Energy radiates and traces my body with celestial tones
I am more alive than I’ve ever been
when surrendering to awe and wonder
the same way my younger self fearlessly did

something about that glimmer hasn’t left yet, may never leave
memories still have flavors to me
mornings with a lake of flakes in my bowl
or years and years later when a fried hangover cure restores me
each month and its esculent flashbacks are a part of me
a cell in the skin
a beaten feather in the wing

something about the glimmer hasn’t left yet
the Earth is still new
and discoveries never expire:
new scenery
new explorations
new chronicles in the cinema
new kindred spirits
new waves of audio
new therapeutic solitudes
all balancing out the
new captivities
new mistakes
new mediocrity
new unhealthy solitudes
and more

until the body is a home base of homeostasis
commensalism at its finest

but something about the glimmer hasn’t left yet, may never leave
I outgrew shadows who doubted their expiration dates
I don’t rubricate the sky in a rage
anymore
don’t let the heartbreak pause a pulse
anymore
don’t let misanthropy obscure who I see
anymore
don’t let uncertainty’s web catch me in a paralysis
anymore

or at least I try

something tells me I’ll never “age out”
of my hunger to live fully
I know deep down you're similar
your craving will not fade into cinders

oh what a feelin!
To be trippin on nostalgia.

I need you in my life, baby

The only productive addiction in my future is to your proximity

A decade of scattered sorrows is but an aching blink when I’m with you

You manifest what I could never say or feel without the fear of exile

Rom-Coms hold no candle or wick to our story

Proposals would only seem like trivial when it comes to you and I

We’re closer than nostalgia and episodic memory
closer than gods and their devotees
closer than the dawn and dusk
when nine to fives carry you through a day

Yet despite our bond
only I can hear you, see you, feel you, think you

So with baited breath I speak your name, or at least what you are known as:

Imagination.

Agitation, despair and its winged variations, you name it
all repressed but still rise to test me

What is my recourse?
I tread lightly on this Escheresque concourse
It’s repeated often, I know
but the pen and keys are my most cathartic release
they’re magma to emerging flames
they’re sedatives for demons and angels alike
that reside on corners of this clavicle

How many steps could you take through my lens, my concave mirror?
Have you felt what I felt?
The brimming, cerebral cauldron bursting, putting volcanic geysers to shame
the questions outnumbering seconds spent since Earth’s nativity
the emotions ripping a rift through which rationality deep dives
it becomes Phelps in unknown depths
your body becomes both a Vatican and a Colosseum,
place of worship and place of war
and you walk the tightropes your vocal chords have morphed into
careful to seem like another replica, don’t wanna upset the blades they all balance on
don’t wanna scare the rest hollow, no,
best to follow and best to follow the regimen:

coffee beans and spice of delusion in the hazelnut syrup,
sip slow
follow the same cycle because change is a cocoon and cocoons ache like the past
keep on pretending to love the workplace
love the norms held over you
puppet strings bring warmth after all
in this solitary world cold as winter missile silos
and just as destructive

So I ask again, have you felt what I felt?

Do the few days in utopia offset the majority on rodent wheels?
Have you risen so high, to satellite peaks, to the best you’ve ever been
only to have the worst waiting on the coin’s parallel?

We flip like saltwater fins and backstroke till a back is left broke
I’m learning to discard hope but breathe in the alternative
I believe in better days, I will carve them from local stone
and build a home upon their surfaces
I now know paradise is a set of blueprints
happiness is no state of mind, it’s a direction to me
you may not notice when you arrive
but you keep going

and that’s the beauty of it
you let it be the wind
It’ll find you on your journey

Tell me again,
have you felt what I felt?

_ _ , _ _ , 2 0 1 9 is a day gone to the ashes of kismet’s pages

the midday zephyrs and wino meditations that ran through streets like rainfall now live in the hippocampus

the bright side’s gone with the dark
the whole day, for what it was, is no longer
and it bugs me out

that through any endless combo of permutations and planetary rotations, the same circumstances that built the ground of yesterday
will never repeat
or will they?

I’ll never know like the licks that reduce a Tootsie Pop to crumbs
I’m not intelligent, I’m dumb
because it took me 27 years to learn the value of 24 hours
to learn that a lotus bloom is something to treasure ten times more than scraps of pure gold

we are the children of nature
what does that make our creations?

Humans birthed a cosmos
of currencies and chambers of computer generated concoctions. . .

are they not descendants of the Mother?
In some abstract way?

Idk, dude, I’m out of it,
if you know me, you know exactly what that means - -
but I digress - -

It’s just that I never got the chance to tell the day how grateful I was to have it
and I now know that wasting time is a luxury modern civilization can enjoy after epochs and eras

this day and age is as far from perfect
as the brain is from perfection,
tech grew faster than the collective consciousness
and we still limit worth and love
to skin and heteronormativity

but at least
for a small sliver of time
things were, in a single moment
.
.
.
pretty good.

High rises burst from soft Earth’s flesh

Was it even ready for us?

From an extraterrestrial’s perspective we’re a disease upon this gentle cerulean Elysium

I’m living in the mouth of duality

I hear it speak as I leave my block and give a peace sign to the abandoned residences in progress

On the block I currently live, the sidewalk is cracked into drunken mazes and yet

                            Directly across, the neighbors stand upon freshly minted asphalt and into a metropolitan construct made for the modern brain: built in amenities, contemporary textiles and garage parking

Are we next?

To be bought and sold, if so, can we at least have a plan for the residents?

Will tenants be invited to the newborn paradise? We have the budget to feed cement trucks faster than hungry mouths. It’s become a bad habit

yet I sit by the man-made imperfections

hoping someone cares enough to drip their Eden into the palms of my neighbors

If time will tell I’ve been getting quite the silent treatment

Travel a little deeper and….

Cosmopolitan crossroads coexist with beggars and lost folk….

Since when was the speech divided between affluent and broke?

"IDK?" The duality replies

I thought you’d say that.

Your roots run thousands of years deep
whether you’re proud or not, I haven’t heard it through the grapevine
but I see you sitting still on this rotating axis mid-bloom, rising to my height
rising with the Fahrenheit

Look across, I’m with the cacao trees
growing yet again, dying off yet again
resurrecting yet again, growing, again

on the same soil, we know the flavors of dust after biting worse
we are neighboring streets but parallel worlds
we are all closer than magnets can fathom with tempers of exploding atoms if ever pushed that far

What would it take for you to see through my eyes?

Well, could you race a maze the shape of brain creases and make it from start to finish in the time a fading wick will diminish

but I’ll show you the routes
put your heart in my compass and unlearn the pillars of your thoughts for a moment
I’ll lay a darker foundation for you to build on,
only for a moment, a sec, a yoctosecond
and you can return to yourself

Look me in the soul
spit your lies on the asphalt
exhale the truth and nothing but
even if it burns on the way out of you
it hurts me too

But it’s just the air I breathe. We adjust.

Like mother Earth, we adjust and keep growing, keep growing, keep growing, keep growing.

You howl across the smartphone speakers
“unstable”
I roar back,
“healing.”
Ah, semantics.

You cling to definitions tighter than static
Your arguments are magnets to my geyser:
stuck, yet I flow on

You build a face for the day,
reinforce it, ready for the wrecking ***** in our vernacular
nothing will shake your perspective
your eyes are glasses to our periscope

The things you’ve been told are just that
and my illness doesn’t make me any less blood and bone
any less ups and downs
any less success and collapse
than you
despite what you’ve heard about depression from some friends or a Facebook post
it’s more than a daily beast
it’s a mountain to climb with only one arm
and I’m on my way to stable footing

You want to attach words like “lazy” and “uncaring” to my identity
go ahead, I pick them off like fleas
they can only drain me for as long as I let them.

I will say “suffering”
you might say “a lil’ sad”
we both sit there, hoping truth blessed us with its language

Only one thing is for certain.
Whatever “it” may be
It.
Won’t.
Stop.
Me.