This world is a nightmare.
It is something dark and sinister
and destructive and
wrong.

It is made up of people who
do not laugh at their faults,
people who do not think for
themselves when others are
willing to do it for them.
People with no capacity for wonder,
no drive to learn or to grow.

Every time someone stands for something
or tries to help they are cut down
by simple minded people
that are afraid of a world where
they might yet be proven wrong.
Every time a leader rises to right
a wrong he becomes some small piece
of the problem he set out to fix.

We do it.
We are poison. We are poison.
A product of a tough planet.
A **** or be killed kind of people.
But we could be so much more.

If only we tried.
We can still change.
We have only to find a reason to.

We inherited a nightmare, from a
generation of people who meant well.
We were given a promise of a bright
future and delivered something foul
and expired.
We don't have to settle for making
it bearable. We can change it.
Fashion it into something we can
be proud of.

We are so small, so insignificant.
Yet we are so great, so mighty.
We can accomplish so much.
If only we tried.

Why can't that be reason enough?

You must learn to forgive.
No one is perfect, and in that
broken person sleeps the very
creature which will rip the
heavens apart and remake a
world that thrills and awes.

You must learn to forget.
Because old battles don't need to
have a victor. They don't need
to become new wars,
better weapons, or another
mark in the “cons” column.

You must learn to stop comparing notes.
No one sees the world the way
you do, with the wonder,
with the cynicism, with the tired
eyes of experience or the fresh
eyes of hope.

You must learn to let a part of yourself die.
Holding on to a single thing is dangerous.
No one thing makes us what we are,
no interest or hobby or opinion can
possibly build a human being as
unique and clever as we all are.

You must learn to retreat.
While you live there is always
hope.
The beginning of a new day,
as wonderful and memorable as
you can make it.

You must learn to laugh.
My god are we flawed, useless
broken things on this tired
worthless world.
It's hysterical.

You must learn to accept the consequences.
Take the step, not ignoring the
possibilities for disaster, but relishing
them. How exciting can one life be?
When it is over, you will have your answer.

We must learn to grow.
Evolve or die.

There was time still!
My god there was time.
Time to do the millions of stupid
things we always talked about doing.
Time to run and dance and play,
like dogs or like children.
Time for so much more.
So much more.

You stole it away.

Thousands of fireflies, trapped
in mason jars, with air holes
poked in the top.
How were we to know that they
would escape?
We were so young.
My god we were young once.

You had those Velcro shoes,
you had such a time trying to
remember what Bunny Foo Foo
was supposed to do.
I'm not sure I ever let you live it
down.
I remember those Velcros pounding
the rain puddles next to my cheap
fish heads, a long time ago.

I loved you then. In those days
when tomorrow was an eternity away.
When eternity itself had no meaning
to us.
It does now. It has so much meaning
to us now. You saw to that.

Lesson learned. Damage done.

I hated you for a long time.
I hated you so much that it stirred me
from my sleep, shaking with quiet rage.
There was not a horrible word invented
that I did not call you.
Sitting in that church, that ******* church.
Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.
Who were these people?
Did they mean anything to you?
You *******, just answer me.
Just sit up, you *******.

I don't hate you anymore.
It's not that I came to understand,
like you said I would. It's not that
I grew up enough to lament.
It's just been a long time.
It's been such a long time.
You would have loved what we've
made of the place. You really would have.

When I see a picture of you, rare though
they are, I do not wince. I do not cringe.
I do not scream.
But I also don't cry, I don't long, I don't
wish.
I do pity, I do sigh, I do care.
There was so much time, Corey.
There was so much time.
My god was there time.

There is a part of me that loves it
when you haven't washed your hair
in four days, loves the smell of it.
There is a part of me that doesn't understand
your playful nature about ******,
but loves you for it regardless.
There is a part of me that watches you
play your video game even though I'm
pretending to be caught up in my book.

You told me that your eyes are blue
when you are happy.
I confess that at first I never noticed,
that is until the day they weren't.
Eyes like a mood ring, we are
a curious species, and you a prime
specimen of the lot.

Your weight is so slight to me, even though
you never seem to be happy with it.
Beating your hands against your thighs,
complaining that most girls aren't so
thick. I don't understand how you can't
just look in the mirror and see that you're
beautiful.
I don't understand that you can't see your
life swelling to burst, infecting the world
with laughter, and with joy.
It seems so obvious to me.

Five years into the experiment of us,
and I am utterly captivated by you.
This is not a freak occurrence, not some
strange collection of lies and comfort,
every time I see you, I can feel my cold,
cynical outlook melt into the
living, breathing, screaming word of hope
you create around you.
Your own personal bubble of paradise.

I have green eyes always. Dull and uninspired.
But you can see the storm there,
just behind these eyes, these old man's
eyes on a young man's face.
(Remember when they said that?)
You, of all people, can see through the disguise
of my eyes, you can see into the heart
of me.

I stand in awe of your movement.
Did you know that?
I suppose not. You're every move is a
miracle to me.
When I freeze, so struck by you,
I see the slow smile spread, the giddy
joy that moves from your lips to
your limbs. That compels you to
run for me, across crowded rooms,
empty hallways, and filthy bedrooms.

My god are your eyes blue today.

Everyone is isolated, if only they
would stop to think about it.
Because regardless of the battles
we fight, the wars we wage or
the love we spread, the love we make,
we walk through our dreams, and our
world with only one voice in our head.

It is not always a pleasant voice, and it does
not always ask of us the things we would
like to believe we are capable of.
Sometimes it will say “run.” when we always
thought we were the type to stand.
Sometimes it will say “yes” when we know
that the occasion calls for no.
Sometimes it will tell us to hate even when
it understands that the intentions were good.

It does not speak in hollow platitudes.
It does not spare feelings.
It does not care that a world exists beyond
the frame it is concealed within.
It is small, weak, self serving, and scared.

My god! Where is the animal confidence?
Here at the top of the food chain of countless
ecosystems, it's secret ambition is to make us think
like prey. Ever watching the ground, the corners the sky
for the predators it knows are coming.

And in the moment, when a plan goes south,
when, looking back at you with boredom glazed eyes,
she says that this was not what she expected, when
you wake from your lonely dreams to an unexpected
noise from a distant room, the clenching of your
bowels screaming terror unimagined.
In the moment when it is right about the
hostile world you inhabit
It doesn't even have the courtesy not to
scream that it told you so.

We are all isolated, with an animal fear
screaming against a civilization it doesn't understand.
We are all lost in a spinning ball of predictable yet
frightening chaos, trying not to listen
to the part of us that wants only our safety.

Cowardice is a word that crawls inside of us.
Digs out a pit in the stomach, and lives there
surrounded in your shame and your guilt
and grows fat.
Because it's easy to listen, to accept
the single minded voice. It is so hard,
so damnably difficult, to aspire toward
a loftier goal, to ignore the voice.
We are all Isolated, if we think about it.

My city has a heartbeat.
I can feel it thunder beneath my feet
as I race across her massive face.
She has a whisper, not a voice like we know it,
but a whisper always.
Telling me what she wants and
more so what she needs.
The wind, roaring through my city is her own voice
and instrument, it plays her mournful song.
The song has only three words in it's composition.
Vengeance, justice and hope.

Steam pours from the manholes,
distorting vision, adding one more
in an endless number of reminders that
my city lives, my city has a presence.
Has a pulse.

The gear, the pulsing brain of this
once airborne metropolis,
sits still against the night sky
she remembers as her former company.
Her companion.
From here, from this vantage point, I can see her.

She's more or less a mile,
in any direction from this point, long.
Her streets are a complicated maze,
a spiral built on a grid.
Her boarders are round. She was once known
as the circle city, another grim reminder
of her days above it all.
Within her boarders there are millions
of nooks and crannies. Hard to find, hidden away spots
that people can live in, work in, or hurt each other in.
Her people are aimless.
They are concerned,
they are worried,
but they are proud.
We used to be something,
and one day we will be again,
she will be again.

From here I can see her.
In her entirety,
like no where else in the
whole of her body.
She's beautiful.

Before there was a field,
filled with fragrant, though strange,
flowers, stretching on forever.
It was in this place, this bastion
at the end or the beginning of
eternity that I found you the first time.
Splayed, as you often are, against the
grasses, eyes watching the clouds as they
find their way across a lazy sky.
You with your impossible answers to
serious questions. You and your
******* riddles.

There is only this room now.
It is squat, squalled, musty in now
familiar ways. It is piece of mercy,
in an ocean of hell.
Beyond these flimsy four walls
lays entropy, the end of all things.
A nothingness of another kind, like
I'd never known before, and hopefully
will never know again.

There are no windows in my room,
for that is how I have come to think of it,
as my room. Yet even windowless I can
still stare into the vast emptiness it is wrapped
up in. I can see the frightful void.
I know what lurks just behind the horrible
safety of my walls.
I scream into the void, if only to
keep my sanity.

You put me here. You wanted me here.
It was through your machinations,
devious and brilliant as they are,
that I find myself facing this nothing.
This was all just one more of your
self-serving, stupid ******* riddles.
And I, ever the pragmatist, ever the
logical counterpoint,
I played into it.

I thought we were so clever, to put
these symbols on our faces.
To shout to the world that this, not
the weak beings we used to be, but
these powerful, noble creatures.
This is who we are.
But I didn't pick the symbols.
They were always there.
You expected them to be.

You counted on my arrogance.
Oh, but you know me so well.