Here comes summer

Everyone is political and love is not politics.  The picture I painted of you in my mind is more perfection than the poem that I can touch.  My heart invents fairytales to my head's dismay.  I fall asleep with the blinds closed and hope to wake up with sunlight peaking in.  It only takes a spark.

I don't want to be inside all of this evaporated guilt and a point and click universe.  I don't want to be live where forgetfulness is happiness.  Some days you wake up hungover but at least you know there was something to regret.  Here under my unmade sheets I lie awake, but only in consciousness.  My eyes are open but my feet don't function.  My heart beats but ever so slowly.  Every doodle I draw is someone else's.  Nothing really draws me but clouds whisk by me like the years in life.  I gaze at them with curiosity, take my eyes away for what feels like a minute, and they're gone.

I'm the shadowy figure of a balloon's reflection.  A colorful shadow, but a shadow nonetheless.  Whispered darkness carries me away and any hope of light is overcome by the distracting noise of dying flowers.

After the rain

The blue moon glow hides behind the the clouded ceiling.  Most of the street is blinded save for a cone of wet asphalt flickering in and out of the forward leaning streetlight.  My window is soaked in condensation and leftover rain drops from the storm only a few hours before.  Inside the air runs consistent, but the second floor struggles to find a cool enough temperature.  At least the thick muggy air is locked outside.  Toads croak in the bushes, sharing little tidbits about where the mosquitoes and lizards are hiding to each other.

My head presses against the glass but only mentally.  In actuality I sit with a gaze through more than just the window pane.  My thoughts and vision pierce through the soaked pavement and into my own illusionary present future.  I see joyfulness far away and contentment in the distance, though the latter is attached to a string that starts inside my chest.  I see love tied up on a branch too high for me to reach on my own.  Imagined futures flood into my present.

Then I reinterpret the past and come to a new line that's supposed to be rusty.  Like misremembering the which subway you took home two nights ago.  My conscious lies awake and pushes me to dream through reality.  Anything we can conjure up or find to distract us will serve us much better than this alleged patient love, it tries to convince me.  You're asleep anyway, what's the use in pushing the dreams away?

Still, I know that love is patient.  I won't be swayed so easily.  I may fall asleep with my guard down but every morning I wake up with renewed skin.  The muscles surrounding my heart grip me tight and loose.  My lungs fill with breath and fluid.  I'm not drowning but walking toward the sun with shades.  I'm a daffodil leaning outward, following the Light.  My roots are learning to tangle themselves in the solid ground around me.  I'm trying desperately to try.  It's interdependence and inward acceptance and motivation.  Step by step.  Day by day.  People don't grow in one day.  Stems aren't always green.

Three in one

I heard our song on the radio tonight.  Or rather it was the song that never became ours.  The one we would've sang into the wind with the windows down and the volume up.  We used to hold hands to keep me from falling apart by myself.  Remember the night we walked down the train tracks and got caught by the security guard as we lay on the tracks?  I used to reach for your hand so I wouldn't have to feel the wind pass me by.  Now you're thousands of miles away and the only thing between my fingers is the moisture from the thick gulf stream air.

I still hear your voice at the far end of the dimly lit tunnels.  I still reach for your hand while I'm driving and my heart stops.  Why couldn't I tell you when you were in my arms?  Why couldn't I hold you when our arms were tangled vines?  Now we're friends and nothing more though my heart's arms are sore from trying so desperately to reach beyond the shore.  You've wandered off to recollect your native tongue, but we used to speak in Romance languages.

As you walked away I could never say anything that would keep you close.  You saw an image of me that I thought I was.  You saw what I thought I wanted to be.  I'm still becoming myself, aren't we all?  You saw the ripples of a man still dripping holy water.  You saw a preteen in a young man's body.  So maybe now I'm just going through different motions.  Yes, perhaps now these are just my teenage lusts that I'm grasping after like vaporous dreams.  It could be that these memories are just that, memories and not a preliminary chapters to my love story.  Maybe.  Maybe I'm just wasting both of our time.

I'm Still Here

Faith is not stutter steps.  It's the opposite, or so I would posit.  It's jumping across the creek without seeing the other side.  It's not hearing the whisper but know that it's inside.

You are just, I know that. Anything that I could think to put forth from my mouth out of my mind is slivers of splinters in a crooked sculpture.  We try to correct our systems but neglect to remember that they are birthed out of broken tools.  Our lives are invisible whispers in the breeze on an Autumn evening.  Here today and gone tomorrow.  We welcome each other and attempt to hold the other's brisk wind in our palms but it always slips our grasp.

We fall asleep one day and wake up with gray hairs tickling our ears.  We wake up one morning and the birds have flown.  We open our eyes and our lovers have left with less than a sticky note.  Stale fragrances of cheap perfume and bloated livers in full bloom.  We wake up and the casket that we buried years before calls to us.

No one will believe me, we tell ourselves and we thank the soul that swept away for purchasing the darker shade of blinds.  Our eyes slip back inside ourselves, hoping we can hide ourselves.  Another morning like this and they'll need to turn me over.  Or perhaps another week like this and it won't be the burden I'm bearing, just a pole that the only ones left are sharing.  It was years ago we made that pact and though our words barely skim passed common pleasantries the agreement is sealed in stale blood that will soon be leaking.

Will you see me in the condensation on the window?  Will you remember me where the shadows used to fall on our bedside table?  Will you reach for your blanket, the one with the blue and white stripes that you used to cling to when the wind grew claws?  How will I see you?  How will I see?  Will I see?

If instead of now my face disappeared two years before, what windows would I have not been privileged to peek through?  Pop culture slang and celebrities reaching farther to extend the daylight like we all do.  More teams winning, some for the first time and others breaking barriers.  The Courts courted the people with new acceptance instead of old grievances.  Politicians paid for power.  The populace believed what it wanted or put on their dilated glasses.  The judges fell asleep long enough to let the thieves get away.

The sun came up.  The sun went down.  The moon circled the circling Earth.  The dead stars danced and the ant-like people let the illusion of their light guide the dark country nights.  Field mice ate seeds and were taken by winged thieves without sight.  The world awoke and sleep with one eye closed.

The world continued to spin.  Go to sleep little child, the world's a dark speck spinning without our force.

Stretching the Daylight

God turns the lights off and the sun goes out.  Then we blast our music, hoping it'll last long enough that we won't have to hear ourselves think.  We don't want to have to turn our eyes inside out and see what's inside.  We drown out the voices inside or numb any feeling, trying to keep the echoes of the day inside for as long as possible.  We don't want to go home to our evaporating souls.  We don't want to have to confront the whispering shadows in the dark.  We're scared of who we might see when we gaze into the mirror.

We don't know how to live at night so we either stretch the temporal joys of the day or numb the loneliness of life among the stars.  The longer we avoid the silent whispers, the more challenging it will become in our future tomorrows' nights.  We don't know who we've become because we're afraid of losing who we've been.  We'd rather forget today than take it head on.  We know tomorrow must come but until then we'll hold the breaks or drink yesterday's pleasant memories.  No one can stand to be around us because when we're around us we're not even ourselves.

We talk to others to keep from having to hear ourselves think.  We ask about our neighbor's life with the hopes that our own troubles will fade into the background.  We desperately try to neglect ourselves but always find the same two eyes staring back at us in the mirror.  "It has to come from inside," they tell us, but the irony is that they're speaking from the outside.  We don't know who to believe anymore.  It's easier to fall asleep than it is to feed ourselves the necessary nourishment to survive.  Our motivation to survive is barely stronger than our desire to live.

We live in a dark gray hole that is far from feeling whole.  "No one can make you yourself and nothing can control who you are."  Still we become the trees around us.  The soil we've been planted feeds us minerals or masked materials.  The foul fecal fertilizer somehow nurtures our growth.  The discipline we so quickly avoid knows what we need and is there to supply it.  As we keep moving, it tells us that it's okay to slow down.  We must slow down every now and again.  We must slow down and be content to not know everything.  There is hope in the distance with roots spreading close to ours.

We're growing up and down.  We're spreading all around.  May it be ripe, juicy fruit.  Pineapples that make mouths water and satisfy not only our cravings, but the salivating mouths of our sisters and brothers.  Sweet citrus nourishment; food that satisfies the cravings of the minority masses.