"You're a killer, son. 
I can see it in your eyes. 
I don't know when it'll happen-
Maybe the first day on the front line,
Maybe when the guy next to you
In the trenches gets his head 
Blown to bits, but some day
You'll snap. 
And it'll all become a game to you. 
And it's a game you're good at. 
And it's a game you like."
These are the words the veteran spoke
Over my father. This is who he said
My father would be. And so he ran away. 

My father took up his pen and he wrote
And he took up the mainsheet and pulled it in
Til the sail hugged the wind, and he did it for years,
But it wasn't enough for him. In the end
He studied business and now he's an
Entrepreneur, building homes and food and lives.
Recently he's been talking about starting to
Sail again. He could've been world champion, you know. 
He says he left to start a family. 

There are days when I look in the mirror,
Deep into the eyes I inherited from my father,
And wonder. In them I see his own passion 
For the written word, for the wind caught
In the sail and the water stormy and deep beneath. 
But I know there's something else in there too,
And there are days when I hope to God it's not
That same look his honorably discharged uncle saw
And scarred him with so many years ago. 
But even worse, there are times I pray it is.

I think they've got it wrong.
I don't think the point of life
is to be productive. I think
the point of life is to live,
and if you can look back on
what you've done and say "I
changed that," if you can say
"I opened their eyes," if you
can sit there and not give a ****
about productivity and your
titles then I think that just
maybe you're doing something
right.

there are
a thousand pockets
of wilderness 
in my city

where 
the thick evergreens
almost
drown out
the sirens

at their least
they were silhouettes building
notes out of the crimson fog
slowly swallowing the stage

but all the rest of the night
the bass taught my heart
a new beat pushing
its throbbing hand deep
into my chest and demanding
life and breath

guitars riddled my skin
piano keys pulsating in my fingertips
and the drums
the drums made me dance
up and down and
with my hands in the air
like some wild crazy lover

have you ever heard
three thousand people singing
their voices all rising
heated in the night
its not our faults
if we forget the laws of physics
they abandoned us first

on a scale of one to
netherlands
how dutch is my sweater?
i'd say it's a solid Amsterdam.

Time hasn't been good to you, has it?
It took you in its rough hands and it threw you up against that wall.
It was slow torture to you, all those questions of how and why,
When no one would even tell you who or when or where.
You didn't even know what life was then-
That first sunburst, first roll of thunder,
Didn't make sense, not any at all. Not to you.

You try to forget but it's not like that this time.
You try to talk about something, anything else-
And yet your life just comes spilling out; a torrent,
A cascade, a parade of all your worst daydreams-
****** in front of his face and clogging his ears and nose and mouth,
Congealing in the winter sun. And suddenly you feel that weight fall off your chest,
And stand, leave him there; dying, drowning, choking on your memories.

If anyone needed the drug it was you-
You needed the weightlessness, the carelessness it lent you.
First the Vicodin and then the morphine, always on the hunt
For something stronger, something that could really ****
All that pain and time and **** piling up inside you. And you found it,
Found your release, that sweet drifting sensation it gives you
And no side effects! Or so they swear, all the ones who went before you,
Walked down that road lined with needles
And turned it into one paved with something stronger,
That one drug you'll never get enough of: **words

You can pretend with a day of words unspoken
But the noise is still there-
Lingering beneath your skin,
Running through your veins like electricity.

You can think that you are silent
That they don't know your name (brother, sister, friend)
That they don't notice you (you're not invisible)
I? I am all of these things
And none of them. I am silent,
I am invisible, I am alone,
I am words unspoken, I am names unkown.

You don't know me, know me at all
Until you have climbed your mountain
At sunrise and breathed in
The whole world stretched out before you
And sighing and singing with you.

You don't know me, know me at all
Not until it's the silences that whisper in your veins:
Blood hidden under skin, breathe it out and let it in,
The morning tainted pink by your breath.

You're always running away from something, aren't you?
I mean, all of humanity is constantly trying to fix,
To solve, to make right. We search in these nearby places
For the answers, and don't tend to realize that yes, the
Answers are out there, but they're on top of that mountain
Or over that hill and all the while your heart's saying,
Why don't you look there but your head says No
No no it has to be this why on earth do you listen to it?
And you run and you hide away in that laboratory of yours
And mix together this amount of comfort with that amount
Of painkiller and think that somehow it has to be complex,
It can't be simple. I'm here to say that yes, yes it can. It really
Can be just that simple. It doesn't have to be long and
Drawn-out and rewritten and careful. It can be something
Short and sweet and spontaneous like a first kiss or a
Mountain flower, something alive and growing and changing,
And not concrete; not once, not now, not ever.