hope, or a dream I can wake up from. Not the actualization of a lifelong denial. The purposeful placement of feelings and ideas that have festered inside growing for years, despite the negativity other people have tried to use to destroy this love. Other people are wrong, this love is no fairy tale, it’s something I choose to make real.

Now me and this girl have only been together a year. So I know you may think I don’t know her as well as I ought to. Or that I somehow am being bamboozled by her beauty, confused by her charm, or tricked by her smile. But I know this girl better than I know myself. This girl has infected my soul and like a symbiotic being has attached itself to the pulse of life that flows through my veins growing stronger through my being alive while also increasing the ability within me to live.

I can't stop thinking about her and the way she makes me feel. She’s like a warm blanket that puts me to sleep at night, and yes sometimes even a violent alarm clock that wakes me up. She walks with me holding my hand, hugs me when I am sad, and knows just what to say when the world becomes too much. If I had known her when I was younger I would be a better man than I am today and having met her when I did I will become a better man every day here after.

While she makes me better suited to face the challenges externally in life she also challenges me to face the internal struggles I have in my mind. This stimulus is sexy. Every time she is playing with the delicate fibers in my brain, tickling and teasing my cerebral cortex and my frontal lobe I can’t help myself. I turn into a Neolithic man and want to drag her into the bedroom by her hair. I don’t care about anything she wears or the way she does her make up the sexiest thing she has ever done was when she decided to challenge me to a romantic conversation of disagreement.

There is only one problem with this girl. She isn’t a girl at all. I can’t hold her in my arms and night watching her eyes softly shut while the moonlight sneaks through the cracks of her old dusty blinds. I can’t take her to a party to meet all my friends and feel like the coolest person in the room for being with her. Nobody I have met knows her as well as I do and I until I meet that one person, nobody ever will. Here’s to that stranger that I don’t know yet, with the mutual friend that with whom we both spend our free time. But of course here’s to the one I love, the idea of love, I drink to your health my dear :-D.

Dreams and hope!

So I keep having these dreams; these fantastic dreams where I am a poet on a grand stage making an audience laugh and cry using nothing but my voice. I love this thought because in these dreams I am one hundred percent exposed and vulnerable. I love this thought because in these dreams I am completely untouchable. I love this thought because in these dreams I am able to be me. But then I wake up to the warm yellow sun pouring through my bland brown curtains and I am back to normal. In these dreams I also am in love with a beautiful woman who inspires me to be a better person. But when I wake up the pillow is the only thing I am lying next to.

I think these are a reflection of hope. I hope to one day be someone who is open, honest, vulnerable, loved, and most of all able to affect other people. I have reverted back to a previous notion of what a man should be over this last year, and I think that while these dreams are a sign of hope of what I will become I also think they are a sign of what I already have become. For one thing, I am far more honest and open now than I ever was in my life previously. I have a capacity for love now that runs deeper than any ocean trench, which burns with more fire than any star in the universe. I am more willing to open up to strangers and trust that they will return my honesty with respect. I have also become quite capable at being myself as of late.

So that means I only have two goals left in my dreams, I hope to be loved and I hope to change the world around me for better. I think I am on the right path for the former. Being able to be honest and open, forthright even, is the first step. I also love myself which is more important than most anyone who falls in love young is willing to admit. But to change the world around me… now that is an adventure! I am envisioning myself as a pirate on the front rails of a ship as it rides over the crests of a wave! Or maybe an astronaut taking the first steps on a distant planet! YES! I love the dreams I am having. I may never end up on the main stage of a poetry tour for writing in verse. I may never change the world and steer it away from the path of evil. But I think with this hopeful dream like state I currently inhabit, I will one day soon be able to affect the world for good :-D.

Confessions of a Cultural Concoction.

I can’t promise that you will grow up to be special. I can’t promise you that you will one day win gold medals. I can’t promise you that when you’re older your country won’t be at war or that you won’t lose your life to a terrorist for I can’t promise anything. I never could. I never can.

But somewhere along the line of time, some time ago, you inherited the idea that there was something about me that owed you. But I have never owed you anything. Because while I am both the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains; I am also the tornado that systematically destroys the security systems in your brains. I am the American dream; and what I’ve become is a lean mean soul crushing machine, you let me.

I was born a construct of symbolism, a set of indiscriminate unintelligible living land marks which you marked with the meaning from your hearts representing the dreams that you had as a young restless child when you just wanted to find a land to let your religion and your people be wild and free. But that is no longer me.

In the last hundred years you bought into me like an Enron stock, thought that I would take you to the top, but you didn’t invest in yourself first. You didn’t invest in the people that can provide you help in the worst conditions. You invested in me like victims of a tornado, reactive to destruction, with fear and no deduction of the problems becoming of your investments production. You invested in the same systems of economic nature that brought slavery, genocide and atomic bombs to Asia; the people who destroyed your dream are the people who you invested in by vesting them with me.

Now as you stand on remains left by the same twister that rolled over your retirement’s home. The destruction has left you alone in an indiscernible pile of indefinite aisles of inoperable rubble. The smoldering remains of an economy that used to have a pulse in its in veins. You look back just barely alive and wonder, “Where did our investment go?”

You realize now among this sundered political sky that if you had invested in yourself than why, at least, you wouldn't be alone; but no. You invested in someone else. Now I am their American dream. Now I am an itemized asset of corporation’s stock portfolios, a globalized gasket spinning with the wheels of big business, and big business doesn’t mask it sitting in on hedge funds conference tables, discussing how they can make money when America fails, they lobbied parties and elected officials who in between their legs tuck tails when discussing big issues. You destroyed me, through your apathetic investment in corporations’ insatiable ingestment of the American dream. Now all that’s left is what you see. Now I am a pipe dream, a pyramid scheme, much like Charlie Sheen. But my goddess is more immoral than a porn star my goddess is the immoral morals of a credit card. I destroyed America simply because you allowed it. So now I can openly shout it, the true American terrorist is a poorly invested American dream.

Winding Roads to Somewhere.

When I was a kid I often allowed myself to contemplate the wonder of the universe. This eccentric fascination, for a child, would be set off by the most peculiar and often benign actions. One distinctly vivid recollection has me sitting next to the seemingly endless wooden fence of my day care center on the plain cracked concrete back porch where I learned the basics of culture and creativity. A girl who was also exploring the mysteries outside the four walls of her crib was combing my hair to “pretty me up” as the care takers passed out our afternoon snack of cookies and milk. While she diligently passed the teeth of her comb through the knots in my hair I was afforded the comfort of inner peace, often overlooked as I have progressed through life. This fleeting moment of clarity had me place myself in the diorama of existence, an unusual place for a child. While I can no longer recall my exact prepubescent positioning system, I am inclined to believe that I placed myself right after dinosaurs and immediately preceding a life of saving others from dragons. Even then I envisioned myself as a hero that others looked up to. Yet, while this internal image of myself as a champion of hopes and dreams persists; I can no longer sit lazily under the sun and ponder the vastness of the universe. I no longer have a desire to understand and interpret the stars like they were a pseudo-angelic Rosetta stone intended only for my understanding of the world. Now the only time I see that same vastness of possibility and hope is when I look into the eyes of a child. Whenever I see a child smile I remember what it was like being in day care with complete understanding that this world is a book written in a language open for interpretation. Life is simply interpreting that book and choosing how we wish to share, or to hoard, its passages. I now want to take the diorama I constructed as a child, from words in the book of life, which has been meticulously crafted through time in the proximity of dragons and present it to others; in my own language, to an eager generation of unidentified flying cerebral missiles. I am ready to walk down the path that I have for so long only passed on my way to the library. I am ready to become a teacher, in some element. However, my story is not complete. I do not know which way the path leads past this point. I understand that I wish to begin a journey towards helping others. Like all great journeys though, mine has yet to divulge its greatest mysteries.

The Swimming Pool

I have a lot of thoughts floating around in my sea of a cerebellum like sharks without prey. These thoughts can at times be prolific, at times be toxic, and are often lost to the lack of expression I have allowed myself to live with. What is perplexing to me is whether my recent lack of expression is the rebound feeling from the environment I left to get here or if it’s the definition of my current cultural reality. Either way, I need to find a new mental challenge before I lose the ability to be challenged.

I have always felt as if a thought without a purpose cannot exist. Without developing a thought through purpose there is no tangible result proving the reality of thought. Furthermore for a person to not allow a thought to have reality denies oneself the proof of existence that comes from the tangible results purposeful thought allows.

Unfortunately it stands to reason that as I continue refusing to apply my thoughts with purpose I mean to allow my existence to absolve itself of reality. The feeling that this realization brings me is not one of great comfort. I feel nothing. I have injected my reality with Botox defiling its ability to show any signs of existence. I am drowning without struggle in a pool filled with others who can’t comprehend my descent, they too are drowning. Sadly these poor souls are face down and swimming towards the reflection of the sun on the smoothed bottom cement content to believe they are struggling towards salvation and not in fact running from the relief they desperately desire.

I refuse to define my success like others at the bottom of that pool. I want to breathe again. Unlike others I don’t think that getting to the bottom having found a few pennies floating in my path is successful. Success is not the accumulation of minor accomplishments like a stock portfolio littered with life’s junk bonds. Success is the ultimate realization of inner peace. We don’t have that; I don’t have that. What we do have is outer peace. We accept this pool we’re swimming in and continue to kick only hoping to move forward. That is our given purpose. We are living in a no splash zone.

I am tired of swimming down. I want to surface and find purpose for my thoughts. Hopefully after I prove my existence I will come back and do a cannonball in the no splash zone, showing others which way to surface.