How fast I wanted to turn 20,
And, on-and-off, how fast I want to rewind.
I feel a freedom
I’m not used to.
I’m bound
Because of my freedom:
To choose, to make many choice calls.

There are those
Who let me make decisions,
Yet those same people
Sporadically pour “suggestions”
My thinking ebbs in empty confusion.

I felt I held my collegiate throne well,
Until that feeling suffocated me:
Where am I going?
Where are my new social connections I expected?
I’m giving an all-out effort;
I never tried or would want to force an answer,
But answers never showed up.

My edition of 20:
Stranded on a social island
Of not a kid yet not quite a full-fledged adult.
“It’s so hard,” I moan sporadically.
Do I focus more on myself?
Is that selfish?
When I’m used to defaulting to care for others,
What effort it takes to come away,
But I know coming away more often
Can bring more of the best out of me
For when it will count most,
Not counting 20.

O Lord,
With my hands clasped together,
Never let me forget my friendship with you.
O Lord,
With my head bowed low,
Never let me forget that You are the primal origin and I am the secondary creation.
O Lord,
With my eyes closed,
Allow me to look into myself so as to see beauty in me,
That I may see and feel equal beauty toward what surrounds my life.
O Lord,
If my prayer requires me to silence myself,
May I be attentive to the sounds I hear,
And accept the aural in the air so as to let nothing bother me from Your Love.
O Lord,
When I conclude formal prayer and time set apart for You,
Never let me forget that You are with me always in life
And that it’s worth more to abide in You than any other dwelling in this world.
Amen.

6 a.m. Saturday morning,
Brothers Bobby and Dylan submit
And accept the snow-grounded car ride to Mount Yeti’s ski ***** with their mother,
Sarah.
The skies resembling a TV screen powered off,
Bobby and Dylan sleepily ponder their future outing:
Their mother likes to ski upward,
Powering against the ascribed gravitational acceleration
That ordinarily compliments the sport of skiing.
On this cold winter morning, with a finger-nail of purple-yellow sunlight
Peering in the distance of Mount Yeti,
Sarah maneuvered the royal-blue Ford F-150 into a parking lot with only one other car.
Two hours past, and Dylan began to moan, faint sights of cold air rushing out his nostrils
As he, Sarah, and Bobby muscle their skis up Mount Yeti’s *****.
As it turned out, the ******* arrived later than they knew it, swallowing
Two more hours of ****** exertion.
Skis finally shaved snow on the head of Mount Yeti and Dylan fainted forward
In daffy exhaustion.
“Get up, dude, it wasn’t so bad,” Bobby teased.
Suppose the uphill battle was worth it, for Sarah, Bobby, and Dylan
Saw the smiling figure of Sarah’s late husband, Warren, swaying naturally
In the early-morning green-blue glimmers of the sky’s auroras.

Though my eyes resume looking outside of me,
I see images in floating space,
In my lids or where I look,
Which mentally recreate images and scenes
Of achievement, accomplishment,
With people who have since become more distant
Or who seem farther from social and spiritual reach,
And those times and places where I picked up
A new idea or skill.
As long as I know I left trail marks
Along the path of my life journey,
I hope I’ll be able to trapeze toward “That happened”
Rather than lust for “Let’s do it again.”
Life moments uniquely occur once,
Which is the challenge that comes with the fragility of memory:
Am I willing to gamble the previous “feel-good” times
For what I still have yet to do and explore
In an unknown tomorrow?

I know the feeling well:
Though I felt great before
In extended video-game time,
My cranium always knew
That the parental limitation
Was keeping me from losing
Not the game, but my reality-focus.

Though I fight certain urges
To fill the empty gap of routinely desire,
I cannot escape the guilt that
The amount of time I wanted to spend video-gaming
Was mentally unhealthy, a statistic I tried ignoring
To keep my head in the game…literally.

“It ***** your brain out,” my mom would criticize.
Bah! I’d think to myself.
Maybe my attachment to video games was never understood,
But the value of my life recognized as more
Than a set of eyes wandering an intangible world
That requires a certain power to play,
Yet that power won’t always be “on.”

When that power’s not on, my mind is,
Fulfilling its created duty of remaining in a world
That I see as a video game…
Since a video game, in its own rite, is a world.

Now I know the consequences of locking my eyes toward a telepathic portal;
I don’t hope to fall prey to the innovative trends
Of becoming more “virtualized” and in a game deeper.
Yet I don’t completely distance myself from my generational kind
In splitting entirely from gaming.
Just far enough to keep my life dignified
And to avoid the “Sim-toms” from gaming too much.

Think about it:
Could we possibly see Confucius and Jesus together
Holding hands amid the skies?
Or Buddha and Rabbi
Laughing not at, but with each other?
Isn’t that what paradise is:
Friends over *******?

I ***** down my drive way
My two shoes clomping along the gravel;
Shouldering myself to the right I walk
As though time were not a factor.

I stroll straight ahead momentarily
Sandwiched along the street with houses, cars,
And the sky above my head, like a hat
That doesn’t itch.

When I am not bothered by the muscle it takes to walk
And as I gaze at the natural scenery above me
And the homes beside me
As if I were peering out the window inside a moving car
I am faster than time.

Remaining on the road’s left
My feet angle left, and I enter a circular path of gravel.

I take my time, I think throughout
Bowing down, and looking up
Wrinkling my face towards the clouds
Sighing breaths not of boredom, but of struggle
For confidence on my path.

I could circle around the scrunched circular path forever,
But dogs bark,
And since I have no one to tell me to stop,
I felt that’s my cue to leave.
As evergreens line my procession out,
I pass from life before
To life ahead.

Cryptograms:
Secret messages waiting to be revealed
A symbol shields the letter in hiding.
Gee, a hint would sure sound nice,
But cryptographers aren’t always that merciful.
There are times where I am left
To guess, err, and scribble down
The correct corresponding equivalency,
Z=A, for instance,
Until I arrive at the satisfactory accomplishment
Of a puzzle solved and a stronger knowledge of code.

Jumbles:
Another newspaper favorite,
Words appear as sloppy anagrams,
Which requires much staring and mental shifting
Of letters until a rearranged combination of letters
Produces an existent word approved by Oxford or Webster.
Within each blank printed box is a certain number of circles,
The puzzler, guessing the words from each row of nonsensical anagrams,
Gathers the letters in the circumscribed spaces
Only to do more mental or written unscrambling
As no answer exists without persistence and resilience.

Crosswords:
My “worst nightmare” in the world of puzzles,
The only enigmas where I have to leave enigmas be
Because I always fall behind in experience and knowledge
To have any clue of what the hints mean,
For some hints are implicit cryptograms,
The solver needs to consider each word of the hint closely
To understand the pun, the sarcasm, wrapped up in the obvious literalism.
Some days I come close
To filling in all up-words and down-words,
But realize that I am never quite right, even in my most confident state.

Is a puzzle ever truly solved?
I don’t know! Figure it out yourself!

You have heard of the “monster under the bed”
Or “the boogie man in the closet.”
But nothing is more frightening
Than mistaking things as having life
In broad daylight.

A car
Its headlights are eyes
Its anterior insignia is the nose
And the area between a car’s front lights and symbol
Is the mouth that never moves.

An electrical outlet
Still though it seems
Stares at you from its wired soul
Through rectangular slits.
An outlet is never happy to see you,
It’s mouth the top half of a semicircle.
Ha! Take that!
A plug will keep you quiet!

Floral patterned curtains
Fool you with detail.
Much staring can lead
Into seeing dotted swirls as eyes
Curved arcs as brows
Or even a flower’s center as the face of a ghost
It’s ******* seeds molding a drooping face.

So, remember when next time you’re at home or in the public
The population may be larger than it seems.

Though night and day cover the same earth,
Their worlds are far unrelated;
Yes, the two portals of time
I know have skies the same,
But what one attracts
The other scares away.

Having lived a campus-student life,
Later departing to seek rest,
I was attracted to Scarborough’s halls
When darkness would ink the above
And when the daytime student traffic
Minimized, which freed space hard to claim
With the sun exposed.

Rays of LED lights flash
On the library’s main outside portico,
Students’ shoulders magnetized to the foundational pillars,
Bodies slanted, neutral-faced and minds set for commuting home.

Perfect!  Though other peers plan according to the daily rush,
I know there will be a chair for me and a platform to stack my books
Inside the library.
I neck my head heavenward
As I ascend the split-foyer stairs,
Seeing if others descend so as not to run over or be run over.

The second-floor is a puzzle,
A maze of paths edging the perimeter,
The space columned with light-brown shelves of books.
Let’s see: Study room?  Taken.
A free table along the main communal hall of the second floor?
Eh, I feel watched there.
Aha!  A fine venue!
A single-person desk, an attached light,
Room on the desk for layering my backpack’s own library,
And side wooden indentations to conceal my peripheral vision.
I never would have expected to lust for nightly library moments,
But I believe, now, that my visits were past due.

The kitchen table is at the right position
Where my family and I can leisurely face our eyes
In the direction of the clear-glass screen door that displays
Views of our backyard.

On the evening of March 16, I sat on the dark brown, black wooden chair at my usual curve of the table.
There are times where I sit and, though I cogitate “Get up! Get up!”, there are times where I just cannot collect the energy to rise from a still, muscle-relaxing pose.
The setting, yellow-white tint of the sun lured my soul to head outside, the natural character in me felt a need for.
Without delay, I zipped on my AHA sweater and capped my head with a retro blue-and-red Super Mario winter hat.
Opening the side door of the garage, the setting sun continued to lure my presence to still myself before its gentle mantle.
[At least there is no admission for seeing nature run its course!]

This evening scene of twilight I had to view seated on a purple cushion 90-degreed,
Unfolded on the outdoor swing.
I try not to let the urban sights of a barn shed, a house gated, dogs’ barks to my right
Derail my focus of natural concentration.
I learned in meditation once to just let noises and sights come as they please,
For they will have their exit.
I may not be a master at letting things go, but I kept meditative concentration
As the practice for the evening.

Every couple beats I would turn my eyes away from the westward sunset
To see if I noticed a lower sun and a higher indigo darkness.
Maybe I am not bound to the ascetic life, but I would not let the crispy, invisible chills
Of the evening winds chase me inside so easily, though the cold rush along the thighs of
My Lee jeans was a caveat that soon, Kearneysville would submerge into hours of a dark, polar void.

I tried to lose sense of the clock, so time would not be my focus in nature, which doesn’t go by Greenwich anyway.
The right amount of cold air lingered that night: enough to be outside for a while and enough to keep the pestiferous gnats away from my eyes.
No clouds passed my line of vision aimed at the ionosphere, and all the hues of the sun’s petering rays shone a “goodnight.”  This evening sun vanished in the optimistic vigilance that natural green scenes and Emerald green scenes were only one horizon away.

Dance, I shall
I arise in the morn’;
I welcome the day
Like I was just born!

Dance, I shall
Unaware of what’s next;
Though the day may be hard
I see past the vexed.

Dance, I shall
So many ways to live;
How can I help?
How can I give?

Dance, I shall
I don’t dance alone;
I dance with the fam’
And my brethren of bone.

Dance, I shall
But with breaks on the side;
As the day wanes
In shelter I abide.

Dance, I shall
Preparing for rest;
I dance with God
Who brings out my best.

Dance, I shall
In the portal of dreams;
I dance high in the sky
By the star’s bright beams.

Dance, I shall
What a way to show praise;
I shall dance for my God
The Giver of my days!