When we devote our heart to what
phases and appalls us,
we leave no room in our hearts and
sit alone waiting on the people of our
dreams.
So many times we take morality and
mold it into our sculpture of opinion.
We take the image of the natural beauty
our friends arrive to take us and photoshop
beauty queens, anorexic girls, naked men,
and clear skinned bashful humans.
We look the way we do,
but we’re not done yet.
Split ends are the representation of a
woman who works hard to earn her
dream and live her destiny one day.
A teenager with blemishes enters the
school doors and cracks quirky jokes
and makes an eight grade girl laugh;
she who is fourteen and feels no inferiority
despite her flat chest and gap tooth.
He is not the fat boy who everybody loves,
he is a human being and is here for the same
reason any model,
rockstar,
dancer,
athlete,
actor,
and Olympian is here
today.
Can we look the way we do and feel as if
we need no photoshop on what is really on
us?
It’s all about
what is
in us.

A thought sometimes forms

I live too much
yet I do too little.
    Woken at strange hours,
never asleep.
       Rapt in raps
       or wrapped in riddles
Chained to links
or hammered to handle
    stubbed to bone
Mens et
               Manus

There is time yet, I swear
        To flourish
To dream

        To make
To be
        To do
        To create

Will I?
We'll see
There's time yet to tell

Be yourself, they say
    The best you you can be
But once more— Will I have time
        To edit

I live less
        I do less
    Portfolio: empty
    or at least, locked away.
        Excitement too.
            Blank slate
Blank palette
Is there any paint?

Can I truly make
        excitement saturate?
Will I be able to place
        value as I see fit?
    Can the world be hewn slimmer, slicker
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Tis daft I think, to amuse such a notion
But not necessarily so daft to be wrong
Emerson called it misunderstood,
Shaw found it unreasonable
But ay, theres the rub
That bed once made, must be lain in and
all dreams which might be had are alone not enough

Bloom effects don't work outside the movies.

Ideas are trash, these are recession times
Deflations made them a farthing a dozen
                                  
                        ­       Started 10.03.11
                               Unfinished
                               D.B. Guy

Ramblings about things I like and things I don’t

(because I have the time to write and I have been asking myself what I really like or want.)

I dislike

things about the modern society sometimes -- like how some people are trapped by their self imposed sense of success driven by their greed and selfishness since they only seems to look out for the wellbeing of themselves. There seems to be something disturbing about the city somehow though I cannot point it out exactly what that makes me feel uncomfortable but perhaps it is the perfect street and buildings all over like a factory manner.

I like

places without the perfect street and buildings and I want to have an adventure and live like going to Cambodia and India to learn about their culture and help some kids there. There I will be rich in experience and purpose and laugh at how sometimes I take things for granted or my own self imposed narrow point of view about the world at large.

I dislike

stereotyping and how human judge people based on external stuff like looks, race or background but I suspect it is our nature as humans to put things into label like marketing or something. Placing labels on someone's appearance or race or anything else alone ***** and stereotypes are disgusting. Take some time to look beyond the surface -- labels are meant for can soup. There is no point having a beautiful façade on the surface but empty in the inside.

I like

beautiful minds, people that are comfortable with themselves despite their imperfection and people being who they are despite it may goes against the norms of society and I think gays are bold (though I am not gay or something), they defeat their insecurities and conquer their inner demons on how people look at them.

I dislike

how cheesy pop music is at times and prefer words that touch me and lyrics that mean more than just about ******, stupid heartbreak or explicit things.

I like

words that make give me inner hope and a will to continue to walk or beautifully written and something that inspire or I can relate to. Perhaps occasionally books that make my heart break a little with a rush of emotion -- even it is somebody's tale or not true but I love the passion of it all.

I like

art. Art that have a story and meaning behind them and not just random models on the cover of the magazines with too much makeup and too much photoshop with the focus on just looks alone.

I like

to take photos of random things and the simple beautiful around us that many of us fail to see and honest heart to heart conversation with a few close friends in a homely environment instead of a big crowd of acquaintance.

I dislike

how some people cannot seem to understand something unless you push it right in their faces, when someone is only nice to me when they need something or just keep up with the appearance which is stupid.

I dislike

each other's' masks and the need to decipher the feelings beyond the masks without being told what it is specifically, people with ******* up beliefs of what is right and wrong and those who can be easily manipulated and people that manipulate them for their own benefit.

I like

beautifully hand crafted items and non factory made stuff. They are one of a kind yet sometimes I can be a walking contradiction and I do like man-made things because once in a while it gives an artificial glint of happiness and if you lost it or break it, you can always have a new one.

I dislike this world.
I like this world.

I want to live in a world with things that bring me a simple glimpse of joy and perhaps that is all I wish to ask for.

Dye the ***** water with contaminates:
                         Blue #1,
                                                  and Sucralose, too.

Bend over to spray
                         the rotting road-**** with perfume.

Perfect the recipe
                         for what was fleshed and fruited
                                                  from animals and plants.

Photoshop the starved and diseased
                         with smiles
                                                  and beautiful bodies.

Clothe the *****
                         with lingerie, with heels,
                                                  and with stones.

Paint the roses red.
                         We paint the white roses red.
                                                  We’re painting the white roses red!

i’ve been photoshopping old memories in attempts to bring back color to over-faded, twice-forgotten black-and-whites
tried dodge and burn but that’s too close to what happened
you dodged so i burned like a stack of photographs and albums in a house fire started by christmas lights
maybe if i crop myself out you’ll turn bright again
until your whole face washes out and i can feel like you’re a stranger again
replace all your blues with harsh reds and sharpen all of my blurred edges
for a while things felt like polaroids,
instant results
but then i realized that i was just wasting film by taking one photo per roll at a time
i was ruining prints of thirty five other potential moments
we were never digital
but we were only ever digitalized,
conversations only spent on snapchat and half-second smiles in hallways
i’ll layer all of our photographs
because we sure as hell never had layers then
your smile is the same in every single one of them, but my expression is always off and my eyes are never quite the same level of jaded
somewhere along the line i’ve realized that no photographic evidence was ever taken of our life
i’m just looking at bad sketches with too many filters
i don’t even remember the sound of your voice
i’m writing poetry about strangers again,
people who have never existed outside of my head
maybe that’s just a bad coping mechanism, pretending that you’re just pretend
but i’ve been struggling with hallucinations lately
because photographs and light and sound is so **** easy to bend into whatever shapes you want memories to take
i haven’t trusted myself for three years now and i’m not about to start
overconfidence leads to the edges of cliffs
and i’m all too familiar with the steep drop of the ravine
when did photographs of you become a foreign language to me?
when did i stop recognizing either of us? why can’t i look myself in the eye anymore?
photoshop steals the life from my laptop battery
and reminiscing on things that may or may not have actually happened steals energy from me
so i’ll try to see if we can forcefully power down this crooked old machine
unplug me
i don’t want these memories saved anymore
delete everything
delete everything
unplug me
delete me
delete me

She was
fascinated by the way the beard floated across his face and disappeared without a trace into his ears and thought it was a camera trick.

The camera doesn't lie is a lie, though we still believe what we can see,no longer polaroid the humanoid is now devoid of all reality,
the photoshopper shops and crops,lops the tops and bottoms of his pics,sticks in bits that don't belong,digitised, giving verbal to the lies in view and finding few who disagree with the elements,reformed and shaped, the new caped crusader,tints,tone raider,
I saw Douglas Bader with two legs but peg a negative and hold your tongue,I like to watch the colours run on the drip dry line,processing time.
I don't like the fact that numbers attacked this art in forms of decimals it makes us vegetables
relying on the cut and crop of photoshop must stop.

I told her that it was no trick,he had the beard but the camera was sick,she listened to me in disbelief and from her briefcase took out a camera and snapped a picture of his face,
and now I'm fascinated in a way as to whether we can photoshop a rainy day and turn it into something good
I wonder if we could or not,must
take a look at
photoshop.

Society is so focused on being flawless.  Perfect.  No one is flawless, not even Beyonce.  We will forget who we are on the inside, and soon that won’t even matter because the physical appearance is the main priority.  Women these days are spending so much effort trying to look perfect, which hurts.  Pretty hurts.  Society is expecting women to look perfect, otherwise people will judge.  ‘Perfection is a disease of a nation’. The showbiz industry is giving a negative message to the world.  Photoshop is one of them.  Making a celebrity look flawless is fooling the world into thinking we must look like that.  Spending so much money on clothes, hair etc. but we don’t need to focus on that because all that matters is on the inside, which most people don’t seem to see anymore.  We are constantly getting the messages in our mind that we must be flawless, and sooner or later, this is a disease.  Some of us can’t take it anymore, which leads to anorexia, bulimia, insecurities, and issues with body image.  Pain also takes over our minds, which is ridiculous.  Even celebrities have gone through this because in our naïve little minds, we are thinking we have to be pretty.  There is so much pressure it takes over our minds, and that’s the only thing we think about.  We look into the mirror despising ourselves, because we are who we are.  Society has created us into thinking there’s a certain way we must look, which there is not.  Our flaws make us who we are, makes us positively different.  Unique.  But we aren’t allowed to think that way because the media isn’t allowing us to.  When people change, they are only cheating on themselves because media displays images of what we should and shouldn’t look like.  It’s not their fault though.  They can’t help it.  Changing, like getting botox or body implant is only giving us a masquerade.  It’s a mask to hide our real, inner beauty, which the media has taken the idea away from us, to become people who we actually aren’t.
And in the end, we know that pretty hurts.
a.a.

It's okay.
The more you envy the photos,
the more *******,
the more negativity,
the more stupidity you are fed;
Because you are sautéd in a lie.

i still **** my tummy in,
imagine it smooth.
my mom was surprised when i confessed
i was shirtless,
with nothing but my sports bra.
(at least I’m tan)
you say you like my tummy,
and some days I do too.
i still slap my thighs,
imagine scrawny flesh,
stretch marks are lost among
photoshop wonderland.
i’m an hourglass figure, you say,
but I find it silly we compare body types
to glasses, and fruit,
for we are a combination of things,
we are stars, and seas, and candy,
and railroad tracks that sometimes go around in circles until
we *****.
i still see my limbs as different people,
and i wish i could detach them like the toxins in my lungs.
people like my ***,
so maybe that’s why I move it so much when I’m drunk.
people say I’m Arabic,
people say I’m Mexican,
people say I’m Muslim,
but really I’m all of those combined into a mixing bowl,
and one day maybe, I’ll make cupcakes
and swallow them whole.

Go on girl, use all of that photoshop to cover up your blemishes, dark circles and what not.
We all know that you're ugly inside.