Anxiety.
Conserve.
Conservatory.
Shakespeare.
Man.
Monk.
****.
I ******.
I'm better.
Expulsion.
Breathe.
Friend.
Not friend.
Friend.
Best friend.
Awkward.
I still have that.
Dress.
Tights.
Queen.
Mill.
Birthday.
Song.
500.
Guitar.
Te­ars.
Nostalgia.
Nostalgic.
Dead.
You're dead.
You're dying.
I'm dying.
I'm dead.
I'm not dead.
24.
You're blonde.
I'm not blonde.
I'm old.
I'm still old.
I'm a child.
I'm going to cry.
Stop.
I don't cry.
No more crying.
I'm allowed to cry here.
That's why I cry here.
I'm allowed.
I can do what I want.
I know what I want.
I have no idea what I want.
But I think that's what I want.
I'm not doing what I want.
But this is enough.
It's not enough.
I'll make it enough.
Where am I?
24.
Twenty.
Four.

Stop thinking.

I let my mind wander
Down dark streets with
Watching eyes whispering
From windows and
Trash-filled sidewalks
And as always
It found you
With your eyes dancing
Behind the glow of a cigarette
Inviting my poor mind
To just step into the alley
Nice and quiet-like
And with your pistol in my back
Emotional bullets snug and tight and ready
I finally asked myself
How did we get here
And when?

High in the saddle, reigns taut,
We galloped away from home,
Proud steed and lean rider
Searching, searching, searching
Seeking from the world
A meaning of sorts; such is the folly
Of the Young.

Long and arduous has been the ride,
But worth it if only to see! The ruins,
Columns in the sands bleached white
As if to be the picked-clean bones of
Those that came before, macabre
Testament too the Singular Truth.

Closer to the ground now,
In more ways than one.
I left my horse buried in sand
And miles, miles, miles.
Such is the Truth of things.

But alas! At last, a meaning!
The Grand Epiphany, you see;
For the further I wander from home,
The closer to home I'll be!
With this Better Truth in hand,
I stopped, turned, and chose a new heading
Towards home.

Keep not your venom,
arrows, or swords;
pour them out like
rain in twilight,
and be cleansed
in the whisper of
tiny, peaceful droplets.

To exist in moonlight,
And moonlight alone,
Is to live the night
As a reflection.
To be much less bright
Than the start that shone
Is the cost and plight
Of this perfection.
But does it make it right,
Just moonlight alone,
To survive the night
Without correction?
Under the moon's sight,
Skin as pale as bone,
Everything's alright
As a reflection.

There is a harsh beauty in mathematics.
Under curves and over slopes,
Equations rise and fall endlessly
In a perfectly measured void.
Optimized, rationalized, sterilized;
Formulas that never lie,
Theorems looming before us
Like an archaic God,
A golden deity whose
Volume is maximized.
How I dream of drifting in this flux,
Concave up and concave down,
Riding the sign of my second derivative
For positive and negative,
For better and worse.
I would not travel alone;
With C by my side,
Friend, ally, brother,
Always paired with my antiderivative,
For whenever we journey back
Into the past, it is necessary
To have a companion to pull us out again
In case we are unsure of where we started.
Rules and laws
Strict organization, control;
There is a harsh beauty in mathematics.
Order; two plus two is always four.
Sines and cosines and theta
All dancing in the unit circle of life,
A conga line that joins itself
To form a mathematical ouroboros.
But the harshest of the harsh beauties
Presented in this Divine Subject
Is that though there is an infinite capacity
For positivity and growth,
So too is there the possibility of stretching
Endlessly towards negativity forever.
However, it is much more terrifying
To lie in the middle;
To be undefined, unknowable, and to add
Or subtract to no effect;
The most fear inducing, mysterious, and gorgeous number
Of zero; nothing yet something,
Infinite yet not,
The most grand of all contradictions.
A hole; a jump; a discontinuity,
Easily removed from life and smoothed out
If you just apply the formulas.
Graphs and coordinates, integers and ordered pairs,
Is that not what life is?
We live within the grandest equation,
Each our own variable,
Constantly solving for ourselves
With the harsh beauties of mathematics.

I remember the tops of clouds,
Looking as far as I could see.
I don't know if the Pacific
Is a pretty place,
But at altitude,
At least it's sunny.
Under the cumulus blanket,
Man makes his own clouds,
Thick with metal and smoke,
All black and shrapnel,
And God help you
If one opens up around your wingtips.
I remember nosing down,
Gritted teeth and twisted belly,
Eyes flitting between instruments
And the little ship
Getting fatter and fatter
Through my prop.
You wait till the last second,
Drop your ordinance,
And pull your nose
Up and up and then
You push that little throttle bar
To the limit,
And then the **** black clouds
Start up all around you,
And when your big baby shakes,
You know something's wrong,
And you cry out
"Buck? Buck?"
Like I did.
And then you don't know
If your face is covered in tears
Or blood from you or Buck.
I remember landing on that carrier,
Big and metal and gray,
Like a big tombstone for your friend,
And your plane is the coffin.
**** it, I remember.