Everything is so close
Within reach
Yet it feels miles away
Feels as though it is part of a different timeline

One where I existed in the familiar all my life
Where the tearful goodbye came after a lifetime
And not just a few years

So close I could touch it
Feel it, squeeze it until it oozed between my fingers
Know it would never be mine, no matter how many times I claimed it

You have to die to be
A spectre that floats in and out of the alleys, no longer confined to it's resting place
Stuck in the city where it's invisible

A spectre that can no longer touch anything
The material world belongs to the living

On a wave length understandable only by humans
The long haired, scrawny limbed musicians produced their peculiar vibration and the rain would never feel the same

The sky was bluer than could be possible in a town made of pollution and sadness
Maybe its because of decaying dreams
Maybe you've failed to feed your happiness anyways
Maybe you gave it up to the wind too soon

But the sky got bluer and the hair got longer and the sunglasses reflected the smile that i couldn't quite stifle

The bees found their hives
In a blinding sea of yellow and the liquid reflected the smile I couldn't quite stifle

I thought of people, faces, and nerve endings and I longed to gaze on the eyes that reflected the smile I couldn't quite stifle

I wanted to take a road into the sea and let all the weight of the world sink with me and feel free reflected in obituaries that could hardly stifle a smile

For the freedom was so enticing and I only find my voice in the end and I want to crack myself open so I have no shell in which to take shelter

Because I want to feel the unmitigated waves against my being, traveling from the source to me, uninterrupted

A stifled smile in a bluer sky and waves in longer hair

We seem to forget and rediscover things often
By we, I mean human species as a whole

The cure for scurvy
Never bringing enough water on a hike

And we make these mistakes over and over and never learn from them
The importance of history
Solidify the facts o ye just one
Write them down
Crumple of the fragile material
Scrape away the pictures frozen in time
Let go only to realize you needed what you have forgotten

The past is liquid until you have proof
I'm sorry, it's the truth
Unless your truth is different
Because right now the past is feeling pretty blurry (and who am I to sat your past is a lie)
Clouding over my eyes like cataracts and I can't tell if the truth is what it says it is

And we forget though we learn it over and over that the truth is never
The truth

Number one proof?
The example, the posterchild of lies, the master of facades, the broken screen door that gets repaired over and over again in hopes that your dog won't attempt to run full speed into it?

The two sides of a human

At this point this information should be engraved on our brains but we always forget
We would immediately say that these two sides are happy and sad

The two most basic feelings

However, I believe, bear with me, that the two sides are the predictable side and the unpredictable
that only ends up unpredictable because we forget what happens in those unpredictable moments
Only to be brutally reminded that humans are occasionally

very

unpredictable

Predictably unpredictable and
Predictably predictable

These are the two sides
The things about humans we like to forget

The car sprang to life
No not literally
Metaphorically
As in someone turned the key
And now the car is on

I watched it drive down the street of thick trees
Not the car of course
The lonely person inside the car

I watched the black worn-down wheels hesitate
Then pull to the left
And off it went

I often wonder
If for the brief moment when the wheels hesitated
If the car ever considered going right
Not the car of course
But the lonely person inside the car

And I imagine the lonely person looking back
Through the clouded rear-view mirror to see the other road behind them
That would have taken them somewhere else

I wonder if the car had a say in the direction it was taken.

I wonder if at night, the car, not the person,
Stays awake dreaming of turning right.
Where left took them to the purple mountains, right would have taken them straight into the burning sun.

Please please please
Tell me
Is it possible to go both ways?

There are too many poems about
Change

Dramatic changes, subtle changes, personality changes, landscape changes

Keep your head up right?
Change is just natural
Let it come and let it go
Like the water winds or the wind flows

But sometimes you can't just look to the sky and wait out the change with a smile on your face

Sometimes you feel more like collapsing in on yourself
Your ribs hurt from the sobs and you can't remember the last time you had a good night's sleep
Or the last time you ate

And all you want to do is distance yourself so it's easier to let go

But in the process of distancing yourself

You lost your mind

I felt sick going in
I feel sick coming out

I cough up the dust that found a place in my lungs
As my eyes are drawn to the horizon
It's flat, dark

And a lone star desperately shines against the night sky
I'm not given a clear answer on what I feel anymore
I don't think that Home means what it used to

But all I can do is wipe my nose and my tears as we cross the border searching for a third way out of
Texas.