We wake up and plan
to smile at strangers,
and hold the door open,
and say no to anger.

But then there's traffic,
and road rage and red lights,
and cut-offs and cuss-outs,
daydreaming of fights.

Our destination is reached,
and our hands are in fists,
we stomp down the halls,
and crash by accident.

Coffee spills, papers scatter,
faces red, eye contact made,
thoughts are racing, anger raising,
a small flame ignites great hate.

We watch the scene
play in our head,
like directing a movie
and take one is red.

It's yelling and screaming,
insulting and punching,
automatic desire,
but solving nothing.

Aren't we lucky
we aren't bound by our thoughts?
We might be tempted,
but slaves we are not.

Aren't we lucky
if take one leads to
mistakes or trouble
we can choose a take two?

What am I between these driving
delusions of all my anxieties, aside?
When every moment is a revolt against
suicide and my steadying decline
and my internal monologue dissolved
into reminding myself why.
Who am I but ceaselessly unsure
of the lens of my own myopic, miserable mind?
Between the shadows stirring
in the corners of these drying eyes
and the alarming cry for predators nearby,
these countless confines multiplying wildly.
How often I find I am fighting my brain every second, all the time
my own excessive efforts led awry
as my uncertainties undermine.
But now all I know is I am finally
freeing myself from being so spine numbingly paralyzed
now that I've realized I lie
underneath somewhere within
the way of still waking up
from this frozen comatose demise.

When the mountains stretch across a starry sky,
the lone bird yells its final call,
and the desolate song bird sings,
sings that the world may be right
as another preaches its wrongs,
so shall too the ground take us all.
And with misdirection the trees grow
from this very soil which reaps
all life from the very beginnings
to the ending of time.
They pass by, so carefully,
and speaking in ways which are
easy, but misleading, as all
creatures do. Why must the truth
be so difficult to find?
How can they not see in the wake of
the sun's wake, and the passing
of four seasons, that it was not
a dream? Dreaming of times when
Mother Earth was kinder, these blades
of grass reach for the heaven and
moon, in a park with hammocks
where dreams were
destroyed.