A Lesson

Time goes by and I learn what I wish I knew

Lessons that could have changed choices

Paths that should have been avoided

Hearts I’d have left unbroken

Yet tempered and cooled by time I am

Every pain a step on those shining stairs

A hope that with every drop of blood

I inch from darkness to light

Indeed I’ve come to see these heavy hearts

In myself, those I hide amongst, strangers

More precious than gold or gems

All I’d hope to die for

Sometimes

    Sometimes I’m lost and don’t know who I am.  Sometimes I’m overwhelmed and just want to flee.  Sometimes I don’t know if there is a point at all, sometimes I don’t even hope.

    Sometimes I make mistakes.  Sometimes they hurt others, sometimes they hurt me.  Sometimes they hurt everyone.

    Sometimes I am forgiven.  Sometimes I’m not.  Sometimes it takes a moment to reconcile.  Sometimes it takes years.  Sometimes we fade away.

    Sometimes after all the deeds are done and the words lost to the wind you don’t so much remember the what, just the who.  Sometimes you can never properly explain what happened because that relationship itself defies definition.  

    Sometimes you don’t have to live close.  Sometimes you don’t have to talk everyday.  Sometimes you know that when you see that person, all the rest of life stops so you can live.  Sometimes your night could not be better than something normally regrettable.  Sometimes we cry.  Sometimes from dander.  Sometimes we laugh and talk until time is an irrelevant concept we don’t need to conform to.

    Sometimes things make sense.  Sometimes, things just come together.  Sometimes someone is their drink.  Sometimes they are the spicy, salty, unignorable champion of getting up and on that is a bloody mary.  Sometimes they wrote the book.

    Sometimes when everything else is about to crush me, I just have to shout out a good thing.  

Stuck In Me

    We are soldiers on a barren battlefield, fighting our war each day and night against an enemy we can neither see nor touch, but we know is there.  Be it doubt, sloth, fear, or anything else, we all have demons that we must choose to wrestle or run from.

    Your war is unique, often played out in battles that are just yours.  It is so easy to feel alone.  To believe yourself the only warrior, standing alone between life and the void, your philosophical struggles somehow sparing the oblivious masses.  Yet such thought only serve to embitter the mind and soul, to separate us.  Yet we were never meant to fight alone.

    I look out on the swarming hive that is our city, and I see everyone caught up.  In food, in money and work, in lust for power or flesh, in so many ways tainting and wasting until any idea of there being a purpose is absurd.  Yet we all do.  I do.

    To think you are above it is the true absurdity.  No matter how high you climb, how hard you fight, how many demons you slay, you are human.  You are.  It is our prison, our gift, our true challenge.

    Across time and our globe we have tried to define and redefine what we are, what we can be, what we should be.  Yet even in the struggle to understand, we lose focus, and find ourselves alone again.  Those guys believe weird things, their values are all messed up, they are petty and foolish, they are unenlightened and simple, they hate me and I must defend myself, they blew up my tower, they bombed my town.  We are lost in our own hate, in our own history, in our own solitude.  We haven’t the courage to lay down arms and understand the pain of these “enemies.”

    We are all the same.  Pale, light, male, female, short, tall, rich, poor, policeman, banker, president, vagrant, sex offender, terrorist, suicide.  We are all to be loved.  

    We need to stop fighting alone.

A Dress, A Choice

I often think of that dress I bought you.  Our lives were tearing apart, and I was so sure you were going to leave, and you did, but I loved to see you happy.  I always did.  And as you tried on this dress, I saw joy in your eyes, so I seized it.  Or tried.

It was expensive, I know, and I never saw you wear it outside the store.  Sometimes I wonder when you did, who you went home with, what happened to this dress.  But that is unimportant.  What mattered was what this dress meant to me.  What it symbolized for me.  A selfless gift in the face of hopelessness.  An acknowledgement that I had no power or control, but in this void I would choose love and happiness over anger.  Even if it would not choose me.

It’s funny, or maybe sad, that I don’t even remember what the dress looks like.  I remember the moment, and the emotion, over the details.  The dress I do remember, a plain purple one you’d worn so many times before.  I remember watching you walk away down an alley, in a moment that felt so heavy.

Somewhere in my mind these dresses have defined the end of an era.  One waves goodbye and the other a final gesture of love before we were over.

But nothing is ever over.  I carry in me more complex emotion than anyone seems to believe.  I can be torn with laughter and tears, smiles and rage, all in a moment.  Every moment.  I just choose to pull out what I do, but it is all always there.  Bubbling beneath the surface.

             I don’t want pity, I despise it.  When other people talk about my life and tear up it makes me angry.  I don’t want people to feel bad for me.  I don’t want to be pitied.  I’m not the one who quit, I didn’t run away and hide.  I faced my doom head on, and I did it with a gift dress in hand and love in my heart.  That is who I chose to be.

Wounded Warriors Wounding One Another

I never meant to hurt you.  I never meant to break your heart.  But somewhere along the way of my own heartbreak, intentions ceased to be.  There was just me, taking comfort in you.

You are warm, sweet, kind, and somehow still fun and interesting.  I never had to pretend to be enjoying myself.  You were trying so hard to not fall for me, and I saw that.  You wanted real, you wanted depth.  But I am spent.

You were so upset to discover I still talk to her, still love her.  You left and I understand.  I stood in uncharacteristic silence as you packed your things and left.  No one wants to be a consolation prize.  

Still, even knowing how it hurt you, I couldn't apologize.  How do you say sorry for loving?  For missing someone so dearly that, despite rejection, every couple days you feel compelled to talk to them?  For laying your heart on the line, even when you knew it would be crushed?  If anything, you should understand that.  We are both weary and weathered, and lost in a storm of need and emotion.

You wanted to turn this respite we found into something real.  In so many ways, we are similar, yet not in that.  After hurt and heartache, you spring back to your feet.  Tears in your eyes, but eager to find the love you've been missing.  I, however, leave my heart behind.  I venture forth, the same man, but lacking my soul.  Bit by bit, I'll salvage what remains, but dare not fall for me in this state, for I am a shell.  And I told you.  I told you not to fall in love with me.

I wish there were a way for me to satisfy you in the state I am.  But you will suffer no imitation.  And I?  If I were really wishing, love would not have failed me, and you would never have known me enough for me to wound you.

Seagull

    Are we all lost boys?  Does everyone else sit here and cry out “why?”  Why did I have to grow up?  Why could I not stay a boy, and spend my life dreaming of adventure and pirates?  My heart is too weak and naive for the world and the life I have.

    Heartbreak doesn’t make us better.  I convinced myself it did, that the scars I carried made me more beautiful, that my pain would temper me like heated steel.  But my agony has only ever led to compromise, to a desperate struggle to feel anything else.  And all paths lead back to despair.  Sometimes I’m forced here, and other times, a prison of my own creation.  

    Everyone gives you advice, tells you how to live, how to be, how to fix it.  All those people who don’t understand.  Who have not only not lived your pain, and are not you.  How arrogant to think your solution mine.  I feel insignificant in your eyes as you try to fix me.  You make me feel so much more broken.

    No one can truly know another.  We hold things back from the world.  We hide our darkest and saddest thoughts.  We have shames we never let see the light of day.  How can we not feel lonely?  Show my darkness, you say?  You can handle it, you say?  That vanity again.  I can’t handle it, and it lives in me.

    When I love, I am wounded.  And when I don’t, I wound others.  Yes, the world is beautiful.  But it is so vicious and vile.  It will tear you up, blind you, and leave you for dead.  It’ll teach you to be like it.  But I’m too tired to be vicious anymore.  

Free Form

    I am a dream.  I am a nightmare.  I am the energy that surges up in you when you lie awake at night and plan to be better tomorrow.  I am the cold loneliness you feel when you are lost to the despair in your mind each day.

    “I know what you need, and I hope beyond hope I am the one to give it to you.”  What was that?  A cruel lie?  Or a tragic truth, a surrender of love and desire, lost in this madness we call life?  Or even still, perhaps it just seemed like a sweet thing to say?  Say it now cause it sounds good, no idea how much someone might cling to it, how it could eviscerate one’s soul, once it has all come out, now that we’re all alone again.

    Or not alone.  Never alone.  Never with enough time or clarity to really know where we are headed, or why.  Rats on wheels in clear cages, watching other rats spinning and pretending we don’t all know what is happening.  Easier to lie to myself than anyone else.  Easier to pretend this game is what I want to play than to try to break free.

    But hopeless is as hopeless does.  The Cooler King tried again and again, and I have yet to have the courage to try once.  Inside is too small, but outside is terror inducing in its enormity.  And that seems it.  In the cave or out.  All the fantasies in the world dissolve in the face of cowardice.

    My dreams lie where ability and motivation never meet.