My method sentimental
Bold is my mood
Surely with light
I must improve

I throw my self into a haze
In a mythical daze
Of rhythmic cortexes
A phased phrase

I run for a day
With the dreams
I cast truths away

My method sentimental
Bold is my mood
Surely with light
I must improve

"Dear God,
I want to be a poet."

I want to speak in silver metaphors that slither into ear canals and seep into cortexes.
Words that turn eyes to a new perspective,
that crack your skull wide open with honest art.
Reality and creativity,
Taped together and painted over in the truest colours of life.

I want to speak in that powerful, yet still human, voice.
To quake the ground beneath you until you are shaken up
and you shed that exoskeleton of hurt,
or fear,
or doubt,
or ignorance.
I want all of that lifeless skin to loosen its grip around you,
and not bind you so tightly to complacency.

I want to establish communities of words,
that take you in as their own.
Delivered so rhythmically that your own pulse will begin to race inside of you,
parallel to the lines I've written.

I want to make you run with these words,
feel the winds against you,
push past the resistance and onto freedom,
as every weight lifts off of you.
So I can show you that your shoulders were not made to carry boulders,
your eyes were not meant for harsh tears,
and that everyone needs a break sometimes....

I want to be a poet because if I know the truth, I want to share it.
Wear proclamations on the palms of my hands,
hope radiating from my worn skin.

I want to write poems because I know that we're all human,
so why hide it?
Why hide our emotions when we can let them take flight?
If we've gotten through the tangled mess, why can't we reach back and help the next hero climb though?

I want to show love.
I want to understand,
I want to now who I am.

"Dear God,
Thank you for giving me a notebook as a best friend,
and giving me a copy of yours.
I know that no matter how far off I stray with my imagination,
I will always know what is truth."

I wanted to be a poet,
but now,

*I just want to be me

My gums hurt-
the toothache is hard to swallow
when we
mend the broken bones
with the loose change in the couch
and the buttons from
worn out cargo shorts.

Take standard biology,
an ideal economy,
and authentic authonomy
with a grain of salt.

We can't find or feed
while we bleed.
It seeps from cortexes
into yesterday,
into today,
into some
puddle
huddled around the fire
for warmth.

We melt just as the ice cubes
in your lemonade
on days
where
nostalgia has no
tranquil, oaky shade.

Stand at the length of lions.
Its breath is about as tolerable
as greed is swallowable.

While these dreams go hungry,
we feast.

While wolves
eat our spines as meat,
we are sheep
turning yellow from the heat.

These entities are unable to be verbalized
the most pleasurable
the most relaxing
I fall asleep to them
but avoid them in conversation.
maybe if I hold my tongue
wet and sandy
you’ll forget the topic.
the world of ***** gum
and cortexes
cannot meet

Pits and pockmarks
flit and dart
across an infinite ceiling.
Random synchronicity
plays patter song
stupor and languidity
The orchestra conducting
purple and yellow
to a sparkling, a
crushing crescendo
falls like a wave on tastebuds, tempting.

She lingers like
fog on a pane of glass
A sharp signature
impaled on a pile
of dreaming dust.

Like a rushed column
updraft through a house
of leaves blank and staring.

A mark from the
back of your palms up.
Your fingers stuck signing
a language sang by the blind.

How did she stay so long
A force hidden in neuron canyons.
A Gypsy camp lodged
between cortexes
spinning silk into a
muffled gasp, a conspiratory shuffle.

She lingers like spines of glass
in nailbeds, planted sweetly,
with the best of care.

Laughter in an asylum
electroshock dreams soaked in sweat.

Grabbed my brain like a chemical symphony.
Painted pictures of pivotal seconds,
wrapped up and romanticized.
Dreamt about.

Your lilting language planted
little honeypots deep in my palms.
Sparked fire from entropy
lighting a city in my chest.

But now these buildings tower
like Goliath in David’s dreams.
I need to escape
I need to slide out of
this sleep you’ve monopolized.

******* dreams
like smokering fingerprints
left on the cleft of my conscience.

The old taqueria on Victory.
The Bourgeois Pig.
The bitter spice of winter
painted over the cracks
crumbling the walls.

These waking hallucinations
haunt my habits.
Still frequent the holeinthewall
dives in my heart.

I'm serious.  I expected more in a place so near the Bay Area, the most
liberal city in America, San Francisco, that
I would not be kind of ahead of my time but somehow agrarian culture, no matter
how high end does seem to breed a kind of conservatism,
how could it not when it resembles feudal wealth, with busy little foreigners
living in tents doing all the work, as the serfs of yesteryear, days bygone in another land
or not, bearing a resemblance perhaps to the South, well, at least they do get paid and
can't be beaten physically, at least not in public but I digress
my ideas, more than a few of them, from my female vocal cords, and feminine visage
and curves that fill out my dress and full head of hair which is becoming increasingly rare
in men my age still, here.
What I said, suggested, noticed, presented was only heard or appreciated when it was later said
suggested or presented by a male, usually about six at least months later in the endless chatter of meetings and chance discoveries
And I know this is not the place for me
where only a male voice
where only a male package between one's legs
a very primitive way of determining what gets heard,
a way that resembles that of dogs who sniff each other and not
humans who have frontal cortexes and high order thinking
had what I said come from the less shapely, thinner lips of a testosterone laden individual
I think
in this place
they would have been heard
and absorbed long ago

In 1972, the Fourth Dragon King of Bhutan created the concept of Gross National Happiness, a new index measuring different areas of life quality. He said, “the essence of the philosophy of Gross National Happiness is the peace and happiness of our people, and the security and sovereignty of the nation.”

The Dragon King was brave with his wisdom. He spoke the truth against the prevailing myth of our time. He dared to ask questions sage in their foundations. What does it mean to live a fulfilling life? What does a successful community look like? How do we answer these questions knowing what we know about our own humanity?

Asking those questions was like coming home again from the rain, and wondering why you had ever left. An act in response to the desperate yearning to be human. A truth so clear, it has been embraced by dozens of other countries.

But not by the United States of America. We are big, and we influence others, not the other way around. We are powerful, and everyone knows it. We are successful, and we know it.

We worship, and ask, and measure the things that matter.

As Adam Smith said, “No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.”

We measure the things that matter.

What is the essence of the philosophy behind Gross National Product? In the words of Robert Kennedy, “It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We have defined success by that which we are able to hold in our hands. We have done so to our very core. We have done so to our most vulnerable. We have done so to our most educated.

In 2011, Amy Chua (the Tiger Mom), laid a truth so bare we could not look away. By her own admission, her tough tactics were simplified and misunderstood: “If I could push a magic button and choose either happiness or success for my children, I’d choose happiness in a second.”

The Tiger Mom would choose happiness for her children, and yet they still would not be successful.

We like to pretend that we don’t play this game, but she played so fervently, we could not look away. We like to pretend that perfect SAT scores, endless club affiliations, mastery of languages and instruments, athletic prowess, social grace, and an unwavering commitment to the community—that those things come naturally from the pursuit of a well-balanced, genuine teenage life. We like to pretend that we are not Excellent Sheep.

But we believe that we measure the things that matter.

From the Stanford-Binet IQ, to the Army Alpha Test, to the first ever SAT in 1926 we have used our creative engines to reduce our humanity to the likes of a No. 2 pencil. After the 1936 invention of the IBM 805—the first electronic test scanner—we would ever more become distinctive only in our conformity.

Uniform in our goals and our language, and everything else that comes in between. Echoed again and again, Bill & Melinda say, success in education is to obtain labor-market value. At least we’re honest about that. What other kinds of success could we imagine without other kinds of values? There is no magic button, there is only the stark white wall of reality that will hit you, hard, when you’re 16 or 18 or 22. And you better be prepared.

But did you know that statistically people are equally as happy one year after winning the lottery as they are one year after becoming paraplegic? Despite our 3lbs brains and large prefrontal cortexes, we are not good at imagining the conditions of our own contentment. We are only good at imagining the future of the stark white wall and the non-existence of the magic button.

Maybe, then, before we imagine anymore, we need to remember. To remember what it’s like to come home again from the rain, and wonder why you had ever left.  Maybe, then, we can finally be brave, and ask, like the Fourth Dragon King of Bhutan, What is the root of the root and the bud of the bud?

Maybe, then, we will measure the things that matter.

there's no instruction manual
for the day that cotton and
broken ceramic sentimentality
both lose their argument
and the bedsheets bleed
a blood better resembling magenta
than a dream-filled agenda.

there's no escape when
night time travels
come to an end.

there's nothing to knit.
Enough of the yarn
has covered cortexes,
capitalized on insomnia,
and nullified touch-
the only common sense.

it's common sense
that bruises don't heal
by applying pressure.

and brown eyes
and blue.
formerly, there is
underrated hue.

(If underrated could ever encapsulate oceans and the stars giving us light abundantly and concurrently from millions of years away.)

i unravel years as I lie
not sleeping,
reading up on different methods
to stop the bleeding.

of all of these shades of vibrant blue,
I choose the one that is brown,
but true.

i see these shades in unison
and when they inexplicably combine,
they are you.

****** knuckles
     From drunken stumbles
                                    That took his pie
         He had named humble
Ready to rumble
                                                                              Were the words he mumbled
                    In a fit and fumble
                                       To find his                               *mind

                                                                                                                                                   More than buzzed
He had become bumbled
                                                                             Just one more shot
Until he
stum    bled
                                   Out the doorway c r u m b l e d

Few ones in his pocket crumpled
      Left from cans funneled
                             I   mpairing cortexes pre                     frontaled
                                                                                                                 Visiontunneled and memory black
He laid down in the street
                                                                            *For an eternity of nap

They had come, all of them,
Answering the call of the gleaming
Spire, mounted atop the tallest
Tower. They stood in
Ordered rank and file, gently
Vibrating to its command, their cortexes
Humming in accord with its
Pulsing stream of information. They
Each had eyes but did not see, they
Each had ears but did not hear.
No, they had long ago
Judged far better the sights and sounds
Fed to them. Those who refused the
Implant were cast aside, being
Indistinguishable from that vile, that
Beastly, that ***** place outside called
Nature.

cadences seep like cricket legs rub

along my left leg up my spine

to cerebral cortexes like dipthongs

uncoordinated half  there half gone

into  electrical and chemical

impulses

and what am I