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.