I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan
To think that a most unambitious slave,
Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne
Where it had stood even now: thou didst prefer
A frail and ****** pomp which Time has swept
In fragments towards Oblivion. Massacre,
For this I prayed, would on thy sleep have crept,
Treason and Slavery, Rapine, Fear, and Lust,
And stifled thee, their minister. I know
Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,
That Virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime,
And ****** Faith the foulest birth of Time.

It is to the free-minded yet civil, the industrious yet unambitious, the honest yet kind, the unencumbered yet giving, the private yet civic, the humble yet wise, the quiet yet firm, the suffering yet dignified, the individual yet understanding and the lawful yet forgiving people that I raise my hand in honor and not to those who would hector us with exhortations from the offices of power or the pulpits of vanity.

FIVE-AND-TWENTY years have gone
Since old William pollexfen
Laid his strong bones down in death
By his wife Elizabeth
In the grey stone tomb he made.
And after twenty years they laid
In that tomb by him and her
His son George, the astrologer;
And Masons drove from miles away
To scatter the Acacia spray
Upon a melancholy man
Who had ended where his breath began.
Many a son and daughter lies
Far from the customary skies,
The Mall and Eades's grammar school,
In London or in Liverpool;
But where is laid the sailor John
That so many lands had known,
Quiet lands or unquiet seas
Where the Indians trade or Japanese?
He never found his rest ashore,
Moping for one voyage more.
Where have they laid the sailor John?
And yesterday the youngest son,
A humorous, unambitious man,
Was buried near the astrologer,
Yesterday in the tenth year
Since he who had been contented long.
A nobody in a great throng,
Decided he would journey home,
Now that his fiftieth year had come,
And "Mr.  Alfred' be again
Upon the lips of common men
Who carried in their memory
His childhood and his family.
At all these death-beds women heard
A visionary white sea-bird
Lamenting that a man should die;
And with that cry I have raised my cry.

western society has, what we call
an ambitious existentialism -
eastern society has, what we call
the expected existentialism -
oh, apologies for the big word,
i know how smart you are
having books for doorstops
with whiffs of the northern wind sometimes
pooping by a hello... but honestly,
the west is so ambitious and the east
so unambitious that we have
a billion Chinese and about a billion
variations of a McDonald's original advert
of: mm... i'm turkey minded to gulp
that **** in!
and stitched up like a diabetic on a diet!
hanky-tango-two-times of
a sneezing donkey's giddy-up toward Golgotha
sounds almost the same.
are you here for the touristy memorandum
hanging on your neck? me too,
i was about to jeopardise two thousand years
of human history with it, imagine! imagine
what an idiot i'd be if i'd actually gone along
with it!

A notch on the car seat is digging into my bare back. We never had *** in a car, in all the two years that we dated. This was our first time, which is funny, so much is over with. It is unoriginally steamy, but this makes the moon look even more muted, and I think about myself as the moon, and you as the sun, as we have always been and always will be in my head. I am intensely serene. I have just given the world’s greatest *******, and you are still kind of panting excitedly next to me. Your *** is still in my mouth. My *** has stained the seats. I am lying a little lower than you, due to the previous positioning of head to *****, and in this moment I am completely unconcerned with you at all. I am having a very silent and extremely imperative one-on-one dialogue with the moon.

And it is very strange, in one second I am looking up and the next I am looking down, it is years and years later, I am looking down at a table, I bought the table off Craigslist from some old lady in Vancouver who promised the leg only rattled occasionally. It didn’t. It rattled all the time.

I am looking down and some guy is standing above me, leaning against the wall. I remember choosing the paint of that wall, it is a light taupe. I remember feeling like my mom. I remember thinking that only a mom would look at the fascinatingly bright rainbow world of Home Depot paint swatches, and choose taupe. I had bought the table because I thought it matched the wall but I was somehow just now realizing that the colors didn't really go together at all.

He leans against the wall, and he looks familiar although I am simultaneously making him up. He has a little mustache, a shade of a beard. His hair is long, and just the right amount of messy, he is exactly what people would call ‘just that kind of guy.’ He is wearing a nice shirt, like he had just come home from work at a job that would pay enough for my parents to be happy. He has tired eyes. He has a kind smile. He looks like he would be a good father. He leans against the wall and I have an intense desire for him to sit down beside me.

I am about to ask him to when he makes this abrupt little laugh-chuckle sound that people in movies make when they’re about to give a particularly awful scripted line. “God, I dated some real airheads in high school.” He really does say the word ‘airhead,’ in my mind. He is that kind of guy. “What about you, babe?” he asks. He rubs his nose with his hand. “Did you have any hot high school lovers?”

And I am back in the car filled with provocative moonlight and innocent, angelic love that drips with that honeyed smell of ***. You have stopped panting. You have scooted your body down beside me so that it fits in a special space that over time has come to feel like an extension of my own body, where it had always been for so many sweet, pivotal, intimate moments of my life. I have a wider mouth now, and bigger eyes, but you still recognize me. I have a little extra skin around my waist too, but you don't seem to mind. Your hand rests humbly on my hip, and you look up at the moon with me. We are quiet for a while, and I cannot help but think that if the guy in the taupe room with the rattling table were there instead of you, he would have said something stupid.

I cannot thank you enough for letting us be simply who we were, in that unambitious and unassuming moment of time. And for bringing yourself to me when I wanted you to but didn't know how to ask, for never trying to be like the movies, and for not using stupid words like ‘airhead,’ for being both transient and infinite, equally and honestly, and for being the hottest ******* high school lover I could have ever asked for.

hard to love
hard to find the time
unambitious obsessive compulsive
the small details are repulsive
reaching for anything to grab on to
under water and blue
you're always wondering what I'm up to
stop saying you want to pick at my brain
I pick at it enough on my own
sometimes I feel that if I screamed loud enough
I could burst myself into flames
passion burns brighter than most things
and winter was more than just a season
it's a state of mind that I'm ready to shake off
where there hell have I been the past three years?
I don't recognize my body
I don't recognize my mind
I'm losing track of time
but I'm on the upswing
at least, I think
I've got to swim, not sink

Laziness it is
Carelessness
Mediocrity twisting me
Causing me to toss and turn
The warmth in the bed is too sweet
I dont want to leave
Foolishness,unambitious
Up I rise, I am my motivation
Back again.