I hit the ground running
What else was I supposed to do
When I fell
Every thought in me
All that I believed
Said
I should have seen this coming.

But where were you
Who were you
Who was it I thought you would be
What did I expect you to do
Who were you...
Who was this "you" in my memory
A perfect stranger
Or maybe me

What did I expect
Was myself not enough to survive the storm
When I asked you and you held me up
Did I expect that you had some deeper knowledge
-- did you know me
-- did you see me for who I am... not who you thought I should be

Give it up, Ive had enough,
I drink too much to believe in belief
I am my worst enemy above even your worst
Criticality
So take a breath and walk away...
Maybe just let me breathe.

Never knowing just what you have, love
Could have (should've) been us... or maybe just me
But we'll see through tide and shore,
But when we sail in with flags shoal-masted
Even the ITC cant prove anyone living still rides with me.

To recognize our shared demise...
Could we - embitter expectations ?
Are they better than you?
Are they any better than me?

They... need (songs to keep the weary alert at sea)
They need to be better than we.

In all my songs and all my stories
I told the crowd how "she" might end with me
Or maybe end me

But are
These just dreams
That still
Let her hurt me
Do
I will let her hurt me

But no
Whisper you're safe
You own your memr'y,  mind and choice or cost to your faith
Mystical and whimsy
Or are we my enemy
Maybe me

Time is a convenient tragedy
And I play witness to this evening's mystery
Inconvenient but always complicit company.
We were never meant to be

We,
Me.
You.
I... half drunk, half hallucinating, half angry - Who can I blame for not being me?

All the same but I maybe somebody.

We were never meant to be recognizable
never meant to be anybody you can acclaim
on the most current, convenient, complicity capitulated captivation of cognitive, but captured and categorized component of your human experience...

Now I'm
Someone you cant recognize
Me
But now I'm now
Almost 40
And its always just been us.

(I'm 3 years to 41
who should I have become)

And what do I have to show
a body left too long in the undertow
This decomposing
This wreckage left of me

If in the last breaths I breathe
My history comes haunting me
There are 8 women I thought could love me

Yet today I can still recall the first
Her name like silver dripping onto silk
How her voice burned in through memories
And she's still here with me
I rode my bike by your house

And the second, like every second after
I painted you inside my head

The rest of this story, and I am sorry will drive you into a never ending loop of pity and tragedy and only one of us gets out alive...


We'll see if you can find any reference of me in three years.

There is a work of words, clumsily compiled, that I may eventually build with enough confidence to post or at least speak publicly - about my grandmother. She was the last of my grandparents to pass, but not even the last of my parents. We ideologically disagreed virulently... but I am starting to see that maybe my father's legacy of doing good and getting ******* around every corner but persevering anyway... may be a gift from both sides of my family. 93, I think she was 93. Two careers, 3 children, 5 grand children, 2 great grandkids.

It may be that her loss is so recent, or that the last 8 years through trauma, surgery, and recovery - being with her was more difficult, and I was also so far away. After losing my father, and never having been afforded the opportunity to decide for myself  how I wanted to remember him, I reflect that maybe I could've spent more time with her - a conscious regret calcified by how difficult it became to talk to her more than a few minutes when I did. Those brief moments of recognition were like trying to watch someone using a fly-swatter in a hurricane of history - desperate to maybe, if lucky, remember me.

Those moments were so different from the hundreds of hours of conversation. When we would have lunch, just she and I - and SHE insisted that any words expressed between us remained only hers and mine... an honor I have always kept sacred.

I said at her funeral that she was a constant source of council, regardless our inability to find common ground on things like faith and "right".

It's weird that I may only be handling this now, but I think I understand her better than I did. To live that long, to experience so much... I am not sure I will ever have the clarity of spirit or the bravery of self to suffer so much for so long and still inspire so many. It was no accident that she was everyone's grandma - she did that on purpose, and we had better give her credit for that.

Im envious of Bermuda.
Her triangle is so deeply recognized.
I am caught in the "this is me now" in the face of who I should've been, and who I thought I'd be.
Cathedrals stacked to the stars
Like for Margaret.
And that you don't know this reference is the perfect epithet.
But how can I place my weight against the scale?
Imperial? Metric? Metaphysical?
What is the search for a sense of self
If not a desperate notion to understand our gravity?
I'm grave, for the far too many I've buried and the far more whom found a mausoleum in me, secure in my secrets.
In theory buried with me, but buried within me, and that is far too great a weight to put on dirt and rock and mantle.
I won't be buried.
Not because I could not keep them but because of kindness in grief, and in the ground isn't safe for these stories to rest, lest, and list - oh list... they die with me never to be uninterred by graverobbers or corporate land barons seeking to build a new golf course.
If the earth had to bear the gravity of conscious existence, she would implode like a fledgling star.
I doubt humans are alone in the universe, but I'd honestly get it - such a mistake...
For evolutionary crafted monkees to dare say this is Me and bend the world and rules around us, mostly by seeking an understanding of those rules...
And then turning them to profit. How human.
Fools, all of us.
Slaves, indentured to the tide of society.
I thought the progression of civilization was to move forward.
The things we'd learned from the dark ages - foolish and desperate attempts to cling to what we thought of as power.
But what happens when power evolves?
It certainly has exceeded us by the boundless laws of physics.
We relent and release in deference to the "please lead me" through questionable times
No one questioning that we brought this unto ourselves
A marooned ship a mile from paradise but destined it it's ignorance to sink.
Nothing, spirit or body, would intelligently design this.
At the very least if the concept of God was not just metaphorical but an ecumenical argument that we should be better...
Why the need to argue at all?
We are perfect imperfections of random chance and about 4 pounds
Of mostly wet pretty much bacon
Electrified like an sophomoric Frankenstein
And most of us haven't even read Mary Shelley
We are a species so magnetic to ourselves.
Watch what we can do.
Even if we shouldn't do it.
Maybe I'll just do it to see what my neighbor does.
And so the echelons grow.
To a maximum order of magnitude 13.
If everyone tells two friends
And those two can only tell two others
With no repeats
Only 13 times can a story be shared before it exceeds the maximal population of our planet.
Only 13 times can a paper be folded in half until you breach space.
Life...
It's a poorly dreamed up pyramid scheme.

I am not who I thought I'd be
Sure I look a little like John McClane now
If he'd birthed Gary Busey.
An unrelenting action hero
That finds "action" an unlikely filter too far from reality, and "hero" a notion so freely given that societally we have reduced what it was meant to mean.
Heroes used to be subjects of admiration
That which inspired aspiration in our youths (utes- some of you get it)
But the title of "hero" was an impermanent...

(Character) is a hero (timeline) for doing (x)

Yet it becomes their lifelong nomination to the firmament of history.
How many of our "heroes" died on crosses only to reveal skeletons (a lot) or journal pages of moments?
How many times have "heroes" been exposed as nearly inexplicable excellence deposed by the consequence of inconvenient fact?

{This guy did a super awesome thing... but oh, wait - no... don't Google, he's really a *******}

That achievement, as laudable as it should be, is no replacement for an expectation to be human.. to be in spite of being.

Athletes, actors, poets, and songwriters, producers, investors, and attorneys who all say "you're going to do great kid", who support you right up until the moment you aren't doing great... or in reality: they're about to get "me too"-ed. {I desperately want to call it moo-ed}

It's not an accident that every movie is familiar and every song sounds the same except the few artists who stake their own vulnerability - it's a badly written matinee.

[Like trying to make those words rhyme]

If we sound or seem mundane, it's because you, the sheeple, conditioned to show contrition at the steeple, believe it to be a reflection of your pain.
We've crafted a carefully cultivated currency of resistance in the constant contentious, captivating and  licensious, breeding and ever feeding, consumers of today... to tell you all to stop listening to us.

And stop smoking cigarettes <wink>.

Taylor Swift, America's sweetheart and a genuinely talented songwriter keeps writing songs about why you should stop listening to her. And that none of you get "it" is probably why I never will.

It's more subtle now. The punk and post punk movements of the pixies and velvet underground refaced the pavements surreptitious to what "adults" then thought was "a wall of sound".
But what is punk now except an exposition of 30 somethings trying to find the after hours after party, even literally underground? Or just go to bed?

We cannot even have an open discussion without being so hurt we have to find private corners to complain about anyone who disagrees with "me"
Never giving credence or understanding of what "me" means...

It's nothing. History will forget you as I hope it forgets me. The only thing I hope is that a few people read my lines, I might help shape a few minds, and I might live forever in the national archives - the pages of memory.

Terrible people are capable of great things
Just as every person history records as great...
Just as all "Great people" have all done horrific things.
No exceptions.

I may have been seeking
A perfect disaster
Thats where I found you
Poring through the files in the evidence room

Swipe right, its like a mirror
You're my reflection
In the beautiful fractals of broken stained glass
A composite of missed memories and failing to act

But I
Keep callin you "lady",
But thats a stretch like calling me a "gentleman"
I am a perfect *******
That's what you're after
Baby I'd be your "*****" if only you'd let me in

A thousand times I should've known
I should have felt
The thousand times without.
For the misplaced faith in a wraith I couldn't doubt...

My own feeling left me reeling
For me to tell the one story,
I'd left untold
And I can never know - if I was right...

I dreamt a hundred lives
And in each time
I never saw your face...

You were here with me from the beginning
Maybe a reflection of my ghost
Or I was too young for me to place you.

On and on.

But I chased you well.
I told the stories
In poems, songs, in visions
In theories, in ev'ry mis-decision
I keep you alive in every lie
In every breath that claims that I
I believe

Did you know that I drowned...
Twice?

You are my hidden face
Wittness to my unveiled disgrace
I was once asked in all my songs
Who were "you"

My unseen mistress
My forgiveness,
My implacabal
Agressive shadow

My insecure insignificant
My insight
Myself deplorable
An adorable
A beautiful disaster

And we slept
So many nights
In each other's comforting arms
And I invited you in
Without a fight
But thats all you left in me

... the FIGHT

My disgraceful, irreplaceable
My exoneration,

my desperation, my displacement,
my revelations...

My whimsical
Mystical, quixiotical
My enervation...

Disgraceful, irreplaceable, it's not just distrust,
Its ireedemable

You're my,

Captivated, and one day they'll maybe see
You've always been me

My inescapable

"you"