ALT 7

AllLivingThings(die)

Cardboard Combustion

It's like walking through an empty door to a barren reflecting pool.  No one is around.  Only the blank space between you and your reflection will hear you scream, but you only shout inside yourself.  Barely a day ago you were surrounded, though your surroundings felt foreign.  You place markers on the side of the mountain with hopes of making it back up again some day, but no one responds, or if they do, their colors quickly fade again into the background.

How do you create from nothing?  How do you find something where there was nothing to start?  Where is the life in a ghost?  Who will respond?  Who will be the one I miss who misses me?  Yes, alone time is good, but this continued isolation cannot be healthy for anyone.  Swipe right.  Swipe left.  What does it matter?  No one will respond anyway.

All of these cardboard cutouts won't cut it.  There is something out there.  There has to be.  If not, then I too am fading into the background.  People press their faces into smiling masks, holding onto fragile hope that happiness will save them.  They hope in flashy lights and smoke machines, and when the man behind the curtain accidentally shows his face they hide their eyes.  I'm not falling for it.  But it's a lonely life living in the knowledge of the truth.  It's a lonely life living beyond forced ignorance.

Preaching transparency and powerlessness to the masses.  Beating down the flock with a cursed compliment.  A subtle hint of their true worship as he nudges a ball to the side.

They say I am bold, but I just cannot stand to be lied to.  I will not fall for your lies like your fallen ones.  Does the wool make you itch?  Does it irritate your wounds like the ones you pour salt on every day?  I cannot lay down and let the smooth lies slide into my like syrup.  A silk robe may be precious, but it will not hide your fangs.

No one can know any of this and so it shall go onto the public forum.  Remember the ancient ones and their laws?  Maybe they aren't all tombs and temples.  Maybe that's just what we see today.  Think of the materials we use today, how many of them would last millennia aside from the stones and the structures they hold.  The rich and the elites know this and so they build their towers not just high, but strong.  They build their stories (their versions of history) deep into the zeitgeist so they can cement their place in history.  They leave us behind but feed us bread and entertain us with circuses so we won't notice them as they slip out the back door.

Their distraction is our destruction.  Well, we've noticed.  We may be late to the game, but cheaters never win and winners never cheat.  Prepare for the end of your reign.  Even sturdy cardboard falls.

Self-Denial/Self-Discovery

I need freedom.  No, not the kind of liberty that breaks chains and opens up previously unseen worlds.  No I need freedom to know who I can be and, in a way, some sort of slavery that binds me to who I am.  I know it may sound absurd, but that is what I'm looking for: something tells me who I am and what my purpose is.  I guess you could call it an anchor, but it has to be so much more than something that holds me down; that's not freedom.  I need something that inspires me to reach out and continue to achieve more.

Burning this match at both ends creates a blinding smoke that I cannot see through, and it chokes the air from in front of me.  Just tell me what to do.  Tell me who I am.

Though I can already see that part of that is where the problem lies.  I will not let you tell me who I am.  I will not conform to your standards or expectations of who I ought to be.  I will not be your marionette.  All the boxes you create are confining and I don't fit.  Can't you see that's why we're leaving these paradigms behind?  Still, I want something that won't choke me when I am merely months in.

Something that involves storytelling.  Something that lets me be myself and pushes me to discover more of who I am.  Something where I am teaching but I am not a teacher.  Some sort of influencer, but not the sole source.  I need to be able to look up and over while talking down and out.  I don't want to talk down and I'm sick of feeling down and out.

Give me a personality test, or better yet, an aptitude test.  I'm inept at talking back to my reflection.  What could it possibly have to say to me that I do not already know myself?  How can mentor the youth and be a storyteller?  How can I use my professional skills, both acquired through education and through practice?  How can I open the seemingly locked windows to my secret strengths that weren't hidden in diplomas and certifications?  Where can I be myself and not become so complacent as to be stagnant and die?

I want to rely on sleep for rejuvenation, not as a means to just escape into dreams.  I want to find the motivation, the ganas, to work when I'm inspired.  I want color flooding back into my life, not just a flash here and a flicker there.  If this is me dreaming, why can I do little more than sleep when I return home?  Why does the picturesque mountain village feel more like a bland desert town made for industrial, nomadic cowboys without a home?  Why are the edges torn and faded and where did all of my friends go?  Maybe this is just the opposite end result of some recent mania, but it keeps coming back.  Why?  Where did it come from?  Where did I come from?  And where am I going?

Everyone's leaving and entering this place, but I'm trying to find a home.  And those who have only ever known this place can't wait to escape.  I'm falling into their trap and fall further down Maslow's hierarchy every day.  Nowhere is safe in compassion fatigue and no one will save you if you're the imagined superhero martyr.  If you're swimming away from the life preserver, you cannot blame the lifeguard when he doesn't save you.  If you're avoiding the hammer, you might be safe from the pain, but how effective can you be?  The nail must hold the planks together and it cannot do it alone.

Alone.  That's it.  Maybe that's it.  Alone.  Take a vacuum to this clean room and suck up any semblance of life that still remains.  And that is where you'll remain: alone.  Complacent.  Barely beyond useless.  Don't blame the other for your own ability to escape the comfort of the soft cover.  A softcover.

Learning to start again without a proper beginning

Connecting dots.  Drawing lines.  No one can tell I'm going this time.  I want something beyond what is here but I'm not sure how to find it, especially when I'm not sure what it is.

I'm a result, an effect.  There have been so many causes to lead me to where I am, but still I feel inadequate and ill-equipped.  So what do I do with these incomplete leanings?  Where do I go?  How do I move on?  I don't know why I try to be something more when my boat is anchored to the shore.  How can I expect anything more here?

I want to write a story, or maybe to be one (to be in one).  I'm not sure.  I want to make a difference, but it's so hard when everything is the same.  I need to move my feet and not be afraid where I'll land.  I don't know why I try.  I don't know what for or why.  Maybe some day words will align and mean more than jumbled ransom notes of words again.  Maybe I'll find my voice again instead of just filling empty space.  I have found something, a light, a flicker, a passion, in academia, but I want a little more, or rather a little something different.  I want something with life, imagination, and creativity, not dry, clinical research.

Creatures, unfamiliar features, narratives, and plot lines.  I want characters with character and places with history.  I want to leave this nonsense behind to explore the rationale behind the nonsensical.  Maybe this can be a month of exploration.  Maybe the effect here can become something beyond the mundane for a change.  Maybe something will happen if I work at it.  Maybe I'll actually work at it and not beat myself down with familiar meta narratives or numbing half-truths.  Maybe.

Hand-Crafted for the Masses

Popular art in this place is decoration.
It's soft.
It's not always easy but its risks are usually safe.
The calculated, concentrated artist is not one.
She's a designer.
Art is not design, though design can be artistic.
Decorative artists don't press hard
against the canvas.  Decorative artists
are not artists.  Decorative artists
are capitalists.
Art can be a means, but if that is all
it means, it is not art.
Art is not just
for looking, it's about teaching you
to see.  Creating art can be learning
to see.  Creating art can be
observing the act of observation.

Popular art here is for the masses.
If it's all the same
I'll keep to myself.
Art is not wallpaper,
and yes, wallpaper can be
art, but art is expression.
It's experimentation.
It's learning to see by really looking.
It's questioning the familiar
and answering a question with another
question.  Everything you see
is not art and somehow we are
all artists.

Popular art in this space
is not art.  It is decoration.
Decoration doesn't pinch or
even prick.  There are no
certain risks.
Popular art is not
my medium.

Three Friends

I miss you.  Three words.  Strong words, and a truth hurling deep inside.  I saw your picture today and remembered your gone.  I missed you today and that's fine.

What is the book inside me?  What are the pages waiting to be set?  The ink of the text falls flat until my eyes become heavy or my energy is dry.  I'm looking for something that's not there.  I'm writing invisible lines just to keep going.  None of this seems with a concrete purpose; none of it appears to come from anywhere beyond my fingers.

August isn't always great and this year is similar.  A move. A first house purchase.  A totaled car (or three in the family).  A new job.  An online class I started late.  September seems to be much better (coming from one that can't stay put in the present).  A four in the ninth month, a question of sanity.  Still, people trust me.  They come to me with questions.  I'm not sure where any of this is going, but I hope for hands to hold.

Codependency, interdependence, and intimacy.  What a combination, really.  A heart, a head, and a hand.  Like three people directing a show.  Three madmen leading the tour.  Is it worth following these men?  Where are they leading us?  Will they help us find our way?

And I do not want imitations of myself.  I don't want clones or colonies.  I want empowerment of others.  I want vigor and valor from timidity and turbulence.  I want the disdained to learn to trust, the fearful to learn to fly, and the lonely to know the embrace of a true and requited love.  I do not want for myself.  Yes, I will need headwaters to keep this stream going, but largely I just want to flow into others.  Water rushing, flowing downstream into new life.

Time.

Is it the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow?  Do we all experience it symmetrically or somehow the same way?  Is it anything more than a complex social construct?

Ask the pioneer who ventured into the unknown how his time passed.  The rugged, wrinkled man that went searching for adventure and returned to restlessness when the trail ran dry.  Time quickens to a pace unspeakable when the journey is fresh.  Once his heels have become buried in the ground complacency slips its mask on.  Adventure doesn't ever last.  Time crawls when joy dissipates or interior smiles evaporate.

The grandmother waiting in the hospital lounge.  No one can disturb her except the slightest movement or touch.  Maybe there's a chance her grandson will make it.  Maybe he'll walk.  And what about her daughter?  How will she fare? Time loses track of itself.  Time gets stuck between floors in the elevator.  It pulls out its playing cards and teaches Joan and Jill to play crazy eights.  No sign of maintenance coming and there is no need.

Field of Vision

I cannot look behind me.  That's just one reason why I need another.  I cannot see through the blinds.  Looking backward there will always be something behind me.  I think the late twenties (and into the thirties) is a spectrum vacillating between isolation and intimacy, community and loneliness.  It's rain clouds outlined in silver permanent marker.

And in this day this age range is an extended adolescence.  Where have we gone wrong?  What needs repairing?  How do we make adjustments if we do not know where the leak is?  Go to the root but when you get there it's cold, dark, and empty save for your own reflection in the shallow cesspool.

Alone and lonely are not always good friends.  A lonely neighbor can be surrounded by cardboard cutouts while alone is a location.

Maybe this is just my field of vision.  My perspective.  My lens.  My point of view.

Basta.

May Flowers?

How convenient that we made it here.  How convenient that the flowers grew this way.  Maybe May flowers are on the horizon.  Maybe June will bring something new.
I'm trying not to think so quickly, so far along.  I couldn't remember your face but now I at least have something to go on.  Now at least there's something there.  I'm telling people but I don't want to spoil the potential.  I don't want to ruin the moment.  Let's just take our time; I don't have to worry about how things will go. Let's follow along where the river flows, no need to rush it along.
There is a horizon and we don't need to reach for it.  Nor does it make sense to let dread burry our minds.  Worry is not becoming for us.
Let's just hold on
to each other for now.  I'll see you again soon.  My dreams aren't whispers or shadows; perhaps they're glimpses of an upcoming life.  Maybe we'll be together, but for now we don't have to rush things.
New feelings.  Or new now.  Thunderstorms in a state of sunshine.  I feel rumbling in the breeze and it's alright right now.  I wanted to tell you that I miss you before but the feeling is gone now.  I'll see you soon, I said.
It's okay if you see nothing here.  Right now just feels like a space filler, but we'll get there.  Don't worry.  There's no need to romanticize the moment.  We'll get there.  Everything is in its place.  Everything is working out.
We will not worry.  After all, it is not becoming for us.  See you soon.

April Showers

My soul is not a pendulum alternating between grace and justice.  Your love is not a carrot that you tangle just out of my reach.  Nor is it an obligation that you begrudgingly bestow upon us.  You choose us.  You chose us.  You want what is best for us.  You want us to see ourselves as You see us.  You want to share Your love so that we may become who You made us to be.  I don't need a missing puzzle piece, this jigsaw is complete.  I am enough.  I am sufficient as is, no assembly required.  I don't need fancy words or a wife to fill me up.

Please don't read this as flattery or imagined adoration.  This is not a "fake it 'til you make it" scenario.  I can make it from here.  I'm just looking for the steps as I gradually crawl from the darkened shadows.  I'm walking and growing ever so slowly to move from living to thriving.  This right here.  The soul beneath this skin is not made of dandelions and clovers.  The soil is enriched with nutrients.  I am flowers coming up for air in springtime.  Rain falls.  Sun scorches.  Even worms crawl in my midst.  But I am flowers, not afraid of growing.

Courage takes vulnerability and I am on my way.
Please plant me near the flowing stream.  Renew me from the roots up, refreshed in the gentle breeze.

Just Loneliness

No one warned me.  They never teach us in school of the isolation of independence.  They don't tell us how to endure days on end with little more than ticking clocks.  I'm finding more of me these days, but in a way that is less and less social.  It's like these opaque walls are mirrors staring back at me, silently judging my near inability to budge.

I miss the thunderstorms, the rain that I could match.  I miss having what I thought was nothing, the quiet conversations in the background with familiar voices.  I feel like I don't know anyone here, especially my own reflection.  Who is the man staring back at me?  How can I find a way out of this chasm if I don't even know where I am?  Some may say to retrace my steps, but that's part of what I thought I did and my footprints have long since been buried.  I knew it wouldn't be the same but why can't I even push myself out from underneath this anti-sociability.  No, that can't be true; surely I must be exaggerating to some extent there..

My very being feels like a whisper cascading down blank concrete walls.  Where I used to see potential now lay a dead battery.  Sometimes I smell the tempting scent of an anticipatory blank canvas, but I can't always trace it's origins.  My legs don't carry me like they used to.  Those words sound older than I am but I don't have a stroller nor someone to push me anymore.  Maybe it was once some thing instead of someone.  I cannot tell you for sure.

So many misses.  I should join a horseshoe club.  So deep in thought when I want to be active.  So empty when most of what they see surely appears put together.  How do I reveal this without crashing?  How do I run without running away or just seeking to hide?  I wish I could tell you how I feel but I don't even know who you are.  I don't even have words except this wasted jumble of letters. Who can relate?  Who can hear me whispering ever louder into the vast abyss?  Why bother?  What's the point of trying anymore?  What purpose does any of this serve?  After all, it's all just a chasing of the wind, isn't it?  Does anything push a gear further that leads to something more than large-scale progress?  Is there a crank that promotes personal progress?  If so, why haven't I found it yet?  Why does it elude my grasp?

Is this just loneliness?
Or perhaps
is this loneliness just?

Who is writing this?

"The only thing keeping you from achieving greatness is yourself."  They say it all the time - heck, I've even said it myself.  I don't always believe it though.  I don't think I can do this life alone.  Sure, I've made it this far, but if I'm being honest I've been far from alone.  These last five years or so have been in and out (mostly in) of the sphere of aloneness.  The more "connected" we become, the further isolated I feel.  I can't keep looking back to the past with a romantic gaze.

I will say here and now that this time is not romantic.  It's not so pleasant living here alone, with nothing but my shadows to accompany me.  Most weekends find me restless staring at the walls and wishing for someone - anyone - to talk back.  Too often I fall asleep because if I were to stay awake I would just fall apart.  I feel like plaster peeling from the walls, my dry life scraping away the pleasure to make room for a painless and complacent discomfort.

I didn't paint my walls this color, so how did they turn out this way?  I didn't want a life like this, so who's life am I living?  What is the life I've chosen or where did it go?  I'm like a whisper on the tongue of a timid student, too afraid to escape and too vital to give up.  Who's life is this that I'm living, and if I want to start over where would I even begin again?

If life is but a dream I want to wake up, I want to get moving.  I want to go back to where I was, or who I was.  Someone save my head from this vice grip; I'm gradually losing brain cells, energy, and the strength to continue.  Who else is here?  Who else can enter into this without falling down the hole that I'm trapped inside?

Maybe tomorrow I'll wake up as someone else.  Maybe in a few days I'll realize that the last several years have all just been vapor and I have another chance.  But the chances are more than likely that I'll have to continue where I am and learn to reach further with the strength I have.  The probability that I'm awake and living is overwhelming out of my favor.  So, I guess now is as good a time as any to start doing something.  But that's the thing.  I don't know how to start because I don't know where to go and I don't know what I'm missing.  It's like trying to find the missing piece to an inverted puzzle.  I don't know what piece is missing, and if I did I wouldn't know where to place it.

Maybe I'm not as much of a mess as I think I am, but I can't convince myself of that yet.  I know myself too well to believe the flattering clichés and hollow words I try to tell myself.  I can't lie to myself and hope to believe it.  How will anyone believe me if I don't believe myself?  That's why I need community.  That's why I need another's touch.  I need someone to come and wake me up because I haven't seen my true reflection in years.  Who am I anymore?  Why should I care to continue this life if the current trend is nothing but dull, repeated shadows?

Make Room for the Gray

Many days ago (it was a different age) the world was a different place.  Relationships were the utmost.  Dialogue existed beyond debate.  Conversations could be civil and connected.  This is not to say that there weren't uproarious disagreements and visceral arguments, it's just that something is missing now.

Each step we take deeper into the future, it seems the gray is being increasingly erased.  We're retreating further into our increasingly reinforced satellites, lighthouses, and castles.  A world that was made for connectivity is reaching for ways to power itself.  Though we thrive on the energy, critiques, and validation of our neighbors, we're finding more ways everyday to become self-sustaining.

I don't think we're built to be self-propelled guard towers in a vast field far from each other.  I don't think happiness and joy are the same thing.  I think we're confusing one for the other.  We've somehow convinced ourselves that we're the beginning, the middle, and the end, though truthfully we cannot abandon the present moment, if only for an instant.  It is for this reason that many of us seek external remedies (or anesthesias) to distract us from the now.

I am not immune.  I do not claim to sit atop an elevated statue and deliver the glories of war to the ones that tilled the fields during those uncertain years.  I am just like the rest of you, and no, we are not the same.  The circles under my eyes are not scars of which to boast; I know they overlap your own.  I need criticism and I need validation just as I claim that you do.  I need you just as I believe that you need me.

We cannot continue to erase the gray.  Some may be confused and think that the gray is a mundane fog that is meant to blind us.  I am not talking of that depressing vapor that lay inside us and somehow seems to separate us from each other.  No, this gray is our overlapping humanity.  It is the conversations without fear of disagreement.  It's listening intently to understand the humanity of the one in front of and behind you instead of hearing talking points until you turn your ears off as you form your own argument.  Do you hear that?  The sound of your sister crying out to not just be heard, but listen to?

I'm just saying, we cannot abandon the value of the relationship yet.  It has too much to offer us and alternative seems only to be leading us down a long, wide, and uneven path toward destruction.  It may be true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so we must learn to embrace conflict when we know it is for growth.  Not just our growth, but their (the other's) growth.  I choose a storied path with bumps, bruises, and unknown endings over the smooth and comfortable road free from conflict leading to most certain death, destruction, and never-ending isolation.

How It Feels

Like dozens of receptors in the brain are all shooting off at the same time.  However, none of them feel significant enough to warrant tending to.  Or rather, there's no energy or way to prioritize which direction to turn so I sit as still as I can and try to make sure no one notices the arguments occurring in my head.  Like I'm about to explode into a puddle of tears that I can't turn off.  A common one for me is palpable desire to crawl into my shirt and escape until I can wake up myself again.

Then knowing that I should know better and ashamed that I don't, but yet I still have to put on a face so that no one else catches my disease.  It's like those "fake it 'til you make it" people say, but feeling more and more like an imposter and less like whoever you used to be.  Like giving up and quitting is the only solution because the simplest of tasks feel like mountains and you don't even own the right equipment.  Like someone entered into your body and you don't know who you are anymore.

It's like being distracted from all reality and trying desperately to fit in so that no one will detect any sense of irregularity.  The only thing you can do is reach desperately for what was "normal" or what was automatic just yesterday.  You don't feel equipped for regular life, let alone difficult decisions or complicated problems.  You want to postpone everything until you're "you" again, whoever that was.

Those people who say they had to take a "mental health day."  Do they even know how this feels?  Do they even know what this is like?  Surely some of them do, but I think it's overused, abused even.

And then remembering that my medicine is on a shelf somewhere because an automated voice system doesn't recognize my voice of desperation.  And I don't know how to share this reality without sounding over-exaggerated so I focus most of my energy on creating accurate descriptions to share.  To say that it's mentally exhausting is either a drastic understatement or somehow the perfect way to describe it.

How can anyone live like this?  I need community.  I don't need solace, for it is not comforting.  I don't need pillowed clichés, they sound like counterarguments in conversation that's nowhere near a debate.  I need someone holding me, nursing me to health.  Solitary confinement is a death sentence.  It's assisted suicide.  This world has cracked before, but this time it's like someone is pulling it apart at the seams.  The small strands that are holding us together are getting smaller everyday.

I needed to share this though it took considerable energy to even get here.  To sit here.  To type here.  I needed to get this out of my head, off of my chest, and into the ether.  Now, maybe, restful sleep will come, if only for a few hours.  Now, perhaps, one strand of the receptors has been disconnected (connected?).  Maybe now I'm one small step closer to getting to be back on track wherever that was when I got here.  Maybe now I'm just a little bit more of myself and less of whoever it is that has been inhabiting me since my mind fell out of my head this morning.  Still, help.  I'm still not still, everything is spinning, even if I'm a little bit more of me than at the start of this literary cognitive diagnosis.

The Third Person

He bought picture frames for a life he didn't lead.  He knew his present wasn't quite the life he was looking for, but he had some sort of hope that contentment would somehow arrive to him as a gift from the future.  In the meantime, the frames lay barren in his empty apartment.  In truth, the space was far from empty, at least physically.  Posters of past adventures and handmade prints from relationships long ago plastered the walls.  Any wall not lined with art held a shelf for books he intended to read or movies he couldn't wait to share with someone else, someone who cared about his taste.

On the outside his life was so far from empty that it was not uncommon for him to hear longing words of envy from acquaintances and strangers.  

"Wow!  I wish I was artistic, but I don't have a creative bone in my body." or "You rested all weekend?  What a life!  I don't even know what that means anymore."

But rest was just one of the words he used to keep people at a safe distance.  He had come to learn long ago that a weekend composed of naps, Netflix, and nights in was far from restful.  Rather, it was mostly restless and very rarely what he wished for himself.  Still, he stayed inside and hoped against hope that his life would suddenly change from the outside.  "Fake it 'til you make it," they always told him.  Another cliché he often heard was the old adage that it's "better to ask for forgiveness than permission," and as much as he wanted to believe that, he couldn't detach himself from his superego long enough to live it.  His mind, though clouded most of the time, was full of shoulds and should-nots, more so than woulds and coulds.

Maybe if he ate more he would be able to find some sense of himself again.  Maybe there was some sort of regimented routine that he needed to find in his life to put himself back together again.  He would sometimes ponder these thoughts but they were mostly futile.  They'd either lead him aimlessly through ruminiations like runaway trains or become vaporous nonsense that quickly molded into forgotten dreams.  There was nothing to write home about because every conversation was the same small talk, only with a different face.  No one wants to hear the silent meanderings of a solitary singleton, he would tell himself as a pretty face walked across the room.

What's the Benefit? What's the Purpose? Is there Any?

If the goal of my work is to make myself not needed, am I in the profession of slowly erasing myself?  And truthfully, the work will continue without me, so where does that leave me?  How do I make meaning from this if it's ultimately not about me?

I hear the screaming through the walls and hope it's the television.  Then I sit and think of the isolation that my generation endures and wonder where it's taking us.  If I was taught inclusion when I was younger and some of that is only coming out now, what will come out of this next generation?  Am I just getting old and beginning to see the neighbor kids begin to tread on my lawn?  Caught between what I was raised to be and what I've learned that I am, I can't choose which way to go.

I know life is gray and something inside me chooses to just stay where I am.  If I stay locked inside these walls then no one will get hurt, but even that's not true.  What about me?  What about the brain between my ears?  Have I no value?  Do I bear nothing of worth?  Maybe I'm just aiming to minimize damage done in the spheres that go with me.

Are you any better for having heard me?  But are you any worse?
Who are you?  And what are you looking for?
Maybe if I knew you we could reach into each other, rather than reading and writing useless lines between us.  This is like a series of miscellaneous dots strung together with barely noticeable lines, but yet you're still reading and, for now, I'm still writing.

I don't know anymore though.  These public whispers do sometimes seem to do something for me.  Perhaps they minimize the isolation or the sentiment thereof.  She said she saw a transformation and now somehow I feel it, but how could any of this ever be compiled into one place?  So the lines connecting the dots that you see here, could you share with me what they've done for you?  What the do for you?  Because by now I'm just hoping that someone's listening or that this will prove some benefit to those in earshot.

You're not alone.  There.  Is that enough?

Nonsense Again

Sure, things are much more fuzzy from far away, but sometimes that green grass somehow seems to beckon me nearer.  It's anyone's guess how I haven't tripped on my own two feet any more than I have.

I want to put the pen to paper, I want to cut the shapes and forms, but it's like I need someone there to hold it for me.  My mind is full.  So many ideas, so many shapes, and soon-to-be discoveries, but my legs don't listen.  My legs cut veins that communicate with the heart.  My arteries keep pushing ideas, inspiration, and creative energy out but my arms and legs can't taste them.  There's something in the gap between that stops me.  I'm a mess really; this isn't even what I set out to do or who I set out to be.  Does anyone even know me?  Can anyone hear this?

Where can I write and come back?  Where can I edit?  Who can I share with?  I wish I could forget it.  There's nothing between myself and who I am, but an increasing expanse between who I am and who I want to be.  Please don't forget me.  Don't lose me.  And don't water the grass on the far end of my reality.  Can't you see I've done enough?  Can't you see the fertilizer I've left in the distance beyond me?

And yet again I'm falling deeper into empty philosophies and barely visible fog and clouds.  Maybe some day I'll escape.  Maybe some day you'll hear me when I'm calling from the inside.  Please

don't

leave

me.