The clerk behind the coffee counter,
she stares out the window
onto the sunny street, lost in thought.
Her half smile on that young face
is an art exhibit of a daydream
about a possible future.
An old woman at a nearby table,
she stares out the same window.
Her eyes glossed over,
they indicate she's remembering
the good moments long past.
The coffee shop daydreamers
have much in common.

-Ron Gavalik

What else there is in life
Other than our struggle to thrive
The rest are just bluffs
By those, who are not worthy enough

Unworthy enough
To face the world's ravaging
But worthy enough
To sit tight and keep dreaming

To keep on dreaming, and dreaming
By their sleep in the night
By their wake in the day
Comes silently screaming, and screaming

They want change, difference, recognition
Things they don't possess, nor see
Which they will achieve and be
With the might of their creation

The dreams they dream, are different
The dreams they dream, are irrelevant
They escapes from this darkness
Into a world they created, upon the rubbles of their sadness


Pain, misery, disappointment
Carved in, like a mine of silver
As they keep on sitting, sleeping, wondering
As they keep on dreaming, and dreaming

They have power over their world
They have control over their universe
They are the gods of their own
They are the ones we ignore

pummeled down by society
abandoned their own sanity    
But they will live on
Oh, yes, the daydreamers lives on

Calling all day dreamers,
Keep your eyes shut
Don’t ever open them to this brainwashed society
Grip onto your soul before they come to take it away
Hide all your thoughts for they are quite possessive
Remind yourself that to be different in a world full of copies
Is to be a diamond in a pond full of rocks
Hold onto your heart as they come around with a hammer
Picture a daisy instead of the trash they all left behind
Imagine it is all just a fiction to numb the pain
Pretend the hurt in the world can all be cured with a band aid
Attempt to smile even when there is nothing worth smiling
Stay dreaming in this beautiful nightmare
Find the good hidden beneath these restless souls
Wear your crown of flowers although you are nothing but a peasant
Dance until the judgement is felt around the room
Calling all day dreamers,
Don’t ever wake up.

These dreams are what we have to build on
What we have come to know

Our minds have been ravaged
These voices echoed so many times
Controlling who we are, and how we get by

The road seems long as ever
As we grow restless to escape this place

As I remember
I am everything I have ever wanted, And everything you didn't want for me.

All I wanted was someone who believed in me.

We are daydreamers
With aspirations that touch the sky
And now I know this is where I lie

We may be blind
But we can see what we were meant to be
All I know is that this means so much to me

Tired hands and waking eyes
Will tell the story of how we lived our lives

As I fall in my final days

These are the memories that will never fade away.

dust off your shoes
lets leave this town,
holding hands-
finding ourselves
lost in these daydreams.
dust off your shoes
we're leaving this town-
they won't even notice
that we're not around.
they'll be busy looking down-
and we'll be bouncin' from cloud to cloud
celebrating our daydreams.

shattered dreams
evolving present
sleepless nights
lucky those daydreamers.-04.12.2016

Oh my little daydreamer,
Dreaming of better days
Dreaming of cotton candy clouds
and a sky you see your reflection in

Didn't anyone tell you silly little dreamer?
You can have anything you dream?
Open your mind, your soul, your heart
You are stronger than you believe

Daydreamer of mine,
Please don't grow up to be masochistic
Be a soldier that defeats any obstacle
Be a lover that loves in the loveliest of ways

My darling little dreamer
Be the dreamer of dreams for all of those who can't
For those of us who have fallen
For the ones who used to be daydreamers

Yellow spheres are terror to the daydreamers
whirling past faces disgraces grazing ears
Recollections of multipurpose room taunts
And Mr. Neptune's rolled eyes as he gives up

Just send me to my fortress of books n poetry
Let me slip away unnoticed and forgotten
between the blue carpet and shelves inside
Let me bang my head on the laminated particle board

I disappear in here where it's just me and three thousand years
floating historically through black & white epochs
Alone, the world is heavy but not so much as my feet
planted and feigning mobility as roots become weeds

I think how dumb it is to talk of my Soul or to sing in the shower
or my car or alone in my apartment with stereo blasting
It's strange how the red is everywhere and I can't imagine
any longer when I'll finally need to draw a line

For you are not with me as I am with me and I'm green
But I can't say if it's in my stomach or in my eyes
And despite the heaviness I feel like I could be swept away
I could flutter up like one of those winglike seeds in Spring

Heaven is no place outside either, and I suddenly remember
That this all started with a love for the color orange
And I realize the silliness of red and yellow by themselves,
still wondering if I am bathed or baked in the warmth.

And maybe we are all a little broken but that's okay because I know some people throw out their old broken things but others notice that they are broken and love them even more because they see the imperfections as beautiful. And there are others who look down at tiny little shattered pieces and get the glue and magnifying glass and get a table out they haven't seen in years and put all the pieces on it. And they sit down for hours and days putting it back together knowing that it will never be what everyone else sees as perfect again but it will be together and damaged but it will be loved. Because the first time it was created it was instantly whole and someone else thought it was good enough. But a lot of things are just good enough. Every single Hershey's kiss looks the same except for the ones labeled as mistakes. Those are less likely to occur. But if they turned out this way normally than we would consider our current norm abnormal. So then the normal would be abnormal and the abnormal would be normal. It's all perspective. So the guy who spent all that time fixing you thinks you're absurdly and absolutely perfect. Because he saw the broken bits that were your original as even better than the whole you started as. Some people just get a few cracks in shipping and some people want the discounted price. But you gotta find the ones who see scars as beauty marks. That's what it's all about. Perspective. We are like this because we aren't like everybody else. We have the abnormal make. We are the 3 am word fighters and the night riders. We are all the bad and the good and we speak in bittersweet tongues. Nobody can fix us because we aren't broken. We are disassembled and can build ourselves. We don't need anyone else's tool chest because we have one right below our rib cage. Our lungs are practically indestructible because they know just how sacred air can be. We are the strong because we've cried ourselves to sleep and thought that was normal. We are the ones who were told they were doing it wrong the first time they cut but were strong enough to realize that they were wrong and there is no right way to destroy yourself. We are the future. We are the pain. We are the daydreamers who know how brilliant the sky looks at 4:27 am east coast time in Atlanta. And just because we've thrown up in too many bathrooms and told too many family members we ate before we got there, that sure as hell doesn't mean we aren't craving life and have had too many heartaches for breakfast. We are the ones who rolled over in bed and realized that the boy was gone and that we would have to hug ourselves. My shoulders are strong from carrying the weight of the world. Our eyes think that floods are normal because that's all they have seen. I have lived my life walking along the train tracks trying to find a way to get home. All I have gotten is calluses on my feet and strangers dreams in my heart. We keep them there. We carry the letters of the broken hearted and deliver them to the lost. As we saved others we lost ourselves. And then we look up and see the stars and realize that there's this whole galaxy that we are. We are everyone's broken promises and expired wishes. We carry the spirits of the deceased and the never born. We hold on to the spirits of the people who changed. I've cried myself to sleep too many **** nights for one person so I know I am the embodied spirit of everyone who's never had a voice and everyone who has needed one. We are the ones who were pushed against a wall and didn't say no because we thought that was the only love we may ever get and didn't realize just how twisted it was to trust a boy who treated you like trash and to think his kisses were your anti depressants when they were your poison.  But then we wake up and push him off and say, "Boy, I don't need you. You were nothing but heartache and pain. You see these scars? Don't tell me to stop until you are there to take away the ******* blade. Do not tell me suicide is a joke because every single part of me has thought it was a blessing at one time or another. Do not ever touch me until the day you will not be repulsed by the blood or *****. Do not tell me you are not in to scars because that is all you have left on both my body and my heart."And we are the sad nights where the boy you just fell in love with leaves on a plane to go home to California. We are the tropical islands where we met the loves of our lives. I am the tears I shed on the balcony in the Bahamas the night I got so scared I may never see you again. I am the song I sang out to the tropical storm winds that night where I repeated, "love is not a victory march, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah." I am the same girl who pushed the tears off her cheeks after letting their significance sink in and put on her makeup to go out and fake a few smiles. We are the ones who take care of the drunk girl we just met even though the boy we love just left. We are the ones who love our fathers even though they’ve broken more than a few bones in their lifetime. We are the ones who have treasure chest souls where children hide their keepsakes so that in twenty five years they can tell the story of their discovery to a 6 year old little girl with huge green eyes. We are the freckles on the lonely girls shoulder that made a beautiful boy fall in love with her; yet she wishes she could erase them. And we are the long distance phone calls between broken lovers that last 1 hour and 6 minutes and deliver lost hopes and shattered promises. We are the weddings that unite two people who thought about stepping in front of buses just 8 years before. We are the ones who cried on bathroom floors thinking it was our fault but stopped when we thought someone would hear. We are those who never want to be seen as weak because we don't want anyone to figure out that we can't always hold it all together. We are the ones who are bones and flesh and have died because their souls and bodies were robbed of nutrients. We are the ones who bled out on the carpet and weren't found for days. We are the student deaths that never made the announcement and never got a commemorative tree. There is nothing beautiful about sadness. But there is something beautiful about watching destruction save itself. There's something beautiful about terrible moments that turn gorgeous. We are the thorns that were trimmed back too soon because no one ever realized we were a rose. And we were never broken. We just needed to be too many heroes at once. So sometimes we get stretched too thin because our souls are too wide. Because there are a lot of broken promises and heart breaks and love affairs and sad minds and beautiful days and long nights that we must embody. We are the ones who would never change being all those things because we like having an ever changing soul. We are the ones who must fight to live even though we have patchwork hearts and memories that are in love with romanticizing the past. We must fight because when we die, others die with us. All the things we have carried and delivered turn to ash and lay beside us in a velvet and oak box for the rest of eternity on the day we are lowered in to the ground. But in reality we know that things will get better because the grandmothers dreams of an education located in our left knee cap on the right hand side tell us to never give up. So that's what we do. We listen to the demons in our souls and the angels that also pay rent. But we carry all our memories even when they jab us in the ribs and make us believe that we will never breathe again. But we are breathing. We are living and the daughter we are yet to have needs us to tell her about the world. Because I pray she has a soul like mine so that I may show her that the world is both bitter and sweet but that every single thing looks better after thinking you'd seen the most beautiful thing in the world. So we keep these bodies and live our lives so that we may realize that there are many more parts of us that magnifying glasses don't show and pounds can't measure.  And we hold on for everyone but must learn to hold the firmest grip for ourselves. Because I will always love that boy who left the island with the crystal clear water and I will never forget the girl who told me I didn't destroy myself in the right way. And I am okay with that. I am okay with carrying these things. I am used to the weight of noth the beautiful and the terrible. And although it makes me feel empty at times, I realize that it is only because my ever hungry soul is still craving even more life.