Shadow

 There a shadow that's stuck to my heels from the day I was born, and it grows longer and darker in time. My days break with light and possibilities before they trickle like runoff into the guttural black. This shadow thickens in the night calling out in a hoarse whisper to stop resisting solitude and surrender to the inescapable cold of death. I swallow light and remedial spoonfuls of life as a man seeks to shake an irritating cough. "Im loved and never alone" I say aloud from the walls of the cage I live. The shadow grows as I lay still with my heart withering with sadness within. I spend each day dying and imaging love. 

Breathing shallow and deep sighs I lose myself. 

The shadow waits for me as death is an inevitably, but I tell you sometimes he's so damn impatient.

Forfeit Paradise

The orange and blue hues of dusk dance across the horizon

The warmth of the day is retreating from my sun bleached heart beaten in the sand

In this paradise of mind I await the tide to pull me back to the to oceans of obscurity 

The windows of light draw thier shutters tightly and I wonder if the stars will remind me of you. 

I've walk along this shoreline of sand turned to rock, and watch as aspirations fall like heavy stones

The seasons change from a romance of spring to the cold of absence

As the colors of my heart bleed into oblivion in a water colored future that won't be,

I contemplate the silence of a forgotten paradise and wonder what tomorrow comes

The Managerie

 The Menagerie

We live in a simultaneous age of isolation and constant connectivity.

We're starving for intimacy and over-fed information.

Honestly, can any one of us pinpoint the moment when innocence died? 

We've got sex robots and the government is run by pedophiles. 

Society conditions children to mutilate themselves for approval.

We demonize and over correct mistakes and shout down those with dissenting views.

The tides of the mass opinion like a cresting wave of sewage saturates the mind and the skin.

If you can see they'll blind you with it.

They'll parade downfalls on the six o'clock news. 

Telling you you're fine while they break you down into nothing. 

In the world that tells you that you can be anything, what they mean is that you can choose what they offer.

Man was not meant to live on bread alone.

The crumbs that fall from the mouth of the system that is to be subservient to the people are devoid of nurturing value. 

Does the eagle say to the mouse "I'm here to save you" as he clasps his clawed talon through the bones?

The opulent wear ties and sit in front of cameras, and then tell you that freedom is the cause of your pains and they have the chains to cure you.

I was born wild, and I've tasted steel cages.

I've gnawed and clawed through the restraints of expectations and in my core I am a free man. 

They've domesticated and bred us to perform their tricks and to stay still while they cup us for best in show. 

I am not their ornamental maltese curled at the foot of their silk laden bed.

I am the wolf in the grass that knows what they are. I can smell their arrogance. 

They permeate underestimation. 

I run wild with the snakes and the lions.

My fear is reserved for Divine fire, and my reverence is set for higher calls.

My faith is placed in the underdogs with the numbers marked in the unseen.

I dwell securely in the shoulders of my God. 

Jericho fell with the crash of clay and the trumpets sound,

Beware the day that dawns on the power of

the wolves howl.

The Courage of the Voyager

To venture forward on the voyage of love is courage.  The moment you hoist the sails and embark on your journey, you have doomed what you were.

You have killed yourself.

The person you thought you were will cease to exist

The stone floor will scrape your knees

where you fall. And you will bleed.

The trust that you carry hidden deep within your heart will be placed into the hands of another

You will become better than you knew, as pieces of you die. Parts of your armor will clang and clatter to the ground leaving you naked and exposed

Passion heat can ignite a burning inferno, but nothing blisters and scars like silence.

Yet beyond the winter of extremes

Having torn the skin from the knuckles as you climb over insecurities

you will stand...

something new

something stronger

and maybe something smarter

Or more compassionate than you ever were before.

OR,

you will have turned back at the first sign of trouble.

and the person you once were will still be dead, leaving you embittered, fragmented, despondent, and broken.

So be courageous

See what is before you, not as the end of your self that you know,

but the opportunity for new life to burst forth from what you are. Let love build you anew

Destruction of a Seed

 Romance is aborted before it is given the

chance to be carried to term. New life, surgically removed by those whom think that the world is better off without what two people conceived.

Staggering statistics mount higher and higher as the love people have for one another grows colder and colder.

Love is seen as just a sense of cells in sorts. A byproduct of chemical reactions. Love has become all science and no soul. The reality is so very underplayed. With every procedure there are complications. Scars. Scars that are carried on in the lives of those involved forever. Romance is like a new born child. It is majestic and wonderful from the moment it enters the world. Its messy, but also beautiful. It grows, if given the opportunity. It is difficult, and it is painful, it is fragile. It changes can connect two people together, and change them forever. It can inspire them to become something so far beyond themselves.

Romance is sacrifice. Romance is a learning process. Romance is a form of life.

The destruction of a seed has moved all the way to the source... Love. If you can thwart that then generations will never come to be.

Honestly

"Where are you? Where are you honestly?

In a state of emotional vulnerability and spiritual awareness of war. In my depressive state I haven't had much energy to leave the house too often, which is a problem seeing as how living with my parents constant criticism is an agitant. The Isolation, occasionally intentional, sometimes unintentional,  isn't effective for recuperation as the only time that I am really truly physically alone is when I am in the bathroom or in my car on the way to work. I've read your question a few times over the past two hours and wondered how to really answer it. The emphases being on the honesty, and perhaps, this explanation is a bit too honest... but really did you expect me to lie?  Is omittion deceit? are the statements a man makes though completely true, but not truly complete, qualify as a lie? 

I thought long about your question. I'm reminded of God and Adam in the garden, where God asks him something of the same. I'm like Adam. Lost in a familiar place, with a bitten apple, trying to cough up the poison of death. I weigh the cost of life, the spiritual kind, and I look around at all the people that have someone that they can be vulnerable with. I think back to Adam in the garden and how he wasn't deceived when he bit the apple. He followed the woman. HE chose death with his bride. It was almost a noble rebellion. A romantic failure that doomed all man kind. Yet, in his death, there was a promise of a redeemer to redeem all of creation from death... A redemption of a bride.  In those moments, of choice... where he held that apple, both alive and dead in the same moment.. I wonder if he thought about all the times he was alone before God gave him a woman. How much time was spent just him and God, before God said "It isn't good for man to be alone"  And in that sin, God asked "where are you adam" and he had hid because of his shame and his awareness of all that constitutes evil. I wonder how he felt in that moment, standing there cowering with heaviness of his choices. Then again, maybe I'm not like adam. Maybe my choice for sin isn't romantic or noble but steps from a selfishness. A rebellion that we all have in our hearts, you know. The dichotomous heart that is part stone, and part flesh with the commands of God written on them.  So, I struggle with these things, the matters of light and darkness, life and death, good and evil, hope and anguish, sin and redemption, obedience and rebellion, grace and truth... and I fight them to concerts of criticisms with the occasional applause breaks of love. I watch as people wax and wane with waves of self centered focus and sacrificial giving , and I wonder where at any given moment I am in comparison or relation. Am I giving of my self to the point that I am satisfied, while still maintaining healthy boundaries within the scope of what I can take? Reflecting on how streight and narrow the path of the streight and narrow goes, you know. 

I haven't been to church because I've been working.

Knives Out

 Sometimes I think we're born like a hunk of wood. Just a piece of life cut from the wholeness of the tree. That is how we sit until someone, or a group of people take their knives and drive it beneath our bark, pulling away the things that we feel we are protected by. They whittle away our leaves, each one saying to another, that there should be more marks here, or less coarseness there. They scrape away at you with their etching tools and the cutting devices... until you fit some form, a rough image of what they have desired all along. Some of us are born like Balsa. Some of us are as defiant as oak.