You can be so arrogant sometimes it astounds me. The way in which you can casually dismiss those that love you, not even acknowledging the presence of those that long to be close...

And still I love you, we love you, the world loves you. That what's so infinitely frustrating isn't it?  That you have all these charms, abilities, powers, and you let us know, you let us feel inferior. But thats not your fault is it? That we feel intimidated around you. If we could ask, if we could say, what do you think of us? What might you reply? Would you throw you head back and laugh? No. Some might think you would but I know you better then that. You'd say you're human. That you're scared too. That at times you feel only as powerful as the weakest of entities , that you know how it feels to be afraid.

You're love and lust for life is incredible, you even surprise me after all these years. Few people know just how grateful your are to be alive. That every time you open you're eyes, every time you inhale you're grateful... Few people know that you have an overwhelming loving energy, and it scares you. That you try to **** it with drugs and alcohol, scared it might consume you, bringing about uncontrollable laughter or tears. Few people know how you long to be close, how you want to smile at them, hug them, touch them........but don't.

How you'd rather face a man with a knife then rejection. How being unwanted is something you've grappled with you're whole life. Few people know you've carried the scars of you're best friends death for the past 6 months everyday.

No one knows you've hated you're intelligence. That the burden of knowing consumes you. Knowing how your step dad threaten to **** himself, knowing that you're mother tried to **** herself. That if she hadn't put down that note you wouldn't even be here. Knowing you're the product of a drug addict and a girl rebelling against her family. No one knows that you have no one to hold and hold you. Someone, with which you can be weak and sink into away from a world that has given you nothing but tough love.

Thats harmed you, stabbed you,starved you.

But know this, the world turns and the day will come when you will never settle for less,
the day will come when you stand strong and confident in your own skin,
the day will come when you emerge as a lion defending those that love you against the world,
the day will come once again when you love freely,

Know that light pierces dark,
the individual can conquer,
that to be a man is to be honest, responsible, and caring, not a stereotype,
know that you were made for a reason
know that you're scars will heal,
and more  than anything else know that,
i know,
that all this will come to pass beyond a reasonable doubt

because I......am you

She has flawed carved into her arm, just above her wrist veins
wonders to herself, how she can escape her pain,
feels justified...in the sadness that she calls her own,
I told her, it isn't wise, to make this place your home...

Black and White photos, she's in her room head down,  
deep mind state, like an artist, she feels that within her image she has found,
A way to project that she is deep,
I smile faintly and whisper, whatever helps you sleep...  

Sadness is a ball and chain, and life is just a game, but when theres sunshine outside, its a pity to claim that all you see is rain,

I've never felt that it is deep, or particularly difficult, to cut oneself off, to cut oneself out, or...to cut oneself...

Much more difficult to wade into the sea of madness that is the collective human experience and proudly proclaim, I do this for me, I do this for you, I choose to labour towards happiness, because the sadness isn't true,

They say the truth is an ugly *****, and lies are her beautiful sister... she never looked so lovely as when she was crying, I swear it was so hard to resist her...

But the tears were the lie and now here is the ugly truth...life is full of love, if you cant connect, perhaps you should investigate why, and if the reason is that your sadness somehow gives you a feeling that you have a monopoly on the truth...well then... i say to you...

99% of what we go through is positive
1% is negative
and this is common to everyone, who has ever lived
you ask me what hidden condescension my eyes hide when I gaze at you,
its because all that i have said to you is true...
and you have chosen to focus on the 1%...
the reason why...is the only thing that isn't evident

I don't think i'll ever fall in love...

Even as I write these words I can imagine the faces of my closest girlfriends, and the well meaning statements of reassurance such a statement might illicit...  

Only... I do not need to be reassured...
When I say i don't think i'll ever fall in love, I'm not speaking from a place of defeat, but rather from a place of recognition, and understanding.  

"Oh, Don't you worry Phillip, you will find a great girl one day :) "

Thank you for the vote of confidence Ashley, I know it comes from a place of great intentions, but...the truth is I have met great women, some I call family, others I call friends, still some I call teachers... and then...some... I whisper to, softly in the night


I have been blessed to meet women who are strong, talented, intelligent (many much more intelligent than I) and beautiful, dear lord, if there is one thing I am grateful for, it is the multitude of beautiful women you have put into my path, their faces shine with perfect symmetry, sharp jaw lines  holding delicate female features, which pluck upon the silver strings of a midnight liar named desire...

It is not for a lack of meeting women that I say I don't think I will ever fall in love, and it is not a shortcoming on their end or a shortcoming on my end that breed this idea, rather, this idea developed from the realization that "to fall in love" has a connotative meaning, a meaning which has been bought by corporations and mass marketed through our media in the form of stories, books, and movies, with redundant story lines that follow a formulaic model that ends in either two dimensional happiness or despair...

When I say, I don't think i'll ever fall in love... I am not saying, I will never love...  
I am in love...
I am in love with life, the subtle intricacies in a delicate tapestry,
I am in love with family, who take time out of their day's to mould me,
I am in love with friends, who hold me down through tragedy,
and...I am in love with all that I have met...

Its just that...I don't believe my love has to come after a fall...

I believe that love is simultaneously eternal and momentary, that the moments crafted in love will be echoed through the halls of eternity, until the Valkyries of Valhalla bring their weary heroes home...I believe that relationships are meant to be fluid, that we are meant to freely flow in and out of one another's lives, and through honesty and consent craft the parameters of our relationships, rather than trying to take people, and through some antiquated notion of "relationship" form a shallow contract to absolve our insecurities,  

I've been in formal relationships where I have felt choked, as if the words I will never leave you linked together around my neck to form a chain of lies ending in...never again

And... I have had friends with whom passions have arisen, and in the dark of night and the secrecy of our abode, our bodies have fused together into a tangled, and sweaty heap called freedom,

To put it simply, I have been in loveless relationships, and love full...well...by contemporary standards...love full nothing's

So please know...That when I say I don't think i'll ever fall in love, I am not saying I will never love...but rather... I will never fall...for the ******* lie...that love can only be fostered through some mundane form of courtship doomed to die...through some, incorporeal ignorance that makes one feel he or she owns the other, fall for the bull that flowers on Valentines day somehow means I get you, or that a diamond means, I love you...

But...also know...that i don't say I will never fall in love...
But rather...
I don't THINK I will ever fall in love...
Because no one person knows the future...

And it may just so happen that one day, in some dusty..smokey..coffee shop I  may be reading this very poem... and in the audience there may be a women thinking to herself that sounds exactly like me...

And through perfect symmetry I may be swept away, the sand castles of my doubt cast out to sea by the tidal waves of our emotion

But...I still don't think I will ever fall in love
Because real love dosen't make you fall,
It makes you soar aloft wings of passion and truth,
And so after this whole rant I believe my original statement needs a revision,
Because now I DO KNOW...that i will never fall in love...
But if i meet the right person...
I just might rise to the occasion

You're dangerous, the way in which, a subtle word, your tongue does pick, a smile on, a daggers edge, shy coated memories on which we dredge, up feelings of current circumstance, the lovers last midnight glance, she plucks and strokes a careful tune, a harp that makes the lovers swoon, a *** a tat and time goes on, until the final stroke off an eastern gong,
will it ever be revealed? that which is the truth?
... I really don't want to go babe, but someone else is waiting for this telephone booth!

I have travelled, many a weary step, so long, and for so long with baited breath,

ANXIOUS

ready to be relieved of the responsibilities of life
craving freedom from calamity and strife
frantic and frenzied
as though at some point i might find the answer
to an oft ignored question

i look up at the stars, as they look down at me
and bask in the glory of the past and present's symmetry
because there are so many of us...
all bound to humanity
now passed through the flame of mortality
the "others"
the ones who have asked themselves why they're here
the intellectuals warriors who have no need for fear
when they look into the veil of death
and sense the first vibrations on the pulse of life

when i used to dip my pen into the ink,
metaphorically, because my  computer helps me to think

i used to doubt engaging in the process of creation
it used to enrage
my self serving denomination

the sensation of never quite being able to express yourself as fluidly as option b
or the devilry that comes from hiding yourself within the layers of flesh referred to as anatomy

i use to cower by act three,
run from the stage before the audience saw through me,
never receiving my final bow

but now i realize,
that at the core of my existence
imbedded in my instincts
is the ability of my creator....

and I'm a fan

so now when i dip my pen to the paper
I'm a masked crusader
cool, liek darth vader
and i aint never going back
to that tired dusty beaten track
refered to, in passing, as memory lane

I see...

Majestic stallions, composed of stars, riding tides, of deep night sky,  
In my eyes,

I feel...
reverberations of water on flesh,
as mothers tears give meaning to young sons early death,

I hear anger, in the voice of the old, whipping youths ears, like december cold,

Can i speak? may i be so bold,
as to caress the worlds order, and try to fold,
solid institutions cracking with decay,
whose every single fisher seems to give way,
to a ray,
of light,
previously unseen,
the veiled confusion of darkness ripped by knowledge at the seem,

choose never to break,
from,
my dream world till kingdom come,
drunk off imagination like a pirate off ***,
running with mental agility a bullet out a gun,
when all is said and done,

DREAMS SET ME FREE!
unequivocally,
like an ancient man staring into a stream,
my dream,
reflects me,
and when my eyes close,
i start to see

two sides of the same coin, two parts of the same struggle, a heavier burden to juggle,
Ive seen trouble in the eyes of the children on the news,
visions of the glazed and un-phased, shuffling in ruin
as foreign investors appraise the worth of the people theyre *******
the one moral man looking in the mirror asks what are we doing?

Coffee and cocoa-beans,
oil and toil,
diamonds on the queens ears ripped from the soil,
these are the things for which we ****,
and people wonder why they can never get their fill,
why they feel morally ill?
perhaps paying taxes dosen't wipe the dirt from your fingers,

halfway around the world construction workers hurry the child to drop his dead mothers hand,
so they can bulldoze her home because the land is high in demand
for agricultural redevelopment, swine being brought in for re-settlement
people for pigs, the market is your master,
the dollar is your god, and your life is a disaster

the reason your life is a facade, is you cant turn false idols through ego worship into god
from a fake wife with fake *******
to fake kids with fake mental problems,  A.D.D.  generation and corrupt therapists to absolve them
to fake pastors, with fake ideals
this is what happens when one man profits from what another man steals,
and corporations re-define how love feels

and the rich try and justify why the poor have no food
why their own poor have no food, but why its more important to allocate funds to the protection of crude,
this is the slavery to which you have been raised
the hypocrisy of democracy can go on for days,

America, land of the thieves, where ideology is cheaper than bark on the trees
America, the land of the lie, where the children of the poor happily die
and yet America, the land where ideals meet reality, where the hopeful optimism of the middle class rightfully challenges the decadent edifices of the status quo
and where evil in the hearts and the minds of all of us has a chance to be laid to rest through the spirit of altruism,
America the ultimate battleground for truth to triumph over lies,
but where you stand, in the end, is the ultimate surprise.