The sun shows white across my golden shoulders
I lay in the field of oblivion,
Sweet wildflowers dance on either side of me
My eyes are sealed shut
Yet the sun's rays still try to touch my retinas
My eyelids translate the rays into the color white
Causing my mind to drip with the essence of blankness

Your scent is palpable and it thrusts me into a prison cell
Of my own creation
I cause my vision to blur
Because you sit in front of me
And I'm intoxicated because of your presence
I'm trying to retain any sense of inhibition I have left
Within my quaking mind,
I think you turn to say hello,
I see you're smiling from my peripheral vision
I look straight forward and
Walk away

Maybe you think I'm cold or callous or aloof
But the truth is I am burning up inside for you
And I just don't know any other way to contain within me
This wild passionate flame
For if I unleash it
It could start a fire
That would not be able to be controlled
It would burn what I have now
A figment of what could be

Sometimes when I see you,
I close my heart
Because you're so beautiful to behold
And the inside of my heart turns white,
It becomes stark and cold
To the point where love it cannot hold
But when I get home
my mind scolds my heart
For being so full of fear
To the point that in the face of prospective love
I wish to disappear.

This darkness, Unshakable
Me- So very breakable
All you see
Is the shell, quaking, aching
Outside of me
And me, contained inside
Hidden away from real life
Because if I spoke my radical ideas out in the open
My life would become broken
Like glass shards strewn across a wooden floor
My feet would bleed but my heart would bleed more

The lackluster people cannot comprehend
The ideas outside of tradition and systems and dogma
And forgive me for my stuttering and reserved nature
It takes time for the shackles to melt
For I must be certain that I can be my true self
And express myself with no filter, then the lock on my vocal cords will open
It takes a skilled blacksmith to break me free from my chains
So I can feel at ease

Sometimes, it feels like people are my disease
Society, groupthink...
Can cause so much trouble
I know I must take responsibility for the way I feel
And steer clear of blame
But I'm constantly thinking,
If only we all thought for ourselves,
If only we truly stuck to our morals
And weren't afraid to be aberrant,
Then maybe we'd have more people like Nelson Mandela,
Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Junior, Abraham Lincoln (and many more) in this world
None of these people were perfect, and some of these people sustained traumas and lived as pariahs in their communities and even in their entire countries
But to some who are outliers, these people were heroes
And thankfully they are regarded as heroes by the vast majority today
Sometimes to live a big life beyond triviality,
We must say no to comfort, our ego, our limiting beliefs
And say yes to a self-less life replete with love, curiosity and abounding possibility

This darkness that overcomes me intermittently and unexpectedly
Can only be conquered
By "looking at the bigger picture" and
Recognizing that even though I often times feel like I don't fit in
And I refuse to assimilate to a subculture because I will not sacrifice the lifelong endeavor of adding to a reservoir of knowledge and wisdom
For ignorance and blind faith and groupthink
Where people are discouraged from having their own unique and radical ideas that defy tradition or what the majority are subjected to believe through the indoctrination of an institution like a school or church
All I can do to defeat the darkness is to surrender to this condition I find myself in
Being full of life and ideas
But feeling like I have to hold it all back in this provincial town to be
"Acceptable"
But I think I'm just going to let the light shine through
I'm going to speak up, speak out
And not become some pseudo spiritual guru who charges an arm and a leg to gain access to their "life altering" retreats and seminars
People are always looking outside of themselves to "find enlightenment" or the next fix that will "fix" them
But we get hooked to these life coaches churning out programs with high price tags like drugs
We need to feel competent, worthy, and purposeful
We dream about becoming just like these people ripping us off
But they're just as clueless as us,
They're just rich off of our clueless-ness and desperation
But I'm going to try something different--
I'm just going to be myself, stand up for my rights and the rights of others
Live a life of service, even if that entails radical service where my life is on the line
Stop seeking validation from people who don't matter
And not give the enemies I will inevitably make by being myself any importance in my life and my life's mission
So, that's it folks
I hope you decide to do the same.

Art is a lot like life
It never comes out
The way I imagined it.

Sometimes
I still
Think of you

Only hundreds of miles away
A train took me away
So far, far away
To a new day

I regret to say
That even though mostly
I've forgotten
Let go of the past
Finally
Some days I think about you and
Us
The happy and the sad
The times we snuggled up together
In the morning before you had brushed your teeth
So you refused to kiss me
But I still stole kisses from you anyway

And then sometimes
I remember the breakup
And how ugly it got
And how cruel we became
Slandering each other to our friends
And calling each other names
So I wonder if it was true love
Like we said it was
And even if the onlookers disagree
I think I know
That we loved each other, maybe, once

I fear intermittently,
I get terrified
Of the thought
That I will never fall in love again
With someone else
The way I fell in love with you

And some alien longing
That I try so eagerly to repress
Is still beating in my chest
Some wish born 6 years ago
When I was so young
And we held each other in our arms
And I told you I loved you
And you got so excited, you almost cried
And you kept telling me again and again and again
"I love you. I love you. I love you!"

And then eventually,
Months later
those words evaporated
As we separated
And even though we claimed to still love each other
I could no longer find a genuine love in you
And I think it had left me too
Only to be replaced by selfishness and hate

I have
This weird dream
Two people sitting at a screen
One expressing her soul
The other receiving,
Reading
But where does this knowledge go?
My intention is to move your soul
But does it fail?

Sometimes I still think of you
And I find it unwarranted
But I can't help myself from sinking back into the
Warmth of these memories
The nostalgia brings me ease
It takes me back to a time
When I still held hope in my youthful heart
Before the trauma reshaped me
Before the disease
Of my identity
Re-made me
Into this cynical, skeptical being
Who can't receive relief

Sometimes I experience
A vestigial grief
For everything I once had
That I took for granted.

The final day, the final hour
The final minute, the final second
The final moment
Moments
Wrapping up around me
Like sweet sweet surrender
Coming down on me
Turning frowns upside down on me
Oh sweet melodies
Caress my inquisitive mind
And time no longer follows a linear path
The past, present and future merge
Into this outcome
That like a once cocooned caterpillar
Emerges
With luminous wings of art
And the wind whispers secrets
My conscious mind cannot yet discern
When I close my eyes
Close, open
Close, open
Like a sea anemone
Pulsating beneath
Layers of dense, buoyant water
Strands like limbs
Moving fluidly with the flow
Of I know and I don't know
The outcome,
Like an equation
Nearing so close
Hold my heart so
passionately inside of me
Here we go.

There are no boundaries
In the mind
Anything is conceivable
It's practically unbelievable
I create and destroy at my every whim
Like a pendulum, like a monstrous crane
I close my eyes,
And exist in an alternate reality, In my brain

Visual artist is not enough of a description
To define these visions
I see worlds I can create
With multitudes of mediums

What a profound blessing
And an irreversible curse
To feel and see and be so intensely
To be so deviant from the mediocre
Whose thoughts are like stale smoke
I see color, I see life
I see beauty, and the living struggling under
The weight of strife
But I get out easel and brush
Right when I've had enough
And I create my way back to sanity

Maybe it's merely a false happiness
That I aim to create
To stave off this disease of
Reality
That I hate.