God and Monsters

With a soul on fire and a burning in my blood, my fists thirst for vengeance. As i toil in my mortal struggle between who i am and who i want to be, eyes are ablaze with an anger darting back and forth between God and consequences. The absence of her presence calls out to me from place where a life awaits judgment. I want to measure out guilt upon the scales of pain, i want you to fear as she feared. I want you to bleed as she bled. As the light of dawn runs across your face and you're met with an overwhelming cold i want you to know that your reckoning is upon you. As i was powerless to save her, so would you too be without calvary.  Repent, you taker of life. Repent you who has spilled her blood. Turn from yourself and pray to the one true God that the sun never rises on a day that i don't believe

The Waters Edge.

 The Waters Edge.

 

I used to speak of the tide of life, the ebb and flow of a great current of wills receding and careening toward the break. The ocean can mean many different things. It was the enemy to Caligula, but a means of salvation for the puritans. For a good number of years I felt like a madman who shipwrecked on the shore line ranting about the dangers of the undertow as well as admiring the way the light hit each waves crest. There were days where I would wade out into the tide for no other purpose than to tell the monsters of the deep that they could not instill within me fear. There have been moments where my limp body has floated face up toward the sky with the salty waves lapping at my eyes, set adrift without direction or purpose. In the sea of life there is as much beauty as there are dangers, tranquility as numerous as ways to die. What is the sea to a man that yearns for the mountains? The comfort of that higher ground brings along with the rushing of the streams and the stillness in balance both flow to a place deep within my soul.  There is an orchestra in the leaves, harmoniously embracing each other in a hushed choir of peace. The sea has its own songs, a rhythmic chanting that seems to beacon men to both come live and also to die.  My journey heads inland towards those mountain, further from the waters of my youth. The starlight ablaze, casting scintillating light across my sea shell littered path. I still hear the sound of the ocean, but I find a comfort in keeping dry.

Sticks, Stones and Glass Window Pains.

 Sticks, Stones and Glass Window Pains.

 

I’m a stone painted like a man, rolling along among glass shaped like people. 

 “Tell me what you’re made of...” I shout as they wander near me.”... for I am not for the weak and cowardly.”   “Oh I’m so durable and tough, I can endure the hardest stuff” they reply. “If what you say is true, we can walk together a while” and with each turn stone scrapes glass and the pressure cracks . The glass streaks back in horror “You’re a monster you are, and I’m scared you’ll destroy me. It’s not safe to be near you.” The men of sticks and woman of twigs snap at attention at the scene, They bark their disdain and dicontentment at the solitary rock.  “I’m so mad” they say. “You’re so wrong and out of line” they cry. 

 I’m a stone painted like a man that has broken foremost the illusions of what glass people see, both as themselves as, and how they see me. They shout that I’m the monster, ignrong half the facts. The how and why become irrelivant. Motives just stain perceptions framing broken windows. Broken things are better left un touched.  I was glass once too. I was pressed down by truth and cowardice. I was tempered with pressure and time. Now I’m a stone with the face of a man scaring the village folk by being direct with them. 

 

 

 

 aint that some weak shit. 

Many things make a man.

A man can get lost in introspection and solitude... and He'll speak of himself in mystery. He'll speak out loud with 5 dollar words and sentence fragments each syllable creating a spark of surprise at their utterance.   He'll think of himself a scientist some moments, observing social formulas and patterns. He'll pick up pieces that he thinks are normal and compare them with traits he thinks he holds, giving great wonder at each shape and picture. He's pause and wonder if they're even from the same set. A man like that will strive to understand himself, so he could be understood, so he could relate, and be relatable. Sharing pieces of his findings with the world with the same confusion of a child who found a syringe in the playground sand. What a strange thing to find, in a place where harmony should dwell. 

A man could get lost indeed in the corners of his own recessive thoughts. Not just in the ways days played out in choices and emotions cultivating vacant stares and quiet words.  With a sense of terminal curiosity he'll question how people can be so assured in trivialities and so adamantly flawed in absolutes. He'll try and sound smart, but also not pretentious. He'll see himself as not particularly anything, and also most assuredly not nothing. His mind will  pontificate philosophy and history, revolutionaries and explorers. He'll ruminate on essences of nobility, chivalry, idealism and valor, but then He knows that He also holds repugnance, contempt, ignorance and bias.  

He'd wander, lost as he is in his thoughts. He'd drift from home to home, state to state. He'd look at the dusty people in their anger, and he'd look at the tree people in their cold.He'd measure their values and their strengths, all the while pulling out pieces of his heart to see if he was one of them. People would tell him to fight a war, and he'd ask why. People would tell him to develop credit and he'd ask why. He'd look at each of them as picture frames and he's a stained glass window in making. They each hold a portrait of a dream, and he'd see himself as an assortment of shattered glass. He's a hundred thousand grains of sand  exposed to the flames of time. 

Maybe He'd call himself a time traveler from the moment he was born, falling backwards through space until a grave breaks his fall. The past is the future, some would say. Look forward to tomorrow while letting go of yesterday, and those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. 

Chicago Style

 Whisperers are talking loudly behind closed door pulpits. They rage and spit with ego clenched fists and insist that they're blessed beyond mere mortal men. I, carry a quiet concealed contempt that I brandish when drawn upon. Step right up and pay the price of admission, but goddamn you if you peer behind the curtain.

 In my heart flows love and light, anger and darkness and I know the chapters and the verses. I know the lyrics to the songs that sing of the things that I shouldn't be. You can poke a bear with a stick but you cant complain about the roar. Just keep dragging a baton across the bars of the cage and then sit back and marvel at what an animal resides within. It's a circus, it's a zoo... it's a place were men shell out hard earned cash to walk around feeling like they're so much more evolved that the beasts of the wild. 

They've hunt me with their distorted views and megalomania like a poacher seeking a trophy above the mantle.  I can feel the shrapnel in my bones of every hurt they've swept away. My love is patient, and my anger is loud.  "shhhhh" they whisper on muted phone calls, firing tranquilizers across the country to silence the angry bear...  but I charge.... with a hole in my heart I charge... with a bullet grazed skull I charge..... until freedom exhausts me and I can accept my the captivity of silence once again. 

Every Broken Word

 We’re sparks in the darkest hours before dawn, drawing power and attraction from another with the right hum. 33,000 people fall in love each day, but do they? Call me cynical, call me what you will but from the side lines I’m watching players march up and down the field, breath heavy, waiting for that whistle to blow. So many people scrambling with the lights on trying to find some rest before the night falls and they’re left alone in their beds recalling all the weight of life. People rushing to the alter to counterbalance the solitude with conversation, the sorrow for a face. We don’t slow dance with romance in a place where you swipe first and ask questions later. We’ve lost our warriors edge. We’re scared of the world we live in and we’re scared of ourselves. We’re scared of the dark.  We’re running from it from our youth. Every broken scene and every broken word reverberates off of the canyon walls of our hearts vacancies. We take people like pills, washing them down with a blind eye and suppressed regret. Each time we tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter, that this time will be different, that They are someone else, that we are someone else. We swallow people to patch our deeply repressed broken dreams, and they stick in our mouths. They weigh in our guts. We smile big with toothy grins that hold hope that the smile sparkles bright enough to detract from the death in our eyes.  The pupils tracing the edges of a shadows in the soul, both known and unknown. Some take people to forget. Like a drunk driver, they proudly drink them in and boisterously take to the streets honking and careening across the asphalt in celebration.  Not all of us though, no. Not for lack of desire, nor for some great steel resolved will. We hold position not to escape, but to find another that can look directly at the truth both within and without. We’re not here for some drug to deny the madness, but to laugh at the world for what it is... meeting its truest face with unblinking eyes. Knowing the cost of stillness and the value of pace, We are not like the hastily plastered vase trying so vehemently to appear new. We’re the decorative plates on display presenting the chips that tell stories of how we got cracked, transitioning value to the intangible and the truly sentimental. We’re vessels that hold water after countless earthquakes have sent us bouncing across floors or other have played ball in the house. Maybe love is an appreciation of what is,  not what is expected, Not what is extracted, not what is left over. 

Like a thrift store suit jacket.

I can't seem to get my head right today. It’s almost as if I woke up as someone else today, but I'm almost myself. I must admit that the concept has been on my mind for a while, who I am and have been. I drive down the streets with neon crosses that flash "Jesus saves" just a quarter mile from where they're selling single barrel scotch. Words of old philosophers and old theologies chase each other in circles in my head. It's wisdom, and pretention, and chaos, and folly. Have I forgotten myself along the way? Happiness is killing the warrior in me. Like a rusty machete in a garage of some aged adventurer; I've been places and I've seen things, though I am not what I used to be. Passions cross my mind often. The determination to care about things, any number of them, that the rest of the world wants to be muted. The question arises, am I being soothed to sleep, or was everything else the nightmare that I am waking up from? Do I possess the capability to be a regular human being? Passions. It seems that there are a increasing number of people who are terrified to have an opinion, and with good reason. To venture a stance is to face waves of aggression and isolation. The days where people could agree to disagree seem to be fading, and tolerance is a crow bar to pry people from their convictions. It is a steel baton that people are beaten with for their nonconformity. I, speak loudly because I'm no stranger to the isolation of unpopular opinion and I was built to endure oppression and abuses. As I drive I see a woman on the street with a huge smile on her face, twitching and flinching like she was being attacked by a swarm of invisible bees. She was happy in her infliction. I presume it’s the effects of some drug. Can I let apathy take me? Am I even able to induce that euphoric disassociation with the bigger picture? That ignorant bliss. I think of Plato’s cave and I know that there is no going back to ignorance and the truth is madness to the captives. Yet truth also is what breaks the chains of captivity.

Apples and Dead men

 I was walking in the cold frosted air of a dream one night counting my breath in the air. An angelic face with porcelain skin, hair bathing in artificial light smiled a tempting smile. She curved her perfect lips and let the words escape her ashen mouth calling forward what every man wished to hear.  She was choking on desire, drunk of pheromones as she took the form of a friend. I could hear the devils hoof prints approaching my flank as I peered deep in to her deep blue desire filled eyes. “Come with me, live a little” she said in her masked fallen tone piquing at the hidden destruction. I could feel the sulfur burning from my skin before I could take a single step towards or turned to run. “Do flawed men hesitate” I asked myself, looking for the strength for what must be done. An apple a day bars the world from the garden and I war with myself assessing fruit.  My fallen friend writes a blank check dipped in passion, tucking it in my breast pocket and I’m certain that my death is at hand. For two days blood boiled and raced, as I weighed the cost of integrity and hypocrisy. I spit sparks of light out of my mouth on the third night beckoning to one beyond me to return me to the waking world of men. Let me walk once again in clearly defined lines as I am too weak for this place of open graved throats and dirty lies. God woke me from that slumbering dream of temptation and life and death. I praised him for the distance, looking down at the dirt on my hands and open invitation in my back pocket. It sometimes takes two days to kill a man that never dies nor stays buried.