And so, I am again awake at night
anarchic freedom holding me it's willing slave.
Never again in love, but once more its fool.
The day I worry is a distant light;
there are no roads before me left to pave.
Working with bare hands, once more a tool.
Now I breathe, the night's a sight.
Abandon clothes and jump through the waves,
away from the graveyard, and the ghoul.

In mathematics,
A set of vectors are linearly independent if and only if their null space
is comprised exclusively
by the origin.
The only solution, is 0. Nothing.
There is no real way to describe them, other than, "because,"
And that's as good of anything I suppose.
Because to be linearly independent is a Godhood in of itself;
You cannot be defined in terms of the other vectors in your set,
Bystanders to your mathematically perfect
freedom.

"Be All You Can Be," says the television.
"1800-USA-ARMY."
I almost chose it, the life the TV tells me.
I almost went away,
To be a brother-in-arms.
Now, I'm thinking about being a brother-in-a-frat-house,
it hardly compares, but here I am searching
So I can be happy.
An 8 year plan for self-actualization.
Maslow would laugh; at the Army ad, at me, and at everyone who follows a path they didn't carve into rock with a spoon.

There are those who walk through life,
on eggshells.
And so, more than death, more than the sky, or the open ocean,
They fear
people.
Not the things they'll do or say,
but what they won't.
That they won't
love them.
That they won't
care for them.
And this, is a great historic tragedy my friends.
For at the feet of introversion,
lie a thousand friendships never made,
stories never told,
and lifetimes never lived.

"I hate American late stage capitalism," my Spanish roommate says.
But what can I say to that.
He's right; every second spent here is paid for in gold
or in crimson blood.
Reality pulses with stimulation,
but still,
the clock's hand lazily wanders, lethargic, about its face.
This pathetic, white-haired professor,
lectures on coding in the front of the room.
"American's only know how to tell the time by looking at their phones," my roommate says.
But I think to myself, now, computers are the only way we bother telling time anymore. Time has become precise,
But it used to be clumsy, more art than discrete mathematics.
The professor informs the class that we have to pay for the textbook,
and again for the software that will grade our code,
and the class doesn't even blink.
"Class dismissed," says the clock. Ironic, I know.
The blue light of our phones,
the kind that keeps us awake at night,
is turned on as we step outside.
"It's noon," I say, and I hear the echoes of gunshots in schools just like this one,
Where someone got tired of paying in cash.

Sometimes I am aware
of the bird's music,
but often I forget.
Some unconscious piece
of me
sets it aside in favor
of the roar of engines, and the screams of circuitry.
But I am happiest with
the sound of waves;
Earth's primordial wail of infancy.
And here, now,
I remember.

Our breath is that of Earth,
the forests
mighty lungs.
Our blood is that of gasoline,
of dead ancestors,
and open ocean.
My soul is that of life,
the quintessential
beauty in everything.