A Small Skirmish

You taught me efficiency and they label me with "procrastinate."  You taught me to use my resources and they tell me I'm a mooch, a pest, and a leech.  You encouraged me to, "Go anywhere!" and "Be Anything!" and they reach for their strings to tie me down.  This world can't hold me down.  This world can't tell me who to be or who I am, although I endlessly ask them for clarification.

You advised me never to be afraid to ask questions and they break out the muzzle.  "Don't keep us here longer than we need to be," they complain.  The peculiar thing is that they were never here to begin.  Their minds have been fixated on former selves, covetous longings, and romantic desires, but not here.  They try to shut me up so that they can escape to where they imagine their dreams are waiting for them, but then complain that nothing ever comes to fruition, at least not the way that they had imagined.

Maybe it's not my place to speak these words.  Maybe this is just pointing fingers, but what if it's not?  What if it's more than that?  What if there is meaning to the madness?  Don't you want to know if there is something buried below the superficial stickers that the world tries to stick on you?  Wouldn't you want to discover what is hibernating deep inside?  Or are you so afraid of the unknown that you would rather plaster further layers of predictable pain on your person?

Stanzas to fill the In-Between

This movie's boring, mundane even.  Maybe a month ago it still held onto some novelty, but no more.  I want to start a new one; can we stop and begin again?

I thought life was living, but somehow it's all the in-between times, like this.  Surely there is light somewhere beneath this crack in the surface.  And here.

I'm a torn and fraying noose ever since you cut me loose.  I'm brain without a skull, unprotected and dull.  A sponge that can't release the pain, the trauma, and the rain.  No, not without you cradling my splinters in your handmade mittens.

There are faint whispers here, but nothing comes to life in a vacuum. Am I sweating or is that your steady pulse shaking the table?

Please don't go there, don't leave me unless you're gone for good.  You know I can't cut the strings myself. My patience is so thick that I can't breathe beneath it.  You understand don't you?

Lust Haunts Me

 I needed you and all you did was give me a passing glance.  You held me up like a prop in your life and that's all I ever was.  Still, why can't I leave in the past where we were?  Why do I go digging through the cemeteries of unrequited loves?  Why can't I leave you and move to green pastures?

And in these moments where everyone is so far from me, farther than physical distance, I return to the vast expanses where I left all of you.  All of me feels like a remnant casting fickle shadows in the still breeze.  I pick up the pieces of my heart that I hardly knew had broken apart from who I was.

And on some occasions the listeners listen too closely to who they think I am.  And then the other times they don't take me seriously enough.  So then I retreat to my interior like in these moments, hoping maybe there I will find a truer version of myself. Hoping, somehow I'll find a new part of me previously hidden.

I felt like I knew you so well and you never knew me.  Now, neither of us know who was or who I've become.  Maybe I'm a beautifully textured surface waiting for the right words.  Maybe I'm a fish in shallow water.  I see no reflection in the mirror.

Get Outside

 I need people.

I knew it before.  I was crying out for community before, but it was all a whisper in the dark.  Now the people are gone or far away and I'm all by myself.  I need an external force.  I don't think you understand this.  People say, "Pick yourself up," "Do it for you," or "You'll never love someone until you can love yourself," but do I not know myself?  Can't I think critically about who I am?  Sure, I have blindspots like the rest of us, but I need something from the outside to push inside of me, to make me go, to ignite me.

What does a solitary man do in the midst of the silent worldwide chaos?  Like noodles dancing mad above my head.  The cords attached to me are loose like live wires.  Don't step close to me or you may shock yourself.

Wear a mask, run for shelter, don't tempt me.

Social interaction is rare these days and the live wires protruding from my brain are the only animated part of me that make sense.

Maybe there is wind outside, but it seems my spirit's left.  I'm a shell, can't you see me?  Everything evaporated but the disaster; I'm still here.

Impetus of the Movement or The First Step to Self-Discovery?

Sure, you can kill the martyr, but don't you know what that will do?  Don't you realize that's what he wants from you?  Kill him and watch him resurrect in the thousands of faces around you.  In your effort to make him disappear your garden will grow with more weeds than ever before.

Yeah that's what he wants, this masochist, this cult leader, this creator, this destroyer.  Kill him if you wish, but just know that his roots run deeper than the soil underneath him.  He has entangled himself in the lives of everyone he's met so you will have your work cut out for you.  He's grafted into every living thing he's ever touched, this world is flooded with his toxins.

 

Cut him down, chop him up, and burn all that remains.  Still, you will not destroy him.  He is the destroyer.  He'll destroy everything but himself, for that is what makes him who he is.  If the martyr kills himself he fails his mission.  He has to convince you that he is the the victim and that he is the enemy.  He drives you to anger, to rage, and to hatred, all with a shallow smile peeking through his teeth.  He knows you see through him, but that is his intent, to get you to fall into this thinly disguised trap he's laid.

Poor man, poor suffering soul.  He truly believes that he is flawed and that no one loves him, or rather that no one will love him otherwise.  That is how his story came to be.  Someone or something convinced him many years ago that he was nothing if he was not suffering.  He can no longer see any different?

Can you cure him?

That's what he's really asking.  Can you peek inside him to find who he was before all of this?  He truly is a sad soul stuck in this delusion, this fiction.  Inside that façade there is someone there, someone real, someone beyond suffering, but he doesn't know that man anymore, nor how to find him.  He's searched so desperately for countless years, but somewhere along the dusty road he forgot what he looked like.  He forgot how to find the man behind the mirror without any aide at his side.

He only knows himself through the eyes of others; that is why he clings to you.  He's a parasite, but not by choice.  He wishes he could be himself, but he no longer recognizes who that is.  He'll disguise his hurt, his brokenness in the perceived innocence of an orphan child longing for a caretaker.  He'll numb the pain with temporal pleasures, even try to sleep in the hope that he'll wake up from this nightmare.

Still, all the suffering he endures is hidden by the hurt he lets the outside world see.  If he would let them in, if he could just be vulnerable for a time, then maybe he could rediscover himself.  But instead he urges you to strike at him, to make the first blow.  His delusion has made him think that only this will remove the thick layers built around his heart.  The soft, almost innocent, and yet somehow sinister glare of his eyes whisper "kill me," but it's the gentleness that holds you back.  You cannot destroy a child, you know there is a boy inside there.

Somehow you have to find a way past his cardboard cutouts and all the layers built by years of scars.  There has to be some way you can open him up to himself.  Maybe you can wound him in a way that runs deep, a way that won't feed the martyr, but rather burst through the beast to puncture the boy.  Somehow, you hope, the boy will return before the beast takes over.

Somewhere inside the boy hopes for this too.  Somewhere inside the boy cries desperately to be set free.

Yesterday's Remains

It started with a virus.  It started simply enough.  Surely we can recover from this eventually.

Remember when this normal was "new"?  Remember when the world did not revolve around you?  There has to be something here.  A purpose?  A tangent?  A discourse?

Yesterday the words were here and I fell asleep or exhausted my creativity elsewhere.  I guess I'm still there.

Can't You See It's Raining?

Like an addict in a torrent plugging holes in the attic.  I'm doing everything to keep the real me from understanding who I am.  My ego takes fear and dresses it in love to keep me in the dark.  It flips the switch on or lights a flickering match in this darkness in an effort to deceive me for even five more minutes.  My ego is the best at hiding its true intentions.  It does not wish for me to see beyond the crack in the door where the light is.

Plugging holes gets monotonous really fast.  I can move from one room to the next, one couch to the next, but there is little difference.  What about community?  What happened?  How did I leave it all behind?  How did I leave you all behind?  Escaping into the shadows doesn't feel like the quick abduction by a phantom.  It's a slow and winding path where the light gradually fades.  So gradual is the disappearance that it feels more the exciting acts of positive rebellion.

Is that what all of this is?  Is it my ego hiding me from the truth?  Or perhaps even this is one of its strategies to push me further.

I need to get to know myself more.  Who can start me on this journey?  I want to see who it is writing this and to have a conversation with him.  Where do I start?  How can I meet him?  Does anyone know how to contact him or where to begin these conversations that seem to have to begin within?  Within what?  Within who?  Within how?