Fingers brush
Ephemeral Bliss
Reality

Yellow bird goes tweet.
Colorless gas drowns it out
Blue tears go drip drop.

A boy trapped in a growing man's body.
Emotions uncontrollable
Environments unstable
Afraid of the past
Terrified of the future
Living only reluctantly in the now.

His history is a mess of abuse, negligence, heartbreak, and death. He forgets the first, pretends the second wasn't his fault, relives the third daily, and is so used to the fourth he just doesn't care.
Tragedy isn't tragic when it's the norm.

Misused by his father,
Mistreated by his peers,
Misunderstood by the world.

And yet, he tries.
His emotions get the best of him.
So he separates. Confronts. Analyzes.
Reinstates.

Stronger than ever, he tries again.
He no longer denies his emotions, and instead accepts them gladly.

Things are fine.

But he can feel them slipping.

So he devotes himself to his own, personal solution. He works day in, day out to understand just who he is and what he's feeling.

Acting isn't the right word, but it's the one people use.

He prefers "living."

Having done it on a daily basis for years, it only makes sense to continue to do so.

But this time, with a new goal. A new frame of mind.

He wants to be happy. happy with his past, happy with who he is, what he's done, where he's going. Just, happy.

Not that he isn't, now. Now, he's reflecting.

In his quest to trust himself, he loses the trust of others.

"You're an actor. I'm scared that I can't tell when you're being honest, or just pretending."

I'll ignore them saying that what I do on a daily basis is pretend, and just say, it still hurts.

It hurts more than everything up to that point and he begins to lose trust in himself.

The first time he hears it, doubt.
The second, fear.
The third, anger.

And as he writes and/or speaks it again, to taste the taunt on his tongue, for the eight thousand millionth time...
Vulnerability.

And this isn't his usual subject. usually he tries to change the lives of others, to write about something more than himself.

Right now, that isn't the case.

Right now, he's dropping his facade, one he'd forgotten he was wearing, and begging strangers who he can trust more than his loved ones to simply trust him.

It's hard. To try and make the world better. He's not a saint, or martyr, and he's not trying to be. He's human, and he's in more pain than he'll ever let on.

Except amidst a sea of faces and words and songs and writing and ideas he may never see again. Here, he finds comfort. Trust.
Peace.

Here he is more at home than in his mother's arms.

All he asks is for you to trust him, in kind.

He thanks you now, having finished reflecting, for doing so.

Growth.
It's why we exist.

We conquered the earth, and moved to the seas.
We conquered the seas, and moved to the skies.
We conquered the skies, first with both our bodies and minds.

And then we moved to the unknown.

Historically speaking, when we have been told "you can't,"
We have responded with an equally indignant silence,
Proving ourselves through our actions as opposed to our words.
Proving that we can.

And then we moved to the unknown.

First, came the architects of the mind.
Then, the architects of the land.
Ad nauseam.

Growth is something we, as a race, have always excelled at.

So why have we stopped?

Look at us.

"But we haven't stopped!"
Pay attention to the world around you.

We are bombarded by a barrage of bullets, blood, and banality.
On a daily basis.

Constant updates of what's wrong with the world.
Masked as calls to action.
In truth a cry for help.

Fear mongering is a commonly used term, nowadays.
Let's not even break down what's wrong with that sentence,
As you can do that yourself,
But instead direct our attention to the fact that it is, in fact, wrong
And it's destroying not only our country, but our world.
And no, I am not full of so much pride in this country that I believe we are the world.

I am full of so much fear that we can destroy it.

And we can, quite easily, at that. It's not a question, at this point.
America is the most militaristic nation in the world.

Ironically enough, this is in fact one of the things we pride ourselves in.

But we spend all of this money protecting ourselves from the wrong thing;
America is a nation at war with itself.

What do we see, on a daily basis?

Pull out your phone.

I'm serious.

Open any kind of news.
Search for the following words in the headlines:
Accident
Mistake
Pain
Loss
Blood
Tragedy
Violence
Raci­sm
Brutality
Shooting
Death.

It's not a question of whether or not you saw them. It's a question of how many you saw.

These are the kinds of topic that sell the best, with media. Research supports that this is in fact what people pay the most attention to.

No ****. I would pay attention, too.

Except that I don't. Because the news doesn't just report the story any more. They add a little pizzazz. Something extra, to make it more attention grabbing.

Nine times out of ten, this extra something is fear.

It's one thing to see an unfortunate tale of a car accident amidst the rest of your daily news.
It's another to see EIGHT PEOPLE SHOT in big, bold, all caps letters
Then to have the "professional" news people drop buzz words like
"Racism, stereotyping, Gun control," and, my favorite, "political agenda."

When all we are shown is fear, all we will learn is fear.
A country united in arms, divided against itself.

Brother against brother.
Father against son.
Politicians against the ideas they're supposed to represent,
And the Law working against it's people.

People act as if police brutality is the norm.
People believe our leaders are out to get us.
Other races aren't to be trusted.
Other religions aren't to be believed.
Other peoples aren't to be offended.
Radical ideas aren't to be conceived.

Change is an outdated word. We have stagnated, and will perpetually decline unless something is done about it.

And, well, when the nation is too scared to do anything about it?

We must grow, or die trying.

At least that way, people might notice.

Have you ever watched a candle burn?
Flicker, fade, wasting away
The wicker waxes and wanes in pain
All consuming and never full
Unsatisfied with life so dull
It grows and builds and strikes and screams
It roars and eats and tears at your seams
You want to let it out but it never quite seems
Like you can.

We live in a world today
Where people's candles melt away
They drip and drop and slowly fall
A silent plop, heard by all
But acknowledged by none
For they have their own flames to deal with.

I was reading the news the other day
And, apparently, there's this new invention
A mental confection
At some grad school somewhere
That's still in the works
From minds of the same inflection
That uses sound waves to
Extinguish
Fire.

Prototypes,
The device and young minds alike.
Relatively unheard of, at the time,
But they may one day save countless lives.

An interesting thought, that sound overcomes
That an amplifier may dampen
Sound inside our hearts
The burning flame that rips apart.
But fire consumes the air itself
And what sound do you make when you cannot breathe?
You open your mouth and you can only seethe
The fire consumes and grows in height
And try as you can with all your might
To make a sound, some drowning noise
The fire devours, ignores and toys
With you.

Our lives are filled with sound.
Why is it then that all around
People fall and fires fade
And candles wax and slowly wane
We burn alive from inside out?
Can this be stopped with just a shout?
A cry for help, a strangled plea
"Please, just listen to me!"
But our lives are filled with sound;
Fires burning, melting down-

Until we learn to hear the truth
Ignore the flames and blow the roof
Off our little hearth, and open wide
Expand our limits, let the flame inside
Perish away and finally breathe
Free from the fires that forced us to seethe-

A prototype, that's all it is.
Relatively unheard of.

A gentle reprise from the world's harsh sounds,
A melody, unheard, unseen;
Silence, it deftly and swiftly surrounds,
Transforming your thoughts to visions obscene.

****** and vile, cruel thoughts in your head
Sinister thoughts leave you begging for death.
An ominous visage fills you with dread,
You squirm and struggle, grasping for breath.

And suddenly, crash! A harsh sound awakes.
You curse and you smile, you've won this fight.
The visions are gone, the night you forsake
Cacophony bursts from your chest in full might.

Silence; a gift, or a curse in disguise?
Only you know what in your dreams lies.