There’s something astounding
About our place here standing
on a planet circling a burning furnace
full of hydrogen atoms colliding
and fusing and slowly eating itself alive,
flaming into the light and heat and
imposition of a life giving god
casting countenance through the emptiness
and unfathomable distances of outer space
Until the day it decides it’s tired
Of All the effort it takes
to scream into the void for all time
and hold the cycle steady
so that something it’s never touched
can “count their days” and keep a schedule
based on dividing entropy
arbitrarily into increasingly small divisions
like eons and epochs and eras,
then to centuries, decades, years,
Months and  days,
down to hours and minutes and seconds, and eventually atomic rates of decay
so small and short and fleeting and transient
as to be inconsequential for them to be named.

It is the only star you see during day,
And when it hides away it’s shine
A vast dark void reveals its presence
Just behind the painted skies she illuminates with radiation from the chaotic energy that shattered atoms release and reverberate and it reflects and refracts and reveals the presence of the heavy elements it made that coalesced into small collections of elemental ***** spinning and floating and collapsing in upon themselves under minuscule but compounded atomic weight

And in its blanket black indifference
little signs of somethings distant and gigantic and ancient shine through the darkest reaches of infinite shadow and silent solitude

5000 years ago our ancestors took a rudimentary set of lines and scribbled simple symbols on the nocturnal symphony because they realized the points of light passed through the same part of the night at a given time, and If you knew which specks were in what patch of sky you could figure out how to navigate great distances because the heavens are ever wide and the same sky flies over every place, and no matter how far you had wandered into the wilderness or how far off course you’d floated away, you could always find a way back home, no path necessary, from any place where you had found yourself, whether you’d been trying desperately to find some sort of peace of mind of any kind, or simply running from some thing terrible or even menial, it’s all the same.

But moving south
Across the equatorial belt
Into the southern hemisphere
Sailing west away from land
Dancing north toward the horizon line
The heavens shift in subtle
Variations so the stars you might expect to find are in a completely different orientation that cannot easily be aligned
But you can always seek out the belt and dagger of the Titan Hunter of the sky. And it might confuse you as to why he seems to be there upside down or on his side. But do not worry you have not lost your bearing it’s simply a matter of of perspective from the angle which you find yourself considering your local night

And a flat earth theory would try to have you believe that there’s no such thing as an equatorial divide, but the fact that Orión Cartwheels across the horizon from the southern side, while  from the north he takes a strolling path across the southern horizon line, and yet he never changes his permanent position directly in the summer spring fall or winter sky, tells you somethings out there further than we can fathom and somewhere even farther is the beginning of time.

Mission Statement

I’m just out here having a good time, man,
doin’ what I can to make it better.
An’ if I’m having a good time, dude
I want everyone else to have one too,
So I’m just trying to do what I can to ensure that,
Cause I don’t want anyone to have to have a bad time ever.
but I know some people do be having bad times that can’t nobody make better,
but if I can do something to turn a bad time good,
imma do what I gotta do,
cause everyone deserves to have a good time,
at least some of the time,
and I’m a good time dude,
so if you’re having a bad time, then so am I,
and I’m not trying to have a bad time, man,
like never ******* ever!
cause good times are what it’s all about, my guy,
and bad times can always get better,
and if you trying to have a bad time don’t come around me brother,
cause I’m gon’ make it go away,
we gonna have a good time, whether you like it or not,
but don’t worry you gonna like it,
good times are way better,
and im good at em, and I have em every single day.
I’m trying to have a good time all the time,
and we can hang out
and you can have some too,
I got jokes and **** to say,
and if you out here having a bad time on my watch, don’t worry,
we gon figure that **** out together.

So what’s your name? I know we met before but
I drink a lot and I forget. I remember faces though and I remember seeing yours. Yeah you say we definitely met before…

Right well my name’s Hatchet, welcome to show, glad you came to play. But before we get it start I got ask you about something, is that okay?

2. That Toothy Grinning Fiend

Can I be honest with you? Because it’s personal and it’s probably gonna be a hard thing for you to admit; and I heard you say it a couple times in a row and when I heard it made me think- I heard you talking about yourself dying and making jokes about why it’d be better than trying to stay, but it’s not something to go make light of because your talking about the ultimate decision, the last decision ever. Is that where your at man? You really done living? You ready to punch out on your last day? Or is something you just hopes happens to you and you don’t have to be responsible for anything? In my experience, that **** only seems funny to somebody that’s been thinking about it too long to know better, when the dark thoughts been winning too many debates and creeping up ever so steadily and they don’t turn back and they don’t retreat, and as it gets closer and that smile starts to look a lot less clever and those sinister eyes, ember red and glowing, and those gleaming yellow teeth you saw shining from the shadow don’t seem so friendly anymore; you think, “why’s he keep smiling like that?” And It’s getting closer and bigger and you see those dagger sharp incisors and he’s still coming faster now and he does not blink and his teeth start to separate and you can see the pink of his lying forked snakeskin tongue and he opens wide and starts to swallow you whole but you still see the teeth from inside and as his mouth begins to close you feel A last gasp of pride and you scream out for help, for someone to come by, but no one hears you and you’re suffocating but you haven’t yet died so you lash out with all your strength, and everything you’ve got to try to survive and the only thing that you can muster is weak half a breath and a joke about how no one would miss you, it’s like you’ve already left. And no one really laughs because it wasn’t funny, and no one says anything because you’re just that way, you’ve got a dark sense of humor and you always joke about awful things just to see what’ll happen to person’s face. And that ******* MONSTER is still right there, with that uncanny grinning and glistening smile and those awful red eyes and the pit viper stains like shadows below the eyes when you haven’t slept in days because dreams are so much scarier than the shadow’s monsters’ doing devil worship and burnt offerings of sacrificial snakes, because hallucinations are easily laughed off as nonsense, and this thing is nonsensical in its own kind of way, but it will not ******* leave and let you get back to your day. It’s madness, and it grips you and you cannot wiggle away, and Getting sleep can be terrifying, but it helps push back the fray.
And when you wake you’re still breathing, and He’s faraway again for now but it looks like it might be getting closer everyday and it’s still staring at you but it’s in a different kind of way, hungrier now that he’s had a taste. It’s even scarier now that you’ve seen it up close, because you know it won’t just ******* go.
You can not escape.
And the Jokes are so your friends can say “hey man… are you ok?” But no one checks up on you because they’re busy or whatever and even if they did you lie and say, “yeah man, you ain’t gotta worry about me, I’m doing fine. You know i got this, imma be ok.” But that was a lie and you stand there desperately as the concern on there face slips away, and just like it always is and so it’s always been, but it don’t have to be, Im standing right beside you and I’m Saying I’ve been there dude and  I’m hearing things I used to say, things you need to talk out loud so you can hear the sound of what your thinking really sounds like in an a three-dimensional space. It doesn’t echo or bounce off of the halls and mirrors and come back distant, distorted, disassembled and decayed, it’s the vampire of thoughts, it’s eternal, it’s insidious, it is evil and unwavering in its hunt For prey. It does not respect or adhere it to the laws and conventions of polite society and it abhors the light of day. it falls dead on it victims and ***** the life out of them, but no life is given, just life taken away. The movies and books make it look cool and romantic, but it ain’t clever, cool or cunning,  guaranteed. It sounds a lot like a dog **** onto a piece of parchment paper and you rolled it up and put a put a ribbon ‘round it and you set off on your merry way. It’s just a **** idea you thought might could fix your problems but it’s just a cop-out, a ******, and a huge mistake. But lemme tell you my man, it’ll Do the trick, if the trick your trying is making the world forget, what you meant to it and what you did with it and if you leave nothing behind you just disappear, and there’s no second act when you come back, and the audience just walks out and don’t even talk about whatever happens to the dude that’s missing, that trick was stupid, I don’t get it.

3. Your Life Your Way

So I’m hearing you and I’m thinking this guys suffering and he might be thinking that it’s his time Today. And if that’s what you wanna do, I can’t take that from you, it’s yours and only your decision to make, and as long as you don’t make it rashly it doesn’t have to be a scary thing, but I would ask a favor of you before you escape: if that is what you choose, then when you do, that you take a beat, you eat and you get some sleep, sober up and don’t medicate, and wake up rested the next morning before breakfast time; you wash body and wash your face, put on your favorite shirt and your most comfy shoes and have your favorite breakfast and then you spend the whole entire day doing ONLY things you LOVE the most. You don’t waste a second of your time, because it’s your last ******* day. why would you let it slip you by, When you could pack it in and fill its to brim with joy and grace. And if you do your day of many splendid things you love to do and go to bed for one more night, And wake earlier still the next morning and go somewhere and watch the sun rise one last time and say goodbye to god or to your life or to your love of anything. And then you pick your time, and you meditate. So that your day has come on your own terms, not driven by anxiety and desperation, and with your whole mind you spend your final hours remembering everything that made your life great,  and when your hour comes you say a last farewell to life, and then your done and dead and nothing hurts anymore and you can’t hear the cries of those left  behind to say goodbye and mourn your loss and your selfish ways. But don’t you miss that time by a minute, you tick down the seconds and don’t look away, and if you hesitate for even a second, that’s proof positive you need stay, because you need more time to be satiated. And that’s all I have to say. If all these things are quantified and capitulated, I will be there at your final resting place;
and I will not mourn you leaving
because it’s Your life Your way,
and I will eulogize and I’ll memorialize and we’ll mythologize you and tell all of the lies, and tell the truth about them so it can’t obfuscate the horrid truth that you did not love anyone, even yourself, and I will CELEBRATE that you have finally found the peace you need, and I will probably cry. But when they cover you, you are ******* dead to me and I will never speak your name again and I will no longer tell the tales and stories we shared because you take them from me too when you take your life from mine.

4. A Way Through

But if you don’t really want to die and be forgotten and waste your precious time. I’ve got some thoughts about how to make it easier to survive the darker days and keep the lighter ones from slipping away.

So It sounds like you’ve been going through it, dude, And that can be tough as **** sometimes. Especially when the nights are long and the hours are slow, and your waiting for dawn so it can be a brand new day, one you can use to be the the first day of the rest of your life and not just the beginning of the end again. I’ve got this tool i use that i think might could help you see it, and I’ll teach you how to use it, if you’ve got a lil bit inclination. Would you like to know just how I do it, man? Would you like to know  how I feel this way? I can walk you through it, and show you why it works, and how you can do it every day, all you gotta do is have little jewel of thought to use as a trade for happiness…

It’s called the Joy Fantastic and it’s so easy it’s on my list of things to do everyday. It’s just like brushing teeth, but for your mind cavities, it’s partly meditation, partly mental paste. It flies the cracks up from the inside that are leaking fluid and slowing the pace, but with movement and with certain stipulations, that will keep anyone in the right direction, and upright, and in place.

I truly believe that there is joy in this world every single second of every day, all the time. Everywhere! Anywhere you look it’s there, All you have to do is find it, and when you look really closely, you’ll rarely have to go to far out of your way to see I’m right. You just have to pick up your head and level your gaze and scan around you, up and down, in front of you and behind, and stop looking at what you’re trudging through for just a minute or two, there’s nothing to it, its hardly effort, and It’s so easy to identify. And if you don’t see it immediately, that just means it’s nearby, but you got to take a walk and readjust your eyes and choose a different angle from which to view. So you just look out all around you and you try to see something bright, or shiny, or just a well Lit place. something small and happy, a ray of sunshine, a glint of dew droplets, or really just anything nice, a couple holding hands and smiling, a squirrel bobbing somewhere unexpected, a stranger’s child’s laugh, it does not have to be something you see, it can be a thought you had, a happy memory, or a smell you come upon, like fresh baked bread, or a flower patch, and you give it credence and you look at with patience, hold it in reverence and accept it simply, that this is all I need for today.

And I take that peaceful moment I always find in this presence to unwind and slip off the pain. And the real beauty of it, the part that’s the actual tool, is the knowledge of that space, and to get there, dig this dude, it doesn’t even have to be your joy, it can be someone else’s, but it still plays. Like you can see someone else that’s happy and just think to yourself “see, everything’s gonna be just fine, and it doesn’t always have to be like this, and this will pass on if I give it time.” And You can borrow that indefinitely and they’ll never know you even have it unless you decide to tell them, and you SHOULD tell them if you ever see them again because a compliment is joy double-time, its something you can use when all the light is fading and it’s something unexpected and nice for the person who’s joy they didn’t know was out there helping people and saving lives, and if you name it, and then hold it, and keep it in your back pocket, because you can’t predict when you won’t be fine, but if you got it already and it’s tucked away safe, you can just access it anytime. So when you need it you can pull it out, and look back at it and say, “for today, this is mine!” And you’ve got that then and forever, whenever it’s convenient, And when it’s dark out and its scary and it seems like it’s never ending and that there’s just nothing that looks like joy you can find between you and the horizon line, You still have something that you can use to break the crushing burden of being Joy blind. Because if you can’t see Joy anywhere, are you really even looking, or is it just you’re not looking for it in the right way?
That means you need to remove The distraction lens and maybe shift perspective from side to side, and all you need is to catch a glimpse of it, you can’t expect to be satisfied ALL the time.

But you can be Joyful in any moment,  whether you’re never happy or never cry, and happiness is a choice you make, a decision to smile. It’s not a destination, It is internal and eternal, and in troubled times it’s a filter of a kind, to help declutter all the other noise, and get the signal through that you need to receive, that tremendous Joy is something you can feel even when you cannot smile. Because joy is not the reaction, joy is a lens through which we view the world and let all of our light shine.
And joy is easy and joy is free and we forget that all the time, and this perspective is like a muscle, you have to work it to build up memory, once you muscled up, and built a pattern it becomes the way you move. My whole perspective is Joy based thought And joy makes me not so ready to get it over with, you just decide to use it and then you start to choose it automatically and then you get to see what really happens, instead of guessing wrong and ******* dying.  So here it is my man, to better days to not forgetting to let the sunshine through. If your prone to mantra I’ve got that too, you wanna here it’s just five lines.

My ethos is Joy
My aesthetic is Joy
My religion is Joy
My motivation is Joy
My purpose is Joy

I love you man, I mean it honestly
I want you to stay alive
And since we just made friends not all that long ago, it’s not fair for me to have to cry. And I am truly blessed to get to be your friend, and I will always be as long as we are both alive, so if you ever think that no one cares at all, just remember me, there’s gotta be at least one, and I’m the ******* guy.
So dude,
Please Don’t leave,
at least not suddenly,
and definitely not forever,
that’s such a long time.

And all you gotta say to get me to shut the **** up is, “Dude I won’t **** myself. !’m gonna be ok.” And if you mean it, I will believe you and we can go back inside, and have another drink. Or we can go our separate ways.

5. a requiem…

And with tears in his eyes he said the magic words, and I believed him, and we walked another block and then we said see you later instead of goodbye. And when we did it was a ******* mistake.

Because he was gone
the very next day.

And now I have to mourn him because he didn’t take just one extra day to do something that he really truly loved, and he forgot why he needed to stay.

Man *******
I shouldn’t have to cry like this
You made me lie to you the other day
I said I’d never speak your name again, that you were dead to me and that I’d be okay, but I’m not okay and I need my ******* friend to help me deal with all this sorrow **** and you abandoned me to handle all this pain. It’s a ******* that does this to his friends, and your a ******* I wish was not just flushed Away

but sometimes people die
and sometimes people cry
and sometimes those things
both happen on the same day.

Sleep easy brother, no one can bother you now, and you can rest forever to make up for all the sleep you missed.

There’s some we love
who come to love us back
And then there’s some we love who get away,
but the ones we love
who never know how much
and never feel the warmth of our hearts’ embrace
are the ones we mourn
and miss the most
who become the ghosts
who haunt our quiet homes
but never show their face.

If they’d just rattle chains
and turn the cabinets out
we could know they care
and greet them with their names,
but they just disappear
only to fade away,
and then we forget their voice
and we forget their face,
and before too long they’re barely even a memory
and we forget that we even ever knew their name.
And they become nothing
and they disintegrate,
and then they’re really dead.
At that’s the final shame
They lay there silently,
forgotten
finally laid to rest
in their true grave

Sometimes they’ll visit us
in our deepest dreams
and if we’re lucky we might just get to say
how much we miss them now
And how we loved them so
And ask them why they never came back to say goodbye,
and what made such haste,
why all the rush to leave,
how could it seem like that was okay?

(In the darkest corner of a small wooden landing at the top of the steps to the fenced back yard of a rented home currently occupied by a trio of underpaid shift workers whom, as a kindness,  have taken into their foster care a destitute stray, a man of roughly forty clearly hard worn years kneels doubled over and wailing mournfully to himself, his head tucked in and down toward his chest in an undeniably penitent posture similar to the pious prayer of those who heed the daily call, and face Mecca; Apropos of nothing, he just so happens to be faced to Mecca at this moment. This is, however, purely coincidental, as our pitiful subject here is not a man of clothe, nor one of great or even minor faith, much less a man of daily prayer or mindful meditation. Quite In contrast, He is a drinker and a drifter; drug-addicted, disaffected, dissatisfied, and dismayed. Yet he is also a dreamer, of the highest order, completely convinced of the attainability of a singular salvation of creative elucidation, a dream he has been chasing unrelentingly for more than 20  years; and which he has just this very evening seen how truly attainable it is. Merely moments ago, In a vision of clarity which came over him unwittingly, and uninitiated by anything within his purview, our vagrant interloper has seen a crystallization of artistic inspiration which envisioned all the interconnections within his disjointed philosophical treatises, which he has spent the better part of three decades composing, and in that moment he was overtaken by the sudden uninhibitable need to bleed the pressure welling-up inside his chest and his lungs began to squeeze. The noise they made directed itself toward the realm of sorrow. It is a wail of a desperation; not unlike one you might hear from a father who’s lost there cherished son, from lovers who’ve lost their lovers, and from children having a tantrum who need to eat and then to sleep, but refuse. He was at that moment all of these things in essence; a man rejected and alone, beset by turmoil of his own making, and both exhausted and famished; but this noise came joyfully, as it was the expression of something deep within him which he had recently freed; and so no effort was made to sequester or quiet the cries that he now seethes. It is simply the gasp and exhalation of soul which desperately needed to breathe.)

A soft wail arises quietly from silence to an open mouth, a single note, unbroken and controlled as much as one can control such a sound. From this beginning after a moment, almost a minute but something less, if you were to count; the wail completes with a sharp cutoff instead off dying back down. It ends, from an open mouth to clenched teeth and the tongue cutting off the sound. It makes a word but he did not consciously say it; it’s just the only word that could come…

Out.

GET OUT!
GET OUT OF ME!
Go the **** away!
I do not need you
I do not want you
I will not hold you
You have to leave
There is no place for you in here any more
Get. Out.
Get out.

GET THE **** OUT OF ME!

PLEASE!

(As he spits these curses and pleads, something moves deep with in him. he convulses and every muscle in him begins to squeeze and he feels as if he’s imploding but his eyes are about to explode out, and in this seizing state, he feels the expelled energy escape, physically, through the center of his mind and forehead, like a boiler valve exploding with steam in a movie. It goes out and up and away and silently it leaves. A calm settles over the whole scene as he stills his body, still convulsing, and then he sees swirling among the phosphors on the back of his eyelids, where it burns an impression when one stares at bright light too long, something coalesce: an impression of an Iris, pulsing and folding into itself but without edge, as if his minds eye were right in front of him. He stays there penitent and quiet and keeps his eyes closed, in order not to lose it, because whatever it is he needs to know it; what ever it is, he cannot deny he sees it. He stays perfectly still while it’s centered in his vision, as if it were a wild animal he intended not to scare away, and silently he studies it and stares and considers what has just opened in his vision and what, preceding that, had thusly broken away. Slowly realization comes, as it’s elemental name is spoken silently from behind,

         “I am the one who sees,
            I am that which drives
         I am you, and you are me
                 We are together,
                   A single being
                         but You
                  are part of me”

and upon the realization solidifying, without hesitation he addresses it, directly and in a docile tone…)

I see you
I see you there
staring back at me

I know who you are
I know you are me

It’s good to see you
I’ve missed you
Where have you been?

He lifts his head just a little, just so he’s holding it with his neck, it’s the first movement he has made beyond the minimum necessary to say the words he had to say and to expand and contract his lungs enough to breath. As he opens his eyes, the vision persists and he’s now staring at it outside of him, nestled into his unknowingly cupped and folded hands, like one would make to receive the sacrament of communion, which is ironic yet somehow perfect: for this experience is the only religious thing he’s ever felt or known or seen. Now, with eyes open, it looks to be an orb of energy without a glow, and he folds his hands closed around it as if to hold itc closing his eyes again, and he stands, with eyes closed; as yet unwilling to lose the vision and let it go. He turns slightly to the north, away from the darkness he had hidden in before and opens his eyes hopefully for the first time in ages.

He stares distantly into the foliage of a few scattered trees that occupy a greenway next to a drainage ditch called “flood street” to the people
that know, and in those last late autumn leaves still hanging on with incredulity, he sees the inner eye again, still staring back at him, and in that moment he already knows- it’s not going go, it is part of his mind, which, now that he has opened it, will be ever-present, even if unseen. He shifts his gaze over to the corner of a house not too far away and again he sees it shimmering, superimposed. It’s not external it is like a lens through which he sees, and he becomes joyful.

He lowers his eyes in peaceful pause and starts to take off his clothes, he sheds his jacket, shirt and socks, flinging them to and fro and descends the steps into the yard and squeezes the grass between his toes. He presses hard down through his feet, to let the ground know that he is there and he will not sink. His stance widens. He loosens his shoulders as he reaches down between his feet, and sets his palms flat in the grass, exhaling deeply as he folds. Then breathing deeply in and upward he raises up towards the sky stretching everything inside, reaching as high as he go, and there he sees the Cheshire smile and he greets the moonlight glow,

Hi how are you, I’m glad you’re here too

And then he begins to dance with it, in Meditative and intentional movement. He makes a show for the moonlight and the minds eye and he moves every muscle under his control, twisting and turning in soft ecstasy releasing decades of unwanted tension; finally letting all the build-up go. He lands down in the sweet smelling grass on his belly, arms folded, palms pressed to the sof, cool dirt, grass threaded between trembling fingers, and in his vision are two small flowers swaying slightly, but swaying alone, as no leaves rustle because no breeze blows. It seems to him that they danced in response to his repose, and he will remember this for the rest of his short and troubled life, though it should be a little easier now knowing what he knows.