. . .

While embarrassingly unprepared for it, the forces that be occasionally sweep me up in their infinite mystery,
like a reddening leaf freed from a tree by a sudden gale.

To float through the air of a seasonal gasp that ends too soon,
only to land in a stream that flows too quickly for me to catch my bearings.
The tale they tell of it will never do for the real thing.

It's such a rare and unforeseen breeze that ever brings me nearer to you.

How I wish that it would blow more often.

This isn't a romance.
It's hardly even a friendship.

This is no place to find the answers.
The answers are hidden somewhere inside of us.

This is just a desert of people digging for them.

When they say vulnerability is ****,
I always feel awkward about wanting to argue the contrary.

I tell people I'm a hipster before I'll ever admit to being a poet.
Seems like a less pretentious compromise.

I can handle being disliked for my personality-type better than being loathed for my hobbies.

Self-centered hedonism is a good defense mechanism against social awkwardness.

The people who are always so adamant about not giving a **** always trip me up.

If you really didn't, why are you trying so hard to project that narrative?

The people who really don't give a **** are so preoccupied with escapism to even recognize the social consequences.

Those are my people.

My brain is awash in budding friendships and cephalopods.

I think at this point it's safe to assume that all of my favorite ones are those who develope intelligence on their own, spineless or not.
Less of a social impetus than one of sheer simple survival.
An adaptation to life-threatening and serious impacts.

And the awkwardness invariably involved tends to tickle me various colors.
And the people who judge might as well be a den full of sharks, bodies going taught at the sense of fresh blood.

They can all **** right off.

I'm not the one to see how you'd warn them off. I'm more interested in seeing how you'd react to fun.

What would happen if one of your many limbs reached out towards one of mine?

Would our color-changes clash,
or would they match?
Would we play off each other until a new spawn was hatched?

It took millions of years for us to find the courage to leave our shells.
Now we're out here constantly shifting/adjusting/conforming by ourselves.

Would it really be so crazy for us to occasionally help each other out?

I find myself longing for something I used to be able to do when I was half my age. Something that now seems way more complicated than it used to be.

I miss lying on the floor of a dark bedroom, staring up at the ceiling while listening to songs on vinyl.

Such a simple recipe,
one would think it'd be pretty simple to recreate,
but they'd be mistaken.

I miss lying on the carpeted floor of my best friend's bedroom, listening to beautiful songs while watching her ceiling fan spin slow circles in the dark.

Sometimes, we don't realize how rare certain ingredients are until we find ourselves without them. Something that used to seem so abundant, so easily accessible - now gone. Long gone.

I miss lying on the carpet next to the one I thought I was in love with, the tips of our heads nearly touching, feeling tempted to just move my hand over ever so slightly to grasp hers, while listening to her records in the dark.

Such simple things that used to seem so close.
Now, so far away.

___
1. Verb
2. Adverb (must end in "ly")
3. Adjective
4. Noun

A day full of retail therapy
punctuated by anti-capitalism posts on facebook propogated by a person I've known since kindergarten.

Life can be funny in a way that doesn't make you laugh,
but at least it tries.
Isn't that enough?

I got mean-mugged by a stranger's bulldog through a window-front while folding my laundry on top of a surfboard that'd been repurposed as a table.

Purposes can be rearranged.
Full moons can rise over days that were strange, only to turn them into stranger nights.
But the strange can make things interesting sometimes.
That's got to count for something, right?

First day off after a month and a half of long days at sea.
I blew off every single plan I'd half-heartedly committed to on the smoke deck without feeling the least bit guilty.

Feelings can be unfriendly sometimes.
Sometimes you just have to choose "Me."

Some people are so egocentric
that you have to knock them down a peg or two before they'll be your friend.

Some of us are too stubborn to acknowledge when we've got it all figured out.

Knowing what's best for you doesn't always mean you know what the next best thing to do is.

Some of us know too many words and not enough meaning,
and we get all tripped up on the semantics.

If I could, I'd stop writing stanzas that begin with ******* like,
"If I could,"
or
"Truth be told,"
or,
"Truth is."

Because **** me dude.
Seriously, I'm the worst.

Poets are sociopaths
masquerading as artists
who've convinced themselves they know how to connect to other people
while having no clue where their own heart is.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder,
and proximity can make you wonder how you ever built it up so be some kind of cure-all universal life-problem-solver.
But when reality falls short of fantasy,
that's where all of the life-lessons are found.

The majority of them seem to be along the lines of:

Truth is, I'm just a charlatan who's gotten very good at pretending like my opinions are wisdom when they're really just a bunch of after-thoughts regarding dumb decisions I've spent my whole life making.

Despite all the shade I throw at my family,
truth is,
they're alright.

Words have their uses,
but they've been perverted to the point of being almost worthless.
Only the cool kids know where their power lies now.
Get out there and make some music.

Use context clues.

I'd rather witness one tiger deftly stalking their target than to watch two dozen of you drinking yourselves *******.

Pastel houses,
carousel mouses.
Culture clashes in tourist-reliant suburban wastelands.

Toxic aftermath pouring out of performers' hands as everyone claps.

This is what I grew up in.

These streets are full of magic.
The kind that seeps from grand dreams seen to fruition.
The kind that charges tuition on the merits of your madness.
The kind where failed ambition sleeps in back alleys,
feeding off forgotten sadness.

The first five days:
a whirlwind of old friends in new surroundings,
indulging in old habits with the occasional mumblings of,
"I'm proud of you man,
this is nice."

On day six, back in the stix.
Kicking it with the fams up to their same old tricks.

It's hard to say where my heart is.
I've always suffered from being adventurer-sick.

All I know is that the planets have finally aligned in such a way as
to allow me to walk down the streets I grew up on in the way that I haven't done in such a long time,
the way in which I learned all their names.
The way I grew up attempting to escape their grasp.

Now here I am, for the first time in years,
rehashing the past
and its dreams,
and its tears.

As do boats.
As do bodies lying in moats
surrounding castles' fortified walls.

Hope mopes.
Waiting in line at the airport to be cleared through customs,
unaware that it is itself contraband.

Hope is for dopes.
Every man is an island.

Some haven't developed proper ports yet.

So you found yourself in over your head.
Bit off more than you could chew.
Stretched yourself a little too thin,
then what did you do?

Sent out a veiled cry-for-help to a friend,
knowing full well it was a torpedo.

Sometimes all you need to admit that you're uncharacteristically cool with all of this is a bit of liquid courage and a pinch of frustrated madness swished around until you're sarcastically committing to loving the **** out of your current situation with a vague suspicion that you're not actually being ironic.

Disillusioned youth all drunk on ideas of change,
passing around their ideals until we all felt the same,
or felt better about not feeling the same,
or felt normal by being surrounded by people even farther from normal than we'd ever claim to be ourselves,
or felt like we were in a safe space for the first time in our lives,
a space in which we could actually be ourselves,
or felt as if the weight of the world thrusted on our shoulders by our parents was no longer a burden we had to bear alone,
or felt sane enough for the first time in awhile to recognize how much we'd actually grown,
to have sorted out all of the ******* from the things we'd always claimed to have known.

God bless 'em, every one.

Oh, how we've grown.

Love is not dependency.
Love is not some broken-hearted teen crying,
"You were the only thing that ever completed me,"
in the middle of the street during a full moon in which all the willows weep or whatever.

Whatever love is, it's surely not that.

Love is not a scam.

Love is not crying when you could've laughed.

In fact, love is the exact opposite of that.

Left to my own devices,
I go to places that aren't very nices.
But you believe in a spectrum of sorts.
One I used to live on before I blew it all to bits.
Sometimes I wonder what the incentive is;
The reason why I keep you arounded.
Times like these, I see what it means.

You're my canary.

You keep me grounded.

Sometimes, I feel too old and cynical to appreciate the beauty of anything anymore, and it's times like these I'm tempted to walk around at night with headphones on and listen to that one song from Blonde Redhead with the heavy piano and ah's as the only lyrics.

If you know how a spell is cast,
all the magic words to incant it and such,
does it have less of an effect when it's cast on you?
Does is matter much?

It's being swollen by a feeling that you can't put into words,
but you try to anyway.

It's something to look back on in later days,
which is today,
a day that ends in a night in which you feel the same way.

It's a guiding arrow through the maze you've made inside your mind,
the one that in theory,
will end with you finding yourself.

Contrary to what you may be thinking,
I am not a contrairian.
I like to play Angel's Counsel to your Devil's Advocate, but not just because I've been drinking.
(Though, to be fair, I have been, but forgive me. I'm celebrating.)
Anything worth debating always has two sides.
Try seeing them both for a change before dividing the lines.
And while it may sound contradictory at times, and doesn't end in a rhyme,
just meet me in the middle, *******!

See, the thing about talent is,
it never really dies.
Sure, it hides from time to time,
or rather, it hibernates.

After all of the personal development has been developed,
and every epiphany has been epiphanized,
what's left?

When every version of yourself has been talked out of the driver seat, only to eventually realize that your life is the road and not the vehicle,
which exit do you then take?

What does it even matter now that you understand the stakes?

After all of those personal demons have been defeated,
(resurrected once or twice, then re-beaten,)
what comes next?

What question is left unanswered at this point?
I suppose it must be:
what are we eating?

I used to attempt to capture in writing all of the times I never thought I'd have the time to recall later in life.
To capture a moment I thought I'd never have the opportunity to live again.
To cage a thought I thought would live wild and free for the rest of my life.
To say farewell to a moment in a way that was gracious, but final.

auf wiedersehen, dear moment.
Au revoir, sayonara, so long.

I thought I'd never see you again.
Boy, was I wrong.

Somewhere someone I love is not thinking about me right now.
Somewhere else is where my mind lives most of the time from now on,
and I have to write this to a song I haven't listened to since the last time I lost my mind in some nowhere town,
thinking of no one I've ever loved.

It hides in the everyday now,
buried underneath.
It waits for us to pull back the veil that reveals the truth we spend the rest of our time longing for, loathing, hoping for, holding on to.  

It rides on the wings of the things we forget to say, that we only think of an hour later, or the next day.

It hides in our heads until we go to sleep then presents itself in our dreams with such pristine clarity.

It's everything you've ever wanted life to be when you feel too weak to put in the effort.

It's everything you've ever wanted life to be when you're too tired to think about how to best spend your next free hour.

It sleeps inside us all,
but we're exasperated by its power.

Mysterious poet with the obscene pun as a name, what is your game?

Sensitive artist at odds with her own sense of shame, are you doing okay?

Drop me a line or remind me that sometimes a stranger can be less than strange.

I'm struggling with change.

Or just hold it down and reach out to the void of your favorite stage.

I'm willing to pay.

These days are so crazy but we're getting too lazy to process the pain.

It's only making it worse.

Gonzo girl with her absurdly relatable way of reading the world,
let's hear a new verse.

Then I'd say that there's way too many Mustangs on this godforsaken base.

Life is so friggin' weird, I'll tell ya.
The older you get, the weirder it gets,
and it just keeps on getting weirderer.

Grossly weird.
Wrongly and disturbingly weird.
Upsettingly weird.

But then, now and again,
pleasantly weird.
Delightfully, excitingly weird.
Weirdly endearingly weird.

Then weirder still.
Off-puttingly weirder.
Over-sweetly weirdly weirder.
Understatedly, low-key weirder to the highest degree contradictory weird.

Maybe weird isn't so weird after all.
When it's the only constant in life,
then weirdness becomes the only reliably normal thing, oddly enough.

You're like a unicorn in a world full of mules.
You are a treasure in a room full of tools.
A patch of bright color in a washout of gray.
Whatever "it" is, you've got it in spades.

Poked and prodded
'til brokenhearted.
Now the game's *******.
The stomachs knotted.

Pushed and pulled;
Together, alone.
The game's not over . . .

(Pick up the phone.)

I always expect the worst from people.

You can't rebuild schemas without breaking them first.

I don't want to annoy the few people who don't annoy me.

But at what cost?
Holding back.
Biting tongue.
Sitting out when I could be having more fun.

Oh right, fun. That became a problem. Having too much fun makes things fray at the edges.

So here I am, all proper hemmed,
and a bit lonely for refusing to annoy a friend.

People can't read minds,
even if it seems like they can sometimes,
but at least a few can read between lines;
what do they find?

Surprises.

(I doubt it.)

People can feel all kinds of things
without saying a word about it.

This reminds me of home.
The smell of wet pavement and damp grass,
the sound of a chirping toad mixed with rain dripping off the rooftops and echoing down storm gutters.

If I close my eyes and take a deep breath, I can almost believe that I'm back in the swamps.