Sorry's all Over

"Time... Time to live again, yes?"

It didn't even serve as a question anymore, since the answer is known, and has been known. Every time it came about again: now was the time to live, to exit dreamland, to walk amongst the living and above the dead. Our faces are no more, no, but one unified construct, and our voices no longer a chorus, but a single one. And together our foots fall as one. It always came at the end, as I realized it. I would be walking and conversing with everyone, each unique face of my own accord; their mouths moving, and I unaware of the strings at my fingers.

Are we naturally so small in each others presence? Our minds so separate? I remember calling out to you in my dream, did no prayers reach you?

No, the walls here are nothing but air, wide-open air stretching for miles, across continents, across light-years; it exists within myself. I sit and nothing comes of it, same as if I had worked, or if I had dreamed, thought, wept. Inside of that, the death of all of my passion, and it's residual emotions null. Thus, we only feel a need to wander and find a loophole inside of ourselves, feel the urge to dig into our minds and find what we're missing in our consciousness. Do I mean to improve myself?

Improve, as if I was meant for anything more?

Split; I'll stay as such.

Who is Who

"To exist within myself, and to be anyone but myself?"

The sun came over the same hills as the moon did, and both shined down on us. Somewhere, someone walked back in a house, a child on the street, or the playground, lost in the woods for the first time, instincts kicking in and everything else matting so much less than it ever has. I remember, the same as you, and everyone else will remember: when we are threatened, everything stops mattering. Philosophy, your God or gods, the clothes you paid for, the normality of your life. The second it all is about to go away, it is already away.

Do we trifle within our own desires? Or is the devil a child and us ants in the sun?

There was a fireplace, fire roasting softly. The crackling being the only sound in the house, some one scribbling in the corner: there was a Bible in those pieces of symbols and letters and words, religion in the boys eyes. It's the same thing that's within all of us to some degree; we want to see ourselves in each other. It's why we share, why we unite, why we rejoice and why we live for those close to us. He looked up, eyes cracked open, raw, tears almost.

The thought that weighed down on me was that I could never escape my own mind. It was a prison that was life, or everything. The walls and the doors around them all were all the same. I would interact and soon find myself silent, only speaking back in my mind, and eventually the words of other just illusions in my mind, possible futures. I had stopped writing my Bible. No, I had never started writing it. The fireplace was silent, the day still alive, music filling the room.

I looked down and asked myself which I was in.

To work for nothing, and end a day somewhere, but always the same place: unconscious, and bound to forget everything and everyone that you will know for the lifetime that is your dream. There was little else to think about: scenarios, different ways that the past might have turned out, adding in too many details to count, and then trying to figure out where your next story is gonna go, even if it's against the rules of the game. I scribbled it all down in my copy of Welcome to the Monkey House, after re-reading the first half, once I had finished the last.

It was one of those days where the clouds loom in and around the city, and the fog is thick enough to lose track of all the distant buildings clustered outside of your window, off and away, but not too far away to feel as though it's not connected to you. The world was gray, and everyone in it, in limbo.

We try to stray away from our own missteps in life, and try not to think about those which shake us feverishly and unrelentlously, but they're either masked with some stupid and semi-cheerful thought, or just sitting there, unused, but not forgotten. That is, when we aren't dwelling on them strictly, knowing what the thought would do to us, but feasting as though it actually seems appetizing. The last five hours of my life has been the latter, so from experience, I can tell you that it's not appetizing.

In fact, it's nauseous. But when your mind has to be dwelling on something, it's better to eat what you fear the most than to starve and lose what you have left of yourself.

Maybe later, and this is hope, human, human hope, but maybe later the thought will be dismissed, and my mind free to wander in the world again; able to rebuild sanity inside of the infinite of limbo: the infinite of today.

Steps Towards Standing Up

The life crept back out, leaving a husk.

Last night I watched the stars fade back into space; I felt empty for the first time in awhile, similar pains coming back slowly. The wind came, but I was aware of it, as with the small sounds of humanity reminding me that I could never escape it's embrace. What was I so destined for? That's what I felt like asking every incarnation of human imagination: what was I destined for? Tragedy or greed? A story, or was I nothing but a brick of a building lost in a city, slowly crumbling away into the obscurity that we all begin from. I felt like the latter, to only know a piece of what could be, but quickly cast aside. I detached my emotions from it and just stared at the sky and the water.

The wind blew cold, but I was aware of it as it slowly took the heat from me, leaving me nothing left but thoughts trickling into my mind.

The exact detail of my emotional stability, or the state thereof, meant nothing; I knew that, I have always known that, a carefully guarded secret. The absurdity of my own meaninglessness made me want to sigh. I stared forward and tried to organize it, tried to justify, and then demolish my thoughts and opinions. I was sitting there doing nothing to anything. It made me shrink, and I felt nothing from myself. It made me shiver, but I continued down until my face stopped making any remarks on it. Eventually I was there to the point where I could comprehend how nothing mattered, and I stared back, forward, into space and the waters reflection of that.

The idea that I was a hangman's past, or that all I had leaving me, eventually felt like nothing, and I was numb. The wind was no longer there either, and eventually the sky and water left me, leaving me with endlessness: vastness. I sighed because I knew it was only a second, and in the sigh emotion breathed back into me.

I already had told you that I hated it, but complaining doesn't do anything more than show care in that case.

But I did feel broken, and without direction, because I had forgotten how to read a compass.

You in Mock-Joy

Perhaps; or maybe a man standing out over the water staring back at you. (Was he waving? Eyes flourishing in the sun, but the sky is so pale blue and the sun loses it's sheen until it's nothing more than white, white, and more white timidly fading into space.)

I waved back anyway, that's what I'm trying to say, that I was at least willing to listen to the idea. And Why not, if everything in pursuit of still had the same goal ahead of it. The idea was to let your passivity take you to where it wanted you to go, to be completely engulfed with it, and therefore, continuously surprised. Do we wade then? And am I nothing but the movement of an image in rippled water? (There was something underneath it all and each question that came to mind made it ring; a low, deep ring that sent shivers down my spine. The coolness of the earth, or the air around a moving car at night- they all seemed to.. correct.)

And I could think of nothing else to do; we said no word to each other, but we stared for a little while. The wind rang in my ear, sweeping out from the softness that surrounded us. There was this air of mutual understanding for a second before my back was turned.

So I whistled out into the afternoon: (A little tune I heard on the radio calling out to me.)

Spades underneath the River

There's nothing anymore, every thought, every feeling expanded into the furthest reaches of a mind until there's no corner that hasn't been lit up, no crack that hasn't been swept clean, and no open spaces for the dance. It was a game that killed itself, grown out of control with nothing left in it. It was a night without a moon, everything was black and pure black and we were in it, sitting there with the lights out, with the television off, the only light a red light on my stereo telling us all it was off. It reflected in our glasses as we looked in the middle of our circle, at what? Nothing, because that's all there was. It sat there in the middle of the room, mid-air, more than just black, but nothing. We looked in and lost ourselves as we tried to comprehend this impossibility. It ate away at us. The nothingness was an orb, or a circle, or a point in the air where everything just stopped and melted away until it just wasn't there anymore. Looking at it there was nothing behind it, but if you went around it you'd find the other side of the room, and then the side you were on a second ago missing. But it was all that we had left, this nothingness, everything else had left and disappeared from our lives leaving us with no where to turn to but the ultimate disbanding of our own identities. It wasn't easier, it just seemed natural. It was a stranger that was put into the world knowing that feeling made no difference, and that all things pass into this state, this nothingness. Do we look forward to it? Ignore it, or erase it? We were afraid to unplug the stereo because that light was saving us. Without it, we'd have nothing, but can't the same be said for any man?

Do we have to worry about the disappointing idea of being less than those humans who came before us?

And a mind just a mirror reflecting back at you, telling you nothing that you don't already know. That's what it is, a barrier into the future, or the now, that you can't enter. It tells you that, as a human, you have to live in the past; as a slowly living object, you have no right to the now, and therefore no right to the future through the understanding of now. (Is this why empires fall? Or tribes disbanded, militias exhausted, and history repeated?) A dream just a passing fog, and reality the reflection of the sun in some ones side-view mirror; words that come and go meaning nothing but trying to tell you of what's there and what it means. It blinds you, you're blinded, unable to see and stumbling in the daylight trying to find, to find what? A thought thrown on the ground, or inspiration in the leaves of a tree? Is reality too much!? Are dreams a coercion of reality, or reality of dreams? Both the same thing trying to wrestle over a soul and getting no where. (Underneath the sun but tired of living, we shrink from the idea of building temples out of sand and try to sleep, yes, forever underneath the dirt.) To exist in between, and threaten no one.

It was as if You were There

I was stuck in the mindset of misunderstanding you, or maybe myself even. Just continuously feeling one thing and trying to make something else out of it; it led me no where. Or let me down, at least let me go. It was the shaking in knowing that you didn't know what you wanted and that you couldn't see five feet in front of you. Blinded by something, characteristics stopped mattering and we all ended up only sitting around each other.

It was just this general pessimism about life and humanity that really caused it to occur; there was no other reason, and literally no reason, aside from this deep-rooted disposition towards doubt rather than hope. It worked better in real life, to constantly doubt, always ready and prepared, never crushed by some one.

As people, we tend to look down at the ground and watch where our feet take us. (But how much do we get out of the sight if we never look up?)

The Night comes into Me

Was there an orchid or was I dead? I was in my bed thinking about that night.

The wind came in at my feet, my eyes drifting into the sky as the sun faded behind our apartment. The sky.. It was a tan mist until you saw some pale blue behind them, hardly there. The wind was cold, and I was in a robe so that my feet and legs could feel it. I looked to my left as two college kids got out of their car, cherry-faced and grinning. Their feet stumbled on the ground wrapped up in China's finest rubber and leather. It was always like that, some bro's coming back from a party, or a get together, or alone with each other, mindless with nothing but ego's. I starred at them walk by and shout in the air, disturbing it and everything; the leaves shook and I thought about the entity of their wake. Nothing was quiet with them, and they needed the world looking. It was theirs, after all, all theirs.

A lit cigarette was in the ashtray and who was I kidding. I sat down and watched the colors fade until they were a deep purple and black. The street lights glowed golden in the streets, and I was floating above their platform of golden mist. The cars raced by on the road and their sounds came at me life waves far off, just zooming on by. It was a nice scene, I felt as if I could have seen nothing greater than this tremendous sea of black and purple bearing down on a world made of darkness and golden lights. Or maybe that and the mixture of Portishead. The place began to stink with cloves.

I went back inside and laid down staring at the ceiling, my thoughts so involved that they didn't really matter. The lines began moving a little and a sighed as I let myself go into my head. I closed my eyes. Thoughts coming and going; every face that I knew swarming into a hive of bees, dancing, singing some decreped lullaby. I felt suffocated but I didn't know by what; my arms and my legs? The weight of gravity? Chains that go further like my consumption, my id, my superego, all useless and constantly at war over nothing. Relation, people related to each other by these bonds that disolve away for so many reasons, and the minds, constantly swinging from one to another. Are we just nodes in the wire of humanity? Like little bundles of spikes on a barbed wire fence, only more connected, disgusting, an entire pile of barbed wire that will never be untied and untangled.

I opened my eyes and I was in the same place as before.

Movement, it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.

The next morning I walked in the footsteps of a younger me, around the age of nine, peering at the edge of the pool. There was a reflection there and tht reflection could be anything, could do anything. I threw a rock in and disturbed it, but I thought for a second, as it splashed into the water; I wasn't sure, but I thought that I saw an orchid blooming in the corner of my eye. Just a flash of dull red, surrounded by all this foliage. It was the first time that I felt as if I were just a character in the dream of my life passing away. I felt transparent, but beautiful. The beauty if I get to experience you again for another life.

Sitting Down in a Yellow House Made of Nothing

He does not ask when, but who? And why ask when you're standing in front of me with nothing to you? (A figment of your own thoughts, like the mist of a persons breath during winter: fading away.)

I look down into the pond trying to see enough to make me fall in for eternity, but all I'm beginning to see is fragments of my own face being ripped apart and the water ripples; will leaves not stop falling? It's the time of the season I tell myself, it's normal, that time again when the wind comes and blows you down, or the lightning to scare you away, or the storms to shatter and maim. My hands on the ground trying to feel the novelty; I am nothing but an addict to life, forever in the process of desensitization. All people fall down, we all fall down, each a game within ourselves in a constant struggle of wits. You see, he hears, she smells, I feel, we taste; our sense leave us eventually and we're only thoughts floating in nothing, or spacemen in the sea, foreigners in our own crusade.

It's vital, to loathe existence every once in awhile, or to remember that jaded is a temporary mind set, or that hallucinations are just as real as your objective hallucinations. Autumn coming and we're all falling into it. The wind combs our hair and there are smiling teeth in the woods or children in masks and horror movies selling out. Tonight a wired mind will wander down the road and see God in the sky, or the devil in a church, or his death in a glass of water, and life within the sand on a beach. Rationality will go with it and we'll all fall down.

Half past ten and still threading needles; the future times coming upon us no matter how many times we try to cut the string. (Return in our heads to the 60's or the 40's and finding them gone from out minds, lacerations in our minds pulling our personalities apart.) Suddenly tart, a tear here or there for the flavor and that passes over; we'll hug and grin and love and smile, and the sun will set, and that passes over. We'll dive into our minds and find us, who we are and who we'll always be, decided then, and that passes over.

Infinity is constantly over. We all fall down.

Today I looked in the rain for something that could tell me where I was. The lightning kept coming down, lighting each drop so that the light brimmed through it like cold, blue steel, or a star lost in the clouds. The air metallic, and you somewhere in the darkness of the forest, and I at the crossroad trying to wrestle a demon to the ground without realizing it. I try to see but maybe I'm the blind one, or the blind one that at least knows he's blind on some level. I could feel myself fall down but there's no ground anymore.

Times and how They're Loaned

I had been mistaken all of my life. It started out kind of as a joke; I was young and didn't know any better, still believed that there was a truth underneath every layer of questions. I saw no end. I would go out and run in the woods with a mission in my life, with a serious expression, keen eyes forward and cutting through the fog until I got closer and closer to where I needed to be. Leaves passed by, ferns that crept into your eyes; the palm trees would hang over you as the wind would lift their spirits every time they dropped down too far.

I was young; that was the point. The mirror showed me a face that I couldn't recognize that was only beginning to grow hair, and my eyes seemed to show everyone else that had entered my head. I ask myself if it was real or just a dream but no one tells me the truth because they don't know, but want to know. We're all thirsty for it as power changes in life. Even then, although I didn't know it, it was still the main idea; I'd grip through it, my teeth clenched, sweaty-eyed and squinted, staring out through glass and wishing it were gone, getting rid of it, getting rid of everything and trying to change in any way.

When we grow older do we only lose ourselves in a world without boundaries?

When we grow older do are friends tend to fall down on their knees so hard, wrapped up in chains and unable to stand again? I don't think that I'll ever understand; maybe I'm naïve to being an adult. I still feel smaller than everyone, not that it matters.

Everything will feel perfect when you can see it all fall apart in my mind. Maybe that's a prediction, it probably is, every future tense ends up being a prediction eventually. I can't see but I know that he's crying right now. Is that what matters?

When some one falls in their life, and everyone is around to hear it, do they hear it?

Systems aren't Made of Bricks

Are you broken or something?

Words don't matter at that point, when everything is just sands through a sifter; searching for some sort of gold in between the rubbish. No one tries and no one cares because the idea of power overwhelms them- they need to transcend and force it until their ego is convulsing on the floor, choking on its own vomit. Somebody got hurt in the process and everyone walked around, looks on their faces matching up with the way the stars are set up. (But they moved, there, don't you get it? Instilled their own meaning in order to create some circular logic. It's methods of control and all

all we care about is) power, running down a persons spine- it makes them want it more and more because it's just like everything else humans touch. We were spongey and no one cared. You were crying and no one cared. You were secretly doubting yourself, surrounding yourself with the ideals you thought you knew and the ideas you thought were correct and an arrogance that rang further than the sky- and no one cared, because we don't care, not when we can, never when we can. Humans and skillets in the ground (both trying to make their own worth and being used by people every day to their own ends.)

You don't seem to get the relationship that's surrounded us like a wall of air. There's nothing left but bone and you don't want to keep digging because of the taste of marrow. There's no use trying to build everything back up because it's blown away-where there's nothing left.

We satisfy ourselves like that. Bitting our tails; are we nothing but felines on catnip? Or dogs, high off of their own obedience and misunderstanding of the world? No matter how hard you try to take a step you can't make it fast, and you end up in the same place.

Lying in your bed unconscious, stuck in your own dreams that you like to think is reality.

Each awakening a death.

(I'm trying to tell you that I miss you and that my thoughts are in the oven and boiling over.)

Clouds Like Batteries

The night was electric and I had been on the grid for too long. I felt wired and falling to pieces underneath it all, as if the only things keeping me up and standing was some deranged power. I thought that I knew that nothing mattered and that everything mattered completely in comparison to that; I thought that I knew paradoxes and reality and the shifting that was my eternal self. Knowledge, and the nothing-wrong! Cleaved from an apple in Spring! Left to rot, decompose, mold then moss than dirt!

I shuddered. The idea that every idea in my mind was only a dying breath, or the idea that I had always been wrong and learned nothing substantial, it shook me to my core. A small tremor that ran down all of my bones, making me feel as if I was constantly at the edge of something. I had always thought that being close to the edge meant that I would dive off the edge and fall into something great, new, grand and all. The truth hit me in my bed. I laid there wide awake looking up at my white ceiling surrounded by white walls.

I've been half asleep, pretending to exist, lying at the edge of this cliff and going no where. I was afraid of thought, of looking over the cliff and finding a ground a few inches from there, or a foot.

A desert with a white sky. I closed my eyes and will clouds to come, willed coldness, willed discomfort. My skin had goosebumps. I willed lightning, it came about in flashes. I willed a stomach ache and I groaned. It was the way it had always been.

Strung out from nothing, thinking I have it bad, not able to escape the confines of my own mind.

there was a mild cloud.

Rain was coming, the wind slowly walking over the hills and fields. We waited.

No one came but there was an uproar anyway, sifting through nothing; did you think that there would be a diamond in between the mud? Or gold lost in the ragweeds? The mud and the waste, our blood and lives. There are suppose to be teeth hidden in the shade of the mountain. I thought that I saw a man walking around the rocks and the waste, let me tell you:

The sky was white and gray, blinding almost. Where had the birds gone? Or the crickets? Only there was silence, and him, a long beard and long hair, looking forward lost on the edge of the scene. The rocks were brown but the color had drained from my face leaving everything some shade of gray. I thought about coughing but held it in; he would look at me and see, see through me, see a heart and lungs shifting fast, see a stomach in the process of boiling over. Fright and conquest-thrills in the end. We were brothers. He heard my mind, turned his head.

His eyes were white and the sky, the sky looked at me. I blinked.

"No one heard you coming." He walked off a cliff, but by then the sound had all drained from it too. I stared forward into the void which is God, the void which is the source of everything that flows through me. A tear, or a rip. I tried to tell it that I shouldn't be looking at it, or tried to tell myself. I put my hand in front of me, or towards the void, reaching out or dashing blinding light away.

"Counterintuitive. Stop shaking me, God damn it, stop reaching so far underneath and knowing nothing that once was!" Time came out and shook me. Everything was once and at once. "I'm coming, I promise."

I was almost there.

16.12.5.19.5

"And what's a memoir? A compilation of the pointlessness of your life? The importance of nothingness?" Head cocked as if he knew anything. I subdued; head bent down and looking at my feet on the ground. I felt as though I had been walking for too long without looking forward. Everyone's head craned. And to what?

When I was young it mattered less. I was mad, insane, and disillusioned about reality, but it didn't matter as much. Starved, misunderstood, picked upon, and mildly lonely, but

it didn't matter as much.

We were all little piece of food on the board table. Older kids were hands, teachers mouths. The president was God, but none of us cared about him. We were all hypocrites was the thing. One time during recess I stood on the field looking down in the grass at the entire word there was. Dreaming. Waking up. falling back to sleep and dreaming again. I couldn't escape creating standards. If I ignored them awake I'd unconsciously set them in my dreams.

Dreaming of escape from every facet or reality. The sky went first, blue ripped away to reveal the entire celestial system before my eyes. Masses of stars, gasses, suns, ringed planets, grappling as time flew by. Each shutter of my eye lashes the life time of eternity. And infinity in a second.

I couldn't curse. I was chained. But it didn't matter. God existed and I could talk to him, but I became friends with Lucifer first.

That part of my life has no words to accompany it but strong trust. I'm sorry but my tongue is bitten. Speech crippled. There's nothing else left. I would have answered, I promise I would have answered. I sat down ready to take it out but I fell back into it. It swallowed me whole, and I was surrounded by it; the thought and pure conscious perception.

It was important; I bit my tongue many times, scratched my knees and elbows, wore black socks and let my mom comb my hair. My shorts were high, my shirt tucked in. It was important, but it didn't matter as much then.

How could I take it seriously? I wasn't suppose to survive.

I was meant to be ageless; I was meant to wake up early.

no Surprises in birthdays

It's been hanging on the wall again, two eyes just shining there in the fog like cold, sapphire skulls. No one ever took it down because the consequences of forgetting were the loss of an entire world, every world that has ever been. I heard some one say that it's a snake by now. Is that true? Are there fangs in place of teeth? Dear?

"The end is coming, isn't it?" Says the prophet. He's been trying to retire; no one listens, and the book is skewed from madness. I watched him sit there for awhile and I knew that he had lost himself in his mind again. I could almost see the torrent of thought envelope him like the waves did Atlantis. Lost forever, just bubbles coming up in between murky water and salty froth.

"No end, no end, no end." He told me once that the problem with reality is that there are no definite endings. Everything is only half of an end, some sort of awkward mix between seeming to end and having no real resolution to every thought. Looking back, I don't think he ever told me, but I know for a fact that he had thought about telling me using those words. His thoughts were sketched on the wall. I could see them coming towards me like car lights down a road. A warning or a hello or a goodbye, depending on your situation.

It's happened before. Glitches almost. I don't know what to do, no one ever knows because there's no answer. The older you get the more you know about there being no answers, at least not one. It's all freeform.

He's getting tired. I can see it in his eyes. They stare forward but they're stuck in his head. I feel helpless. Tonight I plan on tearing every mask on the wall down. I plan on taking them off in his sleep and burning them all, then throwing salt on them. Demons from the past and all. The last thing he said to me meant nothing.

His words, they're all shells. He's trying to build a beach and he knows it's bullshit.

i Love you

"I've been tired of your idea to be vague about everything." That was true and I couldn't deny that, could I? He shook his head.

"I mean, you've been stuck in this abstraction of-what? Your soul? Completely unable to get to the root of anything without it coming out as a blurry image. But your mind isn't refined to the same limitations that your eyes are! Look out at the world! It's red and scarlet and orange coming down on us. That's not JUST a color, it's the emotion, don't you get that? That's hope. That's revenge. It's passion in it's utmost form. It's not just an abstraction, God damn it."

He was right, he was always right like that, but I'm a thinker and I can't do anything about it. I'm going to be lazy and fall into laziness, I'm going to move on from one passion to another, from one idea to the next, too quickly to do anything with the last idea. Everything I do will be a half-finished project, and I'm aware of that.

Tonight's season might be a change for something more intentional. Maybe it's just not having the right words to convey the meanings of the right ideas, but I think that, if it isn't that, I'm just falling, as if I've tripped over a root in the woods like I did in eleventh grade. Only this time I haven't been running as fast as I could, but I wish that I was. I'm tired of this feeling of base neutrality; I want to speed up, hit the ground hard if I can, just get so wrapped up in something that everything else just becomes a blur of an image as I race by in whatever I'm in. Like looking at the dashboard in a speeding car. I just don't care anymore. Abstraction or clarification; the point is null and void either way, and no one cares in the end still. People don't stay into things, they all move on, and that's my point if there is one.

I'm not the only one who leaves everything half-finished. We're all ADD like that, we're all just more intense or calmer versions of each other racing by and flinging our interests at whatever catches our eyes.

Maybe that's why I'm falling. I throw my interest at difference, or throw it at conformity. The world's full of ideas, concrete things: emulations, originals, novelties, and me.

You Don't Plant Trees in Parking Lots

They fell like wine lovers from the treetops in autumn, bright red and flaming yellow, as if something had spit up mucus from it's lungs. It was beautiful, so crisp and dry that my teeth bit into it with a crunch, and my breath came out of the ordeal smelling of mint and willow bark. The use was something akin to the nature of the woods itself; I ran through her, my hands far from shy, until I explored everything there was: every rock, log, tree, leaf, branch, turned around several times. I fell into the cracks in the sticks on the ground, you see. There was infinity in them, endless cities of oak with pebbles of people darting around in them from one home to another, saying hello and waving to each other with face brimming over the top.

Some one told me that every now and then you forget who you are and where you are, and everything that lies behind you is the only thing you see ahead. You stop, and all thats left in your soul is the desire to stare out and let everything fade back into nothingness. It's the nature of things. When I was younger I could feel the wind and breath in it, let it fill my lungs; it empowered me, the wind did. These days I can only see the wind, and feel it a little bit when it's strong, but I don't exist in it in the same way that I used to. Eventually, or so my brother said, I won't even be able to see the wind anymore. Everything will just move of it's own power and will, and my world will be filled with everything dancing and twitching.

The truth is that we don't know what to think eventually, and we get caught up in this cycle of pushing ourselves to think how we used to, and so we slowly die, having already ventured that thought process, and never grow, having bonded ourselves to that one and only thoughts process. It's the desire to hold on, this illusion of worth and meaning. The truth after this, in order to save a life, is that nothing matters, and everything is the past means nothing. The only real representation of the past is memory, and anything beyond is not an easier way to remember the past, but an easier and more effective way to tie down the you that is growing to the past you, which never stays the same, and only slowly decays into the nothing that is was before.

Tonight the sky reaches up with God's hands, spilling over with a chalky cyan, and splashing into brilliant white, where the sun beams through wisps of clouds. It doesn't look like dusk is coming, it looks like a dawn of a new day. And the truth is, that means nothing. It's beauty, and that's sufficient; isn't it?

Nitch Nitch Nitch-Noo

New. It was new, wasn't it? It came out over the sky, another day, another time, but it was new nevertheless. New in the sense that no one had remembered seeing it, other than the world. I figured that it would creep about on the floor of our kitchens at night, just out of reach, just out of sight, underneath the refrigerator where none of us ever cleaned. We were afraid of going there, to look at what we had been for all these years, afraid of the effort, afraid of looking at it and having to acknowledge it. So there it sat and would sit. What is wrong with humanity? To look out into the world for every fix for their interior problems? To avoid at all costs that things that made them feel as though they'd vomit up their heart, still beating. I was tired of it, everyone was, but day after day of straying away from it, it grew, larger, more sinister, more dreadful, until it had become part of us, had taken over. It crept along the ridges of the tile floor, moss, fungus, something we would never have seen coming, now upon us, now in our air, now in our lungs, heart, and mind.

Sitting, waiting, creeping. That wasn't what was new, it was the same old.

Fuck everybody. His words rushed to my mind first off, and I thought that I understood in a way, but I knew that my comprehension was different than his in the end. He was a cold winter and alcohol, and I was a hot summer night and a lit joint. We were two different spectrums completely, but I felt as though we were still part of the same thing. I looked down at my feet, toes in the sand, the sun was hot that day but the wind was cool and crisp because autumn was coming. I knew what that meant. Every night would be black skies and the street lights would look more orange than golden. I would be able to dress in clothes that suited me better. It was good.

It was good because I was already becoming the wind again. A smile, or a face, teeth and eyes and lips all in their different ways, likes your reflected in my eyes. That made me happy, you knew, that's all there was too it. Maybe it was enough. The floor of my apartment was white but covered over with blankets; I'd step on them at night when no one was around to see, sit on them and fall into the void, then recreate myself one piece at a time. It wasn't complete change, just control, creativity. I wanted to be something new unto myself. That was the idea was all.

It was the autumn that made me want to clean underneath the refrigerator. It took a day and, in the end, didn't matter and wasn't as bad as I thought. The thing is to not trick yourself into being afraid. It's life and life only.

Time and Time Again

"I no longer shine."

"You're a star." -The husk, unused shell, shadows cast forth. The night sky without heirloom, or the wedding dress without scales, or the brow without a furrow, crease; what's the use? To some, sand in a clay jar, alone in the desert, the sky a mirror of the ground, equal and opposite, giving nothing. It's a money changer that only takes, a king with high taxes; the world, being a cage, trapping you inside of it and never letting go. This gravity, fingers around my ankles, the endless blue sky, the window in a prison showing only a little of what really is. The ground might as well be cracked concrete, caked with the skin of every human being who has tread it's surface looking up at night and almost falling into the infinity of darkness. It's nights like that that take away all hope in humanity. Dreamers; you gotta join the cause, they're a dying race and all.

We're all getting caught up in the objectivity of religion, of drugs, of commitment, of sensualism. We're forgetting the infinity of our lives, the slowly passing time, and it's endlessness. We forgot our snakes and our tongues, we forgot the way the light reflected off of each others eyes. Creases in the hands, a texture like a pillow case made with Jersey threads. It's lost, maybe that's not so bad. Life sometimes is like a firefly, off and on all the time, lighting up in different places. You can't see where it goes when it's gone, but once it's back you know where you are. Shadows still play off the light- what's it matter? A second, a minute, wasted to ruin everything?

"Do things happen for a reason?" -No, they don't. "Then what's the point?" -Choice. It makes no difference, or all of it, whatever. Ashes to ashes and all.

Sleep well.

The Velvet Underground and Talking to Tristan

I felt the evening rise, you know. It was something that just came out of me, spilled from my eyes that night. And there it was, the clouds lighter than the dark sky behind them, passing over what stars there were like ripples or waves. I had been growing tired; the way my skin crawled until I couldn't feel my own eyes, the way I saw you in every person with a nice skirt on, the direction of the wind being inexistent. Maybe I was just getting homesick, or maybe I was losing my nerve. If it was the second, then it would have been the first time in a long time. I sighed, I felt like I wanted my soul to just charge out of me, out and away from my heart so that I would stop feeling everything slip from underneath my feet. What was it anyway?

The death of my old life and my relation to all my old friends.

It was the first time that I felt surrounded by people who were so much more experienced at life and mature than I. Maybe I couldn't handle it, maybe I could just no longer bear to tell myself that the world will keep spinning on, or that I had a hundred years to do all that I wanted to do, or that all the pain I felt would be nothing but a sliver of a vague memory in my near future. I felt like a corpse shoved up against a corner of a bare room with nothing but my own mind to confront and fall in love with. Something that I could never grow into, or change to, or improve myself to. I didn't want to just sit and learn nothing, I didn't want to be content with only myself. The walls around me all felt as if they held nothing. The reason I cried was because I knew that I should be able to put meaning into them, to change their color with my mind, to smile at myself and know that it would all be alright because it's infinite, but the most sinister thing that I knew, that was keeping me from being myself, was the idea that I was wrong and had always been wrong. That I had just been tricking myself into thinking that I was beautiful enough to smile at the idea that the future is whatever I make it to be.

Maybe I knew what was inside of me, eating me alive like this, and just wasn't willing to speak about it to anyone yet.

I sighed again. I vowed from that point on to try to work out more often, eat less, and look at the sky as if it were the person that I wanted to fall in love with again. Kiss the wind as it breezed by me, hug the ground for supporting me. I had never been too great at vows, but even if I followed it a little I'd feel better, I thought. It's just hard when you can look back and know exactly what you missed and what slipped from between your fingers as you grabbed the life that you lived.

Sniffless, Silent and Solemn

"I'm sorry, but I don't know where I've been or where the time's gone to."

Everyone was wrapped up in their own plastic coating; they were sitting where their eyes couldn't shine on each other so no one could see the dark colors rise up over them like water from the deepest part of the ocean. We were letting the time slip by even though it came in waves upon waves; flashes of post cards from the times in our lives just playing like a reel in a movie theater, flipping so fast that we couldn't see the nothing in between each moment of time anymore. I was sweltering in the midday sun, the cars were zipping by, and in each one each person driving was so caught up in their own world that they didn't know that I existed. Hell, for all I knew I could just be a split second of an image in their entire world, nothing more than an abstract, unconscious, visual blur of their life. Or I could be their husband, or their arch nemesis. We were all just possibilities of relations to each other. I felt like a kid.

My eyes were still opened wide, looking at a world and wanting to see beauty that shook the sky and kissed the sun and fell in love with the earth and the water and the wind, but taking in all of the human greed and misfortune that they had never though of. We were all children constantly struggling to stay children, and the adults were constantly trying to steal it from us. It made me think about who was the first adult and why they would want to be one; the first person to want something more than childhood? All gore and all, swearing and adults killing each other, children with old faces spitting on the ground and people in jobs fantasizing about rape all day; it's so much and it tears away at the spine and makes you into something new, something that looks out with lazy eyes and speaks with a dry tongue. My idea was that I'd try to escape it all.

But to be honest, not everyone turns into an adult. The wind and sun and water and trees all escape it every day. I thought what I'd do was I'd become a deaf mute; I'd just turn away from the images of those future days and recreate them into something new, take apart the puzzle and put the piece all in the wrong order so that you wouldn't even be able to tell what the original picture used to be. It'd just be a mess of color that way, a mess of color that you'd have to piece apart yourself, look for a new image, something with a smile on it, or maybe a frown, or a hand to the sky, outside of a moving car and sound waves washing over it. So maybe when we look behind and see all the cars moving with us in our direction, we'd stop by and really join them, link hands across the pavement and we move forward. The sky might shatter, and the trees all get up and move, and it might look like a mess of color, but at least there won't be Armageddon on the horizon of the sky we look at.

No.

There'd be the rest of us, endlessly youthful, constantly dying, and unanimously conscious.

Static in The Background

"Everything ends."

I knew it, everyone knew it deep down. Maybe they denied themselves, or maybe their naivete persuaded them that they could fight off death with their passion, but deep down, underneath all that emotion, was the demise of themselves, and the end of every beginning of their life. I knew that each end was a beginning or something else, but that would end too, and in the end, if it ever really came, we'd all go out like a gunshot in the dark. We wouldn't know if another round went off after us, we'd be over, and that would be all that mattered for the rest of infinity to us.

I didn't know what we were trying to do. In the end our words would fall on the ground, would be dirtied up by someone, forgotten by most, written on toilet paper as a cute little saying, and misunderstood by the masses. It happened to Nietzsche, and it'll happen to me, and you. I've gotten into the habit of seeing hope and knowing it only as a temporary fix, a fix to cover up the idea that the end can be something positive. And I suppose it can if you're having a terrible time on the ride. Some people do want to die, simply to have life stop beating them into the ground. But for most of us that wish to continue living, who enjoy it, death is our enemy. I looked down.

I was just being melodramatic, I thought. The sun would keep on rising. And who knows, maybe the bastards who have that amount of passion can really keep on pushing themselves into the future like that. Maybe what they said was true, when one life ends another begins. It didn't start as a thought on death, so much as an end to anything. An end to a period, an end to a friendship, an end to a class, or a meal, or a first experience; an end to your first time, laid to waste with the idiotic of your lover and your teenage feelings. Tomorrow you'll look back on it and weep that it ended, weep that you'll never again be able to experience it for the first time. You'll sob over that moron you used to be, that being that you think you're greater than. You'll, quite frankly, look down on the grave of your former self and wish that you would have followed him there, or raise him from the dead and resume his path.

But, for the time being, thoughts like that should stay as they usually are. Fractions of indiscernible noise in the back of your mind: never ending, and rarely defining themselves.

Sunshine in the Sprinklers

Today Spring woke up again, maybe Summer; they look alike but when you look in their eyes you can see the difference. (Towards the pupil, where the iris either changes yellow or stays green, that's how.) The morning came back around, but I missed it. The sun still kissed me on the cheek when I woke up, and I thought about it, felt it's warmth, and the coldness of the shadows in my room, underneath the blankets. Just cooler. It's unnatural. I'm stuck, locked away behind too many walls, and we all are, and we know it. The worst part is that most of us are completely content with that, though, isn't it? So, today was for walking back out into the woods and getting away from the mosquitoes and taking a nap underneath the sun and the green shade. I heard it far off; it should have come months ago but I suppose everything was running behind anyway.

We've been crossing the breeze, but we haven't gotten to know it. And what's crossing anything without diving into and knowing what you're missing, understanding the feeling that you're skipping over so that you know for sure whether or not you want to skip it? I was tired of staying on the roads and just zooming by, and why should I be excited about it? I wanted to lose myself in the woods completely, somewhere where the sun shines down between the trees and where puddles form when the rain comes down, like sprinklers from the skies. God always had a way with making things more grand than a snakes head in the earth shooting out water. I'd sit there and watch the entire day pass before me, do nothing, think nothing, eat and drink nothing, just so that I could understand how slow or fast time went. I'd know for at least a year, completely comprehend the passage of time and how I flow through it like salmon through the river. I'd go with the flow and against the flow depending on my mood.

But don't we all?

The sun came bitterly over the sky, the ground was heating up, sand dunes falling into salty water, dark but with bright, white, foamy crests like mountain peaks in the north; I'd miss it all in the future when all I'd have is the sky to tell me where the water is. Then I'd have to try harder to center myself an touch the spirit of the earth. I'd be further away, covered up by all this flesh and spirit clashing together. I felt like leaving; the door slammed on my way out and the heat crashed into my face-warm and thick like hot, humid jelly. Lately there have been cats in the woods, they look like the trees even though they're orange with dots all over them. I knew why, but it was still strange and perplexing- you can't much get rid of that feeling. I sighed.

Lately there had just been nothing around but the way the sky looks and the air around me, telling me about the absurdity of my soul. Was I suppose to have peaks of passion and such complete losses of inspiration and thought? Maybe my life was just as boring and plain as water; nice, but very typical for out planet. And then I needed the right conditions, when the light was coming down just so through the rain from the sprinklers as to make a rainbow. That's what I needed, and maybe that's why I was scrambling so much about the world around me.

It defined me just as much as I defined it.

Sorry to Flowers

Things have slowly touched my mind. They turned it around, didn't they? When was the last time I had a conversation with myself, or looked at just a piece of me? My mouth with words; always silent because they're affixed to my mind and the tracks that run down my spine. I'd look outside and the wind was green and the plants were purple and I felt as though the sun would set soon, die out in a carriage of bursting flames that just spread their arms over the sky and engulfed us all slowly and bitterly with some sort of desire for both revenge and love. Jealousy, and the world was filled with it all, we were up to our necks in it. I felt like an image on the screen; I'd want to bring you flowers and grab your hand and show you a dream in my head- walk across the water to an island no one but me has seen. It'd be perfect there and the waves would wash away our footprints in the sand. Wouldn't it?

It was just that it was reminding me of so many things that had passed before my eyes. Nothing was like the screen and all those plays that wrecked out before everyone else; it was boring and lame and filled with nonsense and intense detail that no one would want to see, but it slipped passed my nose so quickly and my eyes pick up all the pieces faster than I thought my mind could comprehend. I saw it in flashes, instances; it all went by so slowly, but that was my life and it meant everything to me. All the nonsense and all the lameness and desire for everything to be strewn before my fingertips- it was all that I had ever been and that little, that nothingness, really, was the world to me. I grabbed at it with my fingers and watched it melt through me. It wasn't sad, it was there, just not now, but then. Everything was then. Now is then, even, and I can't stop now from becoming then because every time I try to keep now now, my efforts follow now into the then.

The truth is that I'm stuck, hung up, wanting to experience it all again for the first time without forgetting that I've already done that.

You brought that to me- thank you, and you as well, all of you. You're like the Bodhisattva's of my life, beautiful in your idiocy and delightful in your intelligence . You show me who I am and take away the pieces of who I used to be and sculpt my around your fingers until I'm tangled up inside of who you are too, and we're all stuck together from now until forever whether we like it or not. It's not that it ever ends, it just levels out.

I fell down to the ground. The sky looks so beautiful in the morning. I wanted to call you dear, and call the rest of your my brothers and sisters, to look at you and live with you and drink and smoke and cry and love with you. My tongue kept flickering but no matter what came from it, it all didn't matter, it was all so much less than what I wanted, but I smiled anyway, if not for finding the words, then for not being content with the words that I found.

So I smiled.

I loved you all, and I love you still.

You: Shattered Like a Robin on the Street

The stars are in the ceiling; they sparkle when the lights go out. My life hasn't changed, but I feel like it should have. Tonight I'll go outside and watch the lights turn off in the houses across the lake behind my house. They'll dim out one by one until it's night and the only light to breath on will be the moon and my lamp. The crickets are out, mating, singing in the air with an annoying, droning voice. Every night they do this, it's their thing, their cycle, their life. Mine is mine to take and keep. It sits in my palm, legs folded, eyes closed, nostrils flaring slightly at each short and swift intake of air, and exhalation of breath.

We all repeat these steps, sitting here in our foggy homes. I'll drink ice water and let it crunch in my teeth. Maybe I'll see a swallow in the tree, cardinal in the glade, blue jay in the air blending into the sky. They'll all fall down one day and won't get up. When birds die, do they just fall from the sky? Do they die in mid-flight?

I'm not trying to sound so sad, I'm just wondering. Every thing's absurd. The light coming off the lake in rays of gold, against the black water as it dances in the wind. Rays of gold just buzzing around at my feet as I walk up to the edge of the water. One time some one asked what it all meant and the wind answered him back with a hollow breath.

Or maybe another person told him the answer. Maybe Buddha in nirvana, or the worm in the dirt. Dust and all. I don't understand it much anymore I suppose, but it didn't matter. I kept watching until my eyes saw nothing but dust in the air, swept up, straight into the sky. I had no words anymore, they fell out of my soul into some hole somewhere deep inside of me. I tried to speak, but there was nothing to say because it was all the same noise in different ways, forms, shapes. I didn't have any ideas; I won't lie, it was frightening. I was a stone sitting there sucking up the world, a mountain Bodhisattva. I'd sit here forever and watch this one place change in the wind. A bird in the air; it flew underneath some power lines, metal hooks hanging off from the wires. Perch up there and cocking their beaks.

One had gleaming eyes, fire in the street light surrounded by black. I was tired of seeing birds. Too small, too light, all free.

One time I walked by a storm drain and saw him in there, face down in grief and trying to act as if he still had anything in him. He was proud in the most annoying way, but I knew that he wasn't born in there. He fell in, in fact, he stepped in, knowingly. He might have lied to himself and told himself differently, maybe he saw something shiny at the end. His face construed with jealousy and an injured pride; that's the worst, isn't it? I supposed it wasn't worth it. If I didn't pity him so, I would have spit on him as I walked by, but what's a good shepherd to do?

Play rebound and suck it up? He'd get over it eventually anyway.

I was tired and I had nothing more; water in the sun just being soaked up by the sky. We spend our time rolling our tongues and thoughts on and on from one subject to the next without explanation; it comes out like a shattered vase made of rainbow dirt and grime, blood behind the background, spit, ash, dead skin cells in a mattress. I hope you understand. We've been pounding dirt into the ground, waving bones in the air like weapons, but who are we kidding? Does the sky shiver with fear at us? Or the ground, the water, the fire coming upon us from the dunes of the desert? No. It stands there staring, waiting forever, shifting slowly around us and we take no notice. Too busy busting each other in the ass, bashing each others heads, taking money from the hands of the poor and all. The truth is that I've settled down.

The truth is jaded and all; brittle but still somewhat smooth.

Just a Sleepy Head

I sit here, and what? The whispers of my thoughts from a year ago still ringing in my ear like a series of gunshots left behind the morning after firing some rounds off. I feel as though I have nothing, limited, move my arms but there's not much room to move around in. I've lain down in every way that I think I possibly can. I guess I just have to think of some new positions or break down the walls around my so that I can go into these forms that I can only dream of being in. I dunno. The walls have your name written on it; I don't think that I can really get away from it at this point but it's not bad, it's not like it's something that rooted deep inside of me, and that's what makes me most glad I think. That is, that when I think about you, it's not some sort of sick, obsession of future idea, but simply your nature, your being that moves through space and time with a smile or a frown, but always sucking up everything around you and knowing. You know. That's what it is, I assumed.

You're like a lotus in my mind, floating on the pond of my mind right next to the lilies of my joys and the weeds of my sins.

Luckily it never stops. I went from something limp to something that went frigid in water, sputtering forward like a snake in a spring, some jack-in-the-box like toy for a child. I didn't know where I was anymore, I never did, I never know anything! All I can see is the silly little turns and twists of relationships becoming tatters of cloth that tear more and more in the wind of our lives; I hope that it'll end soon. I'm tired of seeing nothing but the sand and dust that comes up from all of our storms put together. I think that's why I like you the most, you haven't ever made any of that dust that I see near the horizon, smog over the city. When I'm in your world the sky is blue all the way down.

I yawned. I had been listening to too much music that went over and over again, "We cry aloooooooonnnnnneeee, we cry alone, we cry alone, we cry alone," But it's also only Noise, after all. I laughed, lay back in my bed and put my head on the pillow with my eyes closed. I knew that the visions before sleep would be coming soon. My logic would slip away into absurdity, and I'd catch it a few times and laugh at the impracticality of my mind, but eventually I would stop noticing that it wasn't real. In fact, it would be real. My mind would once again become my world. I yawned again hoping I'd have a dream with you in it. With everyone in it.

It never ends.

Slight Change of Rain

You were a face, mossy underneath some branches on top of a tree trunk, near the ground. I dunno, I had no idea anymore. I sat down on a cushion of green and yellow leaves and tried to feel the wind around my skin; I wasn't sure but I thought that I was on to something, getting close to something, finding something that would finally reach down past my skin and muscle and touch the marrow in my bone, touch my body to the core, but something so much more. I wanted to find something that could reach into my mind and touch my phantom as it shuffles away at the sight of something else so close to it. I wanted to be brought to the point where I could look at a white wall and watch it explode into some new reality that I could put down on several white walls and make a life from it, a life from telling people what was inside of my mind. I hadn't written in several days, I wasn't sure how long but it had felt like a long time. I wanted to, I just didn't have the right words to say it. Every now and then I realize that everything I say falls short of what it's suppose to describe. Every single character an atom of what it's building, if an atom. Every time that happens I can't live with writing, the paragraphs go on forever, and I lose the feeling. I can't feel long enough, everything is slow. I looked up at the sky through the leaves; some clouds were passing by like icebergs in the Caribbean ocean.

I was depressing myself.

I toyed with some sticks, breaking some, flicking leaves with smaller, more flexible ones. I was sweating; it was ten and the sun was beginning to make it's climb into the sky. I felt incomplete and as if what I was missing, that bubble inside of me, was filled with smoke that clouded everything I felt until it was just a shrug. I was becoming something different in a chilling way, in the fact that my heart was beginning to get used to it. Get used to falling into my reality in the morning, and falling out at night. I was used to living. I could see every turn and know how to react with the least amount of effort. But what was worst was that I was becoming numb. My mind was alright; I wanted that I thought. My emotions were stable, in fact, I had mostly been happy, and only sad for other people; I thought I wanted that too. I began to pick all the white or near white leaves off of the ground and pile them up next to the mossy tree. They'd be a small community of pearls surrounded by green hills. I felt stupid and got up.

Since when was it about being smart? Or cool? Graceful, polite, and gentle?

I thought about people, human beings, naked human beings in a square building.. We're such awkward creatures, the way we look and act, the sounds we make, our faces and how many ways they can move and what emotions are in their wrinkles and eyes. In that setting no one is better than anyone else. It's like Bob Dylan said, even the president is sometimes naked, and it just shows you how everyone, at their base level as an animal, without the fright of their suits and jewelry, is just as much as everyone else. I shook my head; I was tired of it all and I felt as though I would spill out again, look down and see some tangled wire of a mind bent and shoved into the dirt. I hated it! I shook my head harder and started to run, just trying to run until my heart beat drowned out my thoughts. It reminded me of when I had several thoughts, reminded me of when I would see things behind everything, mix up what was real and what was not real, reminded me of when I would have to drown out so much more. I felt as though, as I ran, I pulled a string attached to a balloon that held it all, and it was constantly trying to pull me up into the clouds where I'd be forever foggy and lost within it's white walls. All I had to do was run against it, but every second I ran in the world I lived in, it filled up with all my thoughts and feelings and memories and mistakes, becoming larger and harder to pull against.

The trees passed over my head; green webs of leaves and branches becoming blurs against the blue sky. Some Spanish moss hung down every now and then, and sometimes billows of Resurrection fern passed in front of me as I floated higher into the tree line. I hoped that I would get tangled up in some nonsense, get stuck and fasted into their embrace so that I could stay at least some what grounded. Maybe some one else would have to catch me on the way, and maybe our combined effort could get us back down to the ground, where were could dig underground, then seal ourselves there and let those balloons fill until we had to walk on the ceiling. I felt a wheeze and stopped running to catch my breath. My heart screamed into the innards of my ears, just loud thud after loud thud.

I looked up coughing. The sun was there, over on top of this palm tree who's head had fallen off, so it was just a wooden spire reaching up into the sky. I wanted to call and ask if I ran towards that, would it pop my balloon?

Never Winter During Summer (But Sometimes Autumn.)

During the fire kids ran around in the street. I thought it was bizarre at the time, it just seemed as if they were desensitized to the world around them, to the lives that were being ruined. Opiated from such thoughts, they ran around laughing in the orange light of the fire as it consumed another house on the street. Maybe they just didn't know anything else, were still too innocent to understand things like materialism and money. To them, all there was was their bodies and their minds and their friends and the world around them, which no one owned, and everyone owned. Collective. I wish that adults could think like that, sometimes, could just let the house burn, be happy that they were alive, and then everyone would help build them a new home with everything around them. Instead they gathered around looking at their lives (the timber and plastic and silicon and metal of their lives,) burn down, back into the ashes that they were born as, back into the ashes that we all our at the very end. And maybe that's why they couldn't be children. Children knew that it was all in vain and knew that it held all the meaning in the world. But adults, seeing those ashes, they thought of their own death, and of the objective meaningless of their lives.

Maybe I was something in between an adult and a kid. I sat there and watched. Our house had already burned down. The things that I rescued was a copy of the documents of my computer, all my papers, my first blanket, and my laptop. Everything else burned down, I suppose. At that point I wondered if my parents had insurance for this kinda stuff. My logic presumed they didn't, but my hope presumed they did. I presumed it didn't matter and that we'd probably survive either way. We had our cars, at least. They were black with the ashes of my parents lives.

I wasn't sure what made me think about that. Summer was almost over, but it was the prime of summer in my eyes. Past all the rain, into the deep, blue skies and bright days with white clouds. It was ideal in that way, one of the few things that are simply ideal, ideal outside of the imagination. Too many things were only ideal in peoples heads. Sometimes gray would roll in from the sea but mostly we'd just swelter in the sun, boil underneath it and sweat until we were just rags lying around on the street, unsure of where to turn or where to go or what to do but talk and eat and talk and eat and then fall asleep someplace. We'd talk until our tongues ran out of our mouths, until our minds were sucked dry of any and all ideas that they could possibly be filled with. The air felt like dust, and everyone had a dream of getting in a car and losing themselves somewhere up north, sleeping on floors and run down motels and in the car parked some place that was going to be conspicuous. Or hopping a train and riding out West with loose change in our pockets to be spent on a candy bar. 

God damn it, I remember the sun would come across the sky with the clouds behind it, just tracing lines over my head, falling behind like leaves in the wind behind a car. Where did that go to? Why is it that every time I look above me everything is the same and never moves, just changing slowly and I can't even look at the changes happen anymore, they just happen behind my back and stand still when I take a look. I can't even shake hands with myself anymore, it's all been washed away in the sea again, washed away by time, but who am I kidding? Who have I ever been kidding? Our mouths move but the words that come out are just ashes on top of ashes. Words and materials and music and paintings and ashes and ashes and ashes.

Time doesn't change or heal anything, only people; people forget and move on.

We never went on that train, it just passed on by. We never took the car out either, it all got totaled, money was too tight, we were all chained down, becoming adults. What happened? I still felt like a kid and that was it, too small, so small, so weak and squished in between all the layers of space and mass that make up the world around me. It squeezes my eyes until they split and the juices of my mind spill out on the floor. Maybe I'm just tired of being an open book, or feeling as if I'm being forced to open up, forced by some power that surrounds me at all times. I had a cup of water, my stomach felt like it was about to explode, I was a fly trapped in a jar and I could have gotten out but I was only being teased. I'm always being teased like that.

Dear Time

Is the sky any other color but blue, navy blue, clouds drifting over, slate and granite rocks that moans as they move over head, shaking the earth with the sound of their voice? Was the grass any greener after the rain came down, dried up mostly leaving the ground wet with it's footprint? I felt as though I was losing it again to the sky, that it was being lifted up and away from my fingers, slipping out of them even as I kept floating higher and higher into the blue, slate sky. The house was white on the outside, run down with the wood dim brown underneath the paint as it flaked off, lost in the grass and the dirt around it. Everything around it circled, too. Somewhere there was a sun behind those clouds, behind the house so that the light came out in rays behind the clouds, in a way that the clouds around the house were lighter. I felt as though I was looking at the reflection of it all in my pupils, but the mirror in front of my face was broken, as if some one had taken a rock and thrown it dead center, shattering everything and leaving only the reflection of my thoughts in my pupils. The air smelled like mint, and the wind was only a breath that scrapped across the grass making it twitch lightly. 

But mostly, everything was silent, waiting for something to happen.

I moved across the ground like a ghost floating, as if I had no feet, put no effort into moving. I looked at the dark wooden door and it came closer and closer to me, like the earth was moving and I staying in the same spot in space. The hallway (dark and filled with end tables supporting small statues, some darker than others, faces distorted and growing long, or small, perfect, almost, with gentle features,) then the living room. The window took up almost an entire wall, so that you could see the grass outside, slightly falling into a forest of oaks and elm trees. A willow tree stood in the yard alone towards the left. Everything just where it should have been. The fan was on and the air was circling around the table, three books sitting next to a small journal. I felt as though it was still empty, empty because I couldn't arrange anything inside of my head, couldn't put it down into the right words yet. I sat down on the couch and picked it up. It felt light and empty, but I didn't open it. The point wasn't to see myself, I knew myself well enough, better than most people know themselves. Maybe there was no purpose, maybe they were just dreams from the past, sitting there in that house collecting dust as the wind died down more and more. The breath of all of my thoughts slowly crumbling like the paint outside. And maybe the wind wasn't a breath.

Maybe it was a sigh.

It should have been, at least. I could feel my feet again, each step; I went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed, face down with half of my face against the blanket. Everything passed over my back, behind my vision, everything that ever happened was behind my vision and all I could do was imagine how it was happening. I knew everything that had ever happened, that would ever happen in my head. Space was like a cream of gasses, white, purple, yellow, thick like water. In real life it wasn't, but in my head it was alive and seemed to move, pass through you. It was old, older than anything. I would float through it, out there in the open, as open as possible. I was afraid of the open but in that dream, I was comfortable. Everything was small, anything that could want me hard, even, were small. Out there in that space, everyone and everything became just as insignificant as everything else. Is it pathetic to find comfort in that meaninglessness? I didn't think so. The space felt like a blanket against my back, and eventually my eyes couldn't open again, eventually I was past it, past that dream, past space and into the limbo of thought and action, where anything that was thought could happen, tottering on the edge of a cliff and ready to fall off, or not ready. It was the point of indecisiveness. 

Lake Summers

The reflection in the water and the way the clouds moved overhead, quickly, scaling the sky like a puff of smoke, it all just culminated, I suppose. I had no other words for it, and that seemed to be happening a lot more lately. The way everything revolved around me seemed to take my breath away at every instance that it could. A drop of rain off of the roof and into the dirt after a short shower, or the wind blowing a palm frawn in the middle of the day, or just some people walking on the side of the road when the heat is coming down, heads looking down and up every now and then; everything struck me in a way that reminded me of the absurdity of life. Camus had already written that story though, so what did I have left to fill in at all? Even if it didn't matter, couldn't some one still ask for the meaning back into it? Maybe, and that was the key word really.

Maybe.

Last night the world rushed by. The sky was dark and the clouds just covered up any stars that might have shone that evening. So all there was was the darkness of the sky and the light that reflected off of it. Amber, dark amber, though, light sometimes and even a little bit purple. All the colors came together in a strange way that made it feel as if I wasn't just in the backseat of a car looking out the window, fireflies of orange light passing by over my head; streetlights. No, it felt like a dream. I put my head back and the moon was covered slightly behind the clouds. No stars next to it, but the trees passed by in front of the moon, blotches of black capillaries, veins, branches in front of it like big, black masses. And what was I to do in that instance? I felt as if my life was just a dream again, my vision the camera. I was used to the feeling but, still, every time it came back around I was still alienated completely from myself, disassociation, depersonalization; it wasn't terrible. No. To be honest I felt as if I was just where I was suppose to be, the only place that I could logically be, in fact. And knowing that I was suppose to be there warmed me. Yes, the only place that I could have been and the only place my feet would have taken me.

Patterns and all that. It'd all reflect in lines of light against the metal gleaming off of the buildings. Was this it all just fast forward to the center? I had always hoped that the tape of my life would always play, though. But oh well. The glass was mostly blue but in one of them, the golden sun reflecting like some ones spirit flying out of their eyes, gold and burning with passion. I scratched at the stubble on my frown feeling lost in an empire of working humans, lost in one of their tunnels. Then I smiled; no one knew! No one in the world knew what exactly was happening here but me! I the only one who could actually feel everything that was defining this moment in the infinite loop of time. It melted in the back of my mind as I stood there, trying to decide whether or not I could walk up and ask where the printing room was. (Something beat through the air, through me, between the gap in my heart beat. It rang with a low and slow pulse, a bass note in the very back of my soul.) 

Sunday morning, steamy out of the cup and light falling in through the windows in rays of white, white purity. And nothing was making a sound, sleeping in on another lazy day, trying to keep ahold of their dreams with the tips of their fingers. That's what I had been looking for: something small and concrete to put some gross amount of meaning in instead of everything that was vague. Maybe that was it.

Morning was coming, and hopefully everything would be on time.

Eyes Like the Rising Sun

The sun rose that morning and it was as if the sky just took a breath out for once, minty green as if some one had just brushed their teeth. Only it was that kind of wind that blows in after the rain had set in, in the morning, rushing in with the dew and the clouds as they all retreat further on into the horizon, past the milky twilight. Nothing went to plan any day that it was, whether or not the morning sky was red or yellow or orange or blue, it always turned out the same. My eyes opened up just like any day, and I rolled off of my bed onto the floor feeling like a newborn baby rushing out onto the floor and into reality. Everything was back and it was the same old dream I always dreamed when I was awake. Five in the morning and wondering whether or not I should go back to bed, get those few extra hours in until it turns into several, until it's 12 or 1 in the afternoon. That was the plan, that was always the plan, but it didn't turn out that way. I felt as though there was dew outside of my window, hovering over the forest, like a cloud that I could touch and swim in for myself. The forest was calling out every name on the face of the earth but no one was listening. We were all sleeping. I was sleeping. You were sleeping.

How would we find anyone if we were all so opiated?

Looks didn't matter and neither did deoderant so I just put on a shirt and some pants and boots. Every now and then you wake up like the wind and you just want to rush out there into the sky as much as possible by running as much as possible until you start to lift into the sky. Maybe that would happen. When I took a step outside I felt like everything in my life came down to maybe's, and whether or not that would change depended on small weights that effected the entire system of gears or pulleys, some sort of mechanical image, any, really. but just small fractions of weights, hardly enough to change that maybe into action, but just so. I looked up at the sky (pasty gray and somewhat dark blue and stuck inside of a misty cloud walking into the forest,) and realized that so much action has been due to inaction. I sighed and ran through the forest once I reached the trail.

Green, red, and blue, just like that, one two three whenever the urge comes up. And why not? I think too many people chain themselves in the idea that they can't do something. Chains made of excuses, what people would think, how society would react, effort and money. What did it matter? And why should it have to be a forest? Or the morning?

I woke back up onto a beach. The wind stung my face, washing it clean like marble like a cold, metal brush. I didn't know, my eyes were heavy and I felt like I was asleep. Would you come up in the tide? I feel like, if you did, it'd be something better than driftwood, some secret treasure that's been underneath the dark water for years, decades, centuries. But not something ridiculous and obnoxious, something simple and nice. Something that you could look at and put a life to it. I've always wanted to do that.

One day I'll go on a road trip with everyone and write a story for each barn or tractor or broken-down vehicle I see. They'll all be about people being people with mild emotions. Maybe one person will be bipolar. Another will lose his head. Maybe even one will have multiple personalities, but probably not.

One day I'll wake up from this, right? Not that I want to or need to. I like it here. The wind always blows in. You can watch it sweep in from the sea. Slow and beautiful like dew.

Title Title

The tree in the back of your house.. I'm not sure, I've been thinking about it lately is all. One time I woke up; it was morning, but it didn't matter what time it was. It was one of those days where the sky was just all white and gray, like a solid gradient from one end to the other, stuck with neutrals and completely colorless. Every now and then, when the wind blew hard enough, a rush of rain would come down. It wasn't sad, and I know it'll sound sad coming from me, but it was as if the sky was trying to keep itself from crying and the wind was that whisper in it's mind telling it to let go of any restraint, to just experience the emotion fully. But I promise it wasn't sad; it was beautiful. Maybe all of my romantic ideas are misplaced these days, attached to the earth and it's seasons and tides. I sat down on the ground and it was wet but what did it matter? When the rain came down I would close my eyes and breath in the air.

It was cool, and the rain on my tongue was so fresh and pure.

But after every gust of rain, everything would glow. The green greener, alive, almost. It shimmered in the white light and it was as if the entire world before my eyes glows with a fogginess that enveloped me. The leaves sparkled like emeralds and jade, if those stones had any spirit in them. I closed my eyes for a little bit trying to lose my mind, throw it away into the darkness of the backs of my eye lids so that I could find it again and be reborn in this place. Another gust of rain came by as I fell into the shadows of my mind. After it stopped, I could distinctly feel the droplets evaporate off of me slowly, leaving a cold finger print of moisture where they used to be holding me. When I opened my eyes the sky was bright white and the tree in your backyard glistening as if it were you coming out of the shower. For the first time I felt completely made new, even if I was the same as before. Just as if the same me had walked out of one place and walked into another place, another birth.

You knocked on the sliding glass door and when I turned around you just shook your head. It's as if you know everything, but you'd hate that. You'd rather I know everything.

But I'm smart enough to know that if you have as much curiosity as me then you still have so much to learn.

Nothing

"Hey."

"Hey."

"Are you alright?"

"No. Heh, I'm not alright. At all."

"What's wrong?"

"I'm never alright. I'm always on the verge of something but I never take off-"

"Li-"

"It's because I'm afraid. I've always been afraid. Afraid to show everything that's inside of me, afraid that I might show something that's not even real. Once it gets down to the point where you're questioning your own memories for validity.. I don't know."

"Can you just tell me what's wrong?"

"What's wrong is that I've the same place that I was four years ago, walking through these woods feeling completely sorry for myself and on the verge of crying, but not, because some one might see and I'm afraid that they'll see how I'm feeling. That's why I always tell you I'm alright, I'm afraid that you'll see. I don't want anyone to see, I have this sick fixation with everyone thinking that I'm something mighty. I enjoy to be the one people go to, at least some people. I have this obsession with being the level headed one that can always help. If I ever tell you I'm not alright then.. I don't know. It's trust, it's all about trust, and I don't trust easily. I don't even know how I can be the level headed one, I'm so all over the place with my emotions. That's why people love me, because I try, but I'm never alright, there's always something underneath my skin, or my bones, or my organs, eating away at any happiness there is. It's because no one knows, no one knows anything, the humiliating truth. We're all hopeless, I think.

"The thing is that I'm just a kid trying to be an adult and I feel as though I missed my chance to be a kid. Don't feel bad though, you can't make a time machine for me."

You and Your Tongues

How many times do you have to look up to the sky and give her a smile then a kiss to start to realize that every inch you take in this ride is another second from the life you could have had? Does it even bother you or reach your senses that everything has just been lost in every second? All the possibilities that exist, have ever existed, or will ever exist, forgotten, trampled over, and murdered by inaction and impossibility. Maybe so, maybe not, I suppose either way the game would have unrolled the way that it did, whichever way that might be.

The last time I saw you I wanted to communicate to you the beauty of your own mind, or of every mind, but not just that, feed your ego almost, see if I could get it up and walking again, even though that seems to end sadly for the most part. (All greedy and greasy by the end of it as if I fed it some shitty hamburger rather than the fine truth.) So what now? Nothing lasted, nothing will last, and I can't help it, but I feel as though you and everyone else and everything else is just a person walking further and further into the horizon until they're just tiny ants on a hill, diving back underneath the dirt and sand and disappearing, as if they were never there to begin with.

I thought that it was time to have a smoke and I didn't even smoke; I would have had to bum a cigarette off of some one, and God knows that would be a lesson of bitchiness for myself. Only women can bum off of people and get away with it; they can pull at their hair and make their eyes shine a if it's nothing. Guys can't do that, so I sat back down into the couch that I was on after getting a refill of coffee. It was terrible. The sun came in through the window and everyone else was just passing me by without a thought on who I was or what I could be, or the thoughts that jumped around in my head. But I wasn't being selfish about it; I do it all the time, even though I try not to most of the time.

I look at all their faces glowing in the sun with sweat and stubble, or old makeup, and I try to think about all the amazing thoughts that must be in their head rolling around with laughter. I can only apply my thoughts into their heads, though, and every time I've ever gone up to some one to ask about it, as rarely as that is, the person has always looked at me like I was some sort of asshole asking to mine the brain cells out of their mind.

These days everyone's defensive; the funny thing is that they actually think it matters.

So I took out a piece of paper and just let it all down, the real nothingness that I was actually thinking about. I mostly think about nothing important, after all, just little segments of visions from a story I have yet to actually create, like some sort of vision into the future of a story, the future of my story; I didn't know, and that didn't matter either. It poured out in groups of words upon words, like bubbles in the surf of the sea that gather around each other as the wave rolls in, and staining the shore.

It was a note to some one, I'd tell you I didn't know who but the real truth was that I knew exactly who it was to, who it should be to, who I wanted it to be to but didn't have enough courage to actually give it to them. I knew that I'd end up keeping it for myself to read, like some prize of cowardice that I could look back on when I'm older and hopefully laugh about because I ended up happy either way. It ended in fake letters, just scribbles.

I looked back up into the cafe and everyone sat there bored on a computer or talking to each other about interesting things, but I knew no one, and all my friends were busy.

I sighed and finished my coffee, then decided to find a secluded spot in the woods some where or walk to the beach to lay down. I decided on the beach; less people bother you there.

Template of a Dark Night

It didn't matter; the wind blew either way, you little whisper of a person past the stones near the streams that ran throughout the mountain. Head resting on clouds and looking up at the stars that regained supremacy in the sky once more, after dragging down the sun giant. I'd watch it dwindle pass from the window of my room. Every time they sank back beneath a wave in the clouds, I'd say a prayer that would never reach them, never reach anyone. And when I was 14, I stopped sending them prayers and wishes every night, and then every week, every month, until now. Eventually the stars fell down forever, and the sun. The only thing that remained was that clouds and a constant maple sky. I believed it was because my wishes stopped holding them up, and I knew it.

So they went by, one, two, three, four. Like dominoes of colors from green to yellow to brown to white. And each time they went by the people would walk out into the day or the night or sometime in between when everything was either white or gray or black, dressed in dresses and suits of red. They'd go out there underneath the sky and look up and sing their prayers into the sky together, hoping to lift the stars back up from beneath the mountains, lift the sun from underneath the still water, and lift the moon out from beside the grass. What I thought it was, was that none of them said anything about anyone else, just about themselves. I sighed and let the world be for once when I was 18.

Became a person and thought more about myself.