I wasn't always so easily discouraged.
I used to bristle with enthusiasm.
I glowed with it.
It didn't matter if the task was simple, or tedious, or daunting, or boring.
As though on rails, I slammed into each and every task with terrific force.

But I got older.
Things that used to come easily grew slippery.
What I used to do without thinking twice, I found myself over-thinking.
I threw the brake. I ground to a halt.
Finally, I became idle. A left-over husk of a kernel that's already been popped.
I drowned myself with doubts. Hypothetical situations that might never happen.
I lived in fear of what might go wrong.

So I began to watch everything go wrong, as though I was helpless.
I was no less able. I was no less compassionate.
But I had grown wary. Of what?
What was it that, out of nowhere, caused me to slow down?

I guess I looked down and realized that if I fell, I would not be getting back up.

When you're young, you have no worries, because nothing is relying on your success.
So you mess up a math problem. You'll get it eventually.
So you botch things with that cute girl who sits across from you. You're young, you'll get it.
Re-assurance, faithfully, unwaveringly. A safety line should I fall.
But I never really fell, did I? So why am I laying down like I have?

Get up.

Get up.

I worry about everything. I worry that I will fail.

I dread what comes, what I can't avoid. But time, and time, again, it comes, and I miraculously don't die when it hits, because I've been bracing for a train-wreck impact, a force that will really, truly, finally, definitely lay me flat for good.

I close my eyes, and brace. But the crash never comes. The silence that was continued to be.

I turn behind me, but there's no train there.

I'm starting to realize, with relief, (with horror), that maybe all I needed to do was step off the track.

I look down, and realize, with a first-creeping then-howling laughter that I was never on the track to begin with.

I look off where the track is. There's no train there, either. Maybe there never was.

Maybe there never will be.

To the hopeful ones:
I am unavailable.
Emotionally.

The cannibal is thirsty
for a flesh martini
Dabs of salt here and there
On tongue and ocean groin
The ******* is hungry
To be the tender olive
Eaten very slowly
Lick the ****** pleasures
Of each other's
knife
kiss
Maternal affections
pouring open by God's rage
They are
shelter
Ignition
To each other's
demons
wonderfully delicious
as frosting or
whipped
cream
They are rare fruit, indeed
What are the odds of them finding each other?
Just goes to show, my lonely lovers
There's someone for everyone
You too
Will find
Your soul mate
Someday
just as the blood
Will eventually
Drip
from
the cannibal's
smiling
mouth
Oh my love,
you are my
yummy chicken bone
dipped in
your
sauce
"Ahhhhh...." he says
"This must be love."

Personals:*
Single Man Interested in Women: Looking for love.
Single Woman Interested in Men: Looking for love.
Single Man Interested in Men: Looking for love.
Single Woman Interested in Women: Looking for love.
Single God Interested in Humans: Looking for them to love and be loved.*
___________________­

When I was born I asked the doctor, how he thought he did?
He recalled,
"Exquisite, it was a perfect delivery."
I rebutted,
"Then why am I still attached to the umbilical chord?"
He snipped me away from the tangling sheathe preventing me from exploration.
I leapt off the crinkling hospital bed paper and onto the goose-bump extracting tile floor.
Playfully bobbing my head as I walked into the world whilst giving the blonde doe-eyed nurse a crumpled note arranging what time I would pick her up for
dinner that night.
--Nurses enjoy being taken care of too.

When I was in preschool my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up.
I told her, "I want to feel the love of a woman who makes me happy everyday and loves me for being me."
She under cut my desired fate, "That's not a something you can work for."
I whispered in her ear, "I know you have never felt love from another person."
She began to cry.
I told her, "That tears are just water for her soul to grow."
She got married later that spring after the rain had stopped,
--Her soul grew enough to show.

When I was seven years old a neighborhood bully stole my bicycle.
I cried for four minutes.
I was angry for about an hour.
Instead of telling him that my dad could beat up his dad
I began to wear my helmet everywhere I went.
I shouted to the other boys in my class,
"I had an invisible superb-deathly speedy-extraordinary-intergalactic- bike."
Two weeks later that same bully gave me my bike back.
As he relentlessly rubbed his knuckles into the top part of my scalp I thought nothing, but that this is the reason why my Grandpa went bald.
Then he muttered through his wheezing breaths of anger,
"My invisible bicycle was much faster than anything your ***** daddy could have bought you."
--Dad's, they love hypothetical fighting.

When I was eleven years old two airplanes hit two buildings in New York City.
I did not understand.
I asked my teacher, "Why would God make evil people?"
Through her tears she explained to me, "Some people are just born evil."
I shouted under my breath, "People are not born evil...
implementing ideas in the sponge of a youth's mind is what is morally corrupt and evil!"
--Corruption is the first cause of terrorism.

When I was fifteen years old I had my first real serious girlfriend.
I did not understand, again.
I exasperated to my father over drinking our first father-son beer,
"How do I know when I love a woman?"
He nostalgically took a drag of his menthol cigarette and as the smoke made it's way through his nose like fog in a canyon he said to me,
"Whenever you look into her eyes and know that there is nothing you wouldn't do for her, that is love."
Before he could reach down and crack another pilsner I told him,
"Dad I look a little lower than her eyes and that is where... everything I would do to her."
--Hormones are a *****.

When I was twenty-one years old my mom told me I couldn't come back home after I graduated college.
I begged her to give me time. I will make it, I promise.
I shouted in the driveway with all my belongings she had neatly placed for me to pack into my car, "How do I know when I am ready to be on my own?"
She didn't have to say anything for there was a brown envelope on top of my neatly folded clothes; that mysterious folding method all mom's know but I
could never seem to figure out,
"Son, you won't know. You won't know until you are poor, hungry, cold and exhausted everyday from trying to make something of your life. The character
you will build will help you later in life when you have a family of your own. I promise. I am not a tyrant, I care too much to see you widdle away here with me
in obscurity and waste all the dreams I know you have. I love you my baby."
--Mom's, even though they don't cut the umbilical chord...they cut the umbilical chord.

Cliff top meditations
the sea, she sings to you

The sun,
shadows left
their mark,
as she cut
through
the dark

blue sky sprites
everywhere
dancing
to
mothers
symphony

Drink, drink, drink,
drink it all in
nature is everything!
no dividing line
no in
no out.

Holding a red, flowing scarf
                                    on a day of all days
                when leaves dance in circles
                in corners tuckered away.

Enchanting weather today
               with a gathering protest of winds
                against an acrylic sky, opaque blue
                                    grasping to steal sway a streak of red.

Laughter stumbles over and down
                on a night of lonely nights
                to be had over lost scarves
                                trickled away by cloy, boiling bathwater.

Phase in blackout, flickering lamp lights
               where past looks back on future
               and memories shift like the earth below
                                                       in constant motion


                                                        ­                                                  she cries
                                                           ­                                                           


   ­                                                                 ­                                                                 ­                  *help me.

you are birdsong
you are moonlight
you are white snow
you are rippling cornstalks
you are rolling hills
you are the sun setting behind the mountains
you are morning air, and dew
you are a ripple in a quiet lake
you are refracted light in a flowing stream
you are a bed of lilacs warmed by the sun

you are beauty
beauty is you