Illumination

This is a strange place we are in, you and I. But I'm glad it's shared.

It is a room of hidden things and words left unsaid. Whispers lay softly afloat like smoke in humid rooms, lazily drifting above tension draped in lead gowns. You in one corner, I in another. I don't know your face, but here, I don't need to. We are skinless here but braver for it. The air between is awash with warmth. We catch only glimpses, yet smile wittingly and suggestively, as two people sharing a secret often do.

Who are you? I am dying to know.

There are many words to be said in this room, if only we could escape ourselves. Words to send shivers up and down the spine, words with the power to melt all nearby faces and surrounding vistas to a faded blur and then dissipate like content gasps from satisfied lovers' lips. Abstract signals so concrete, ripe for the plucking from but a touch, a smile, a secret shared. From moments of togetherness so far removed from the clutches of description that the mere attempt would rival trapping sunset in a bottle. A captured series of seconds woven into the tapestry of lonesome hours in the dark, when but an eyeful of those sacred sentiments brings you mysterious joy.

A cold flow washes through me and I awake from my daydream. Smoke lingers on my lips. My weary eyes follow the footprints in the soft earth, trailing back and forth like lines burrowing into an old man's face. I contemplate; how many is the tally for today? How many times have you tamed the desire to touch and steadied your lips before a smile's gift had a chance to escape? How many times did you let sunlight escape beyond the edge of the earth without so much as an trailing glance? My reflection in the glass concurs; times aplenty, always aplenty. This is the way of the world.

We swallow so many sweet words back down our throats, back into the recesses of the heart. They become entangled with veins so dark they resemble leafless branches against bright midwinter skies, veins clogged by all that we leave unsaid and undone. These words are so difficult to set free, so hard to let loose upon the air. Their wings need air beneath them, but the path they choose when airborne can never be determined. Chaos and communion are always a feather's sway away from collapsing into one another. An outcry, no matter how pious its aim, would surely devour levity and leave us defenseless in each other's company. The words stick to our teeth. We dare not dream. It makes me feel older than I am.

Gently, with a reserved hand, I draw the curtain aside and observe the secret place from afar. Time stands still and runs through aeons in an instant. All is perpetual and frozen.

This place is so vibrant. So fierce. Impenetrable yet completely weightless. Drenched in milky darkness yet pronounced to the finest colorful detail. But above all; it is secret. It is an impasse we all willingly confuse with reciprocity. We will over-exert our control over ourselves unto the grave, only to gasp a final grand sigh of regret on the deathbed for all that was left behind worse than was needed. We empathise with the world by finding common ground as cowards, because our feral virtues have been drawn from us like blood from a sacrificial lamb. We are bound and subjugated by our instinct to suppress the purest forms of dialogue we possess; we strive to be strangers. It is irony at its foremost finest.

Still this place finds us. It envelops our minds at a whim, for it exists in a space of longing beyond our control. We are all searchers, are we not? And so the light will thrash and struggle for release like a caged animal awaiting an unsung tomorrow where it would be set free. It is so bright it numbs you with fear. So prone to overflow you grip it with both fists so tight your nails puncture the skin. You greet it with anger. The thought of but a single beam escaping is terrifying, because it would tear a hole through the darkness and drag you into the midst of something unforeseeable and unfamiliar. Something uninhibited. A place devoid of shadows, exposed and with no place to hide. In the wake of this dread we are all brother and sister.

We often mistake our gifts for burdens. Of this I am guilty from every sunrise to sunset, and a lesser man for it with each passing day. Perhaps this makes me a bigger fool than most, perhaps I'm merely a more insightful buffoon than most. I dunno. But I fight to conceal this luminous force with a matched if not a stronger hand. Even when my heart swells with indescribable savagery, beating like a wild drum. Instinctually, I wish to give more than I have and receive only what candour grants me, but at the apex of fruition I halt. This is a world for the takers, where currency requires currency and nothing is free. The act of granting grants nothing by default, and it is only through bitter mercy that we close our palm when more than our share is there for the taking. This is what I've been taught by harsher hands than their possessors would care or dare admit.

So I hide so many beautiful things in rooms within rooms, stuck behind heavy doors and bound by thick chains. They meet, flow into one another, painting all in their wake with deep red and glistening gold. They explode like fireworks and spontaneous laughter, smashing hardened, sour sights into countless glimmering pieces. But they are locked away, left to wither. I curse myself for being so terrified of such wonderous things. As should we all, for we are all equally guilty of such transgressions. This you know.

I find strange solace in the thought that all this will fade away, in time. A dishonest sentiment rotted from every corner by the acidic nature of denial. But the weight of emotions is so often so impossible to overcome and endure, and love above all things feels most unbearable to me. It encompasses my very being yet I fight it like a taint, for it renders me defenseless. That is why every woman I have ever loved & lost remembers the ironclad taste of gridlocked resentment whenever my memory invades their thoughts. I would describe loving as others might describe bleeding; beauty, pain, dissonance, wonder and foreboding all in one lingering jolt of blinding light, stretching into the evermore like a frozen river without a creek or waterfall to break its neverending journey. I find strength and clarity in knowing that it all has an eventual end, but I also recognize the thought for what it is: rejection. It makes me cherish the agony as an act of welcome penance.

Yet I am a poet. As much in love and awe of these heartscapes I am illustrating as with any creature of skin, flesh and bone. As enthralled by the secrets of sensuality as any conoisseur of puzzles and enigmas. Too restless to leave passion without note, thus risking withering all beautiful and delicate things through exposition and exposure. Words paint my world alight, but they disturb the play of shadows with their pervasiveness. I am easily swayed by the rhythm and melody no one else can hear, often forgetting whether I'm the player or the pawn. With the lines already blurred, the threat of losing touch is ever present. These sights offer a succulence too tempting, and with their whimsical direction, I often misstep. But to know me is to know this. To love me is to welcome the horrors this wild heart harbors.

We do bad things. To ourselves, to one another. Inconsiderate things. The paths we've left behind are paved with good intentions, cracked open by insecurity, decorated with disregard and littered with casualties. We race feverously towards the snarling jaws of the world to prove that the spit of the grey sky hardens our skin into a stronger shell. Yet the lashing we endure extends from our own hands and the blood we spill is only incidentally someone else's. We bleed for resolve and strength, yet the drive to inflict pain stems solely from fear. What silent souls we've allowed ourselves to become.

But in the finest company - that which we should seek tirelessly as our numbered days tick away, I believe - we would strive to ascend into a new breed. That is, if we should be so lucky to find such company, insightful enough to recognize it and brave enough to embrace it. Thus would begin a hopeful blind stumble on the ladder of evolution to new, unimaginable heights. The marching advance of renounced thespians no longer able to act unwavered by the tremors our crossing paths leave in their wake. The visage of such a tomorrow is quite delicate in its simplicity; indifference completely and utterly destroyed.

Perhaps all that we are now is all that we will ever be. Reluctant passers-by on our way past this strange place into a safe haven devoid of threat, meaning and renaissance. Perhaps surrender will come to weigh upon our scales but lightly if at all, and in hindsight we shall reminisce mournfully yet detached upon the day we allowed this yearning for higher entanglement to still, succumb and perish.

Then again, perhaps not.

This is a strange place.

Kindling

My thoughts tear asunder, run amok. En garde! Parry! Riposte! I am spread thin and thinner, granted no true measure of release or rest, with my own uncaged mind leading the cavalcade of disharmony to and fro from the ever expanding fray.

I battle secular sentiments of self-loathing each new dawn my weary eyes greet the ceiling above, but it is not because I lament the passing of time; it is because I mourn for all that could have been accomplished and achieved during moments now lost to the ether, for every breath drawn without aim. Sleep is of course not the enemy, for it is the playground of dreams. But no dream will come to fruition lest its tail is caught and its body tamed during waking hours. Though forever free, it needs to be commandeered, straddled and made to serve as a steed for the journey to take form and be drawn to its conclusion.

Every so often life unfolds like an expedition through perilous badlands. The destination, if set, is beside the point. Some curse the cruel sun for stealing the rain as the desert abyss slowly swallows them. Others, however, cherish and celebrate the sensation of lingering thirst, for the rapture of release is multiplied exclusively by the weight of the struggle that precedes it. I belong to the latter category. I chart across this treacherous landscape on all fours with a roll of parchment for a tongue, but the journey is my own. My legs have given under me and my mind has melted into madness, but the journey is my own. Pain is beside the point, momentary musing upon the frailty of life. It is a given. A dab of ink on an endless canvas. This desert belongs to me as much as I belong to it.

Words, to me, are more bloodletting than typing. There is song and melody behind every syllable, untamed orchestration behind every seemingly steadfast structure. Stone walls built upon feather beds. A poetic bounce beyond form and function. Always so much more at play than mere communication or exchange. In many ways these exercises of lyrical expression are a very real extension of the endless sojourns I'm thrown into when the thundering flow of music under my skin takes hold and pulls me under. I fall in and drown, again and again, only to re-emerge with another savory drop on my parched tongue. I emerge with another short lease on life.

It is the rhythm of these roaring waves that I so desperately try to pour upon strings and keys and whatnot, mirroring and mimicing each water-soaked tingle via melodies and harmonies and thus forth, with my own unevenly balanced loss and gain of blood being its own reward by ensuring the flow remains unclogged. Drop by savory drop. It is not so much a ritual of rebirth as it is a long, arduous clarification of self.

The music within is a furious flame, a wall of violent poetry between the world and its witness. The bane of my existence yet its most bejeweled crown. The finest reason to keep breathing yet the most unkind of foremen. Hard as I try, the work will never be completed. So I will spend each day of this wretched, joyful life under the whip, struggling and striving. Enduring. Succeeding if such is the hand I'm dealt, but without any conceivable means of measuring the worth of the work. But I will never utter a single complaint for this gift of strife. Exhaustion breeds strength.

All emotion is wood for the roaring fire, freshly glimmering ore under the tip of the pickaxe. Every heartbeat sways in the wind like grains of wheat before approaching jaws; never fulfilled, never released from hunger. Every sight, sound and experience is kindling, so eager to ignite. The world burns in my eyes with violent, eloquent beauty. I have but these words to describe the sights I enjoy and endure and subsequently try to re-envision through artistic enterprise. Mere lettering is a shoddy substitute, I know, but it is the best I can muster.

This fire will never cease, never cease to devour. It will never die out from starvation, for there will always be mass for it to consume. I will make certain of that. All I have to do is feed it, watch my world burn and present you the ashes. Whether you hail the afterbirth as an accomplishment or crushing failure is, again, beside the point. In the end all that art needs to portray to warrant its existence is to give you a glimpse into the soul of another. The cycle is endless. The fire negligent yet willful beyond imagination. All it needs is oxygen and time. All we truly have is oxygen and time.

To create is to burn, willingly. It is to watch all your fortifications engulfed in flames as you tinker away at the next pyre of your own design, oiling another rope around your neck. Sometimes I have to drown out the noise and endure the quietus of silence to grant myself a measure of serenity. Even then I lay above embers. Sometimes all I can do is bide my time in pockets of numbness separating me from the cacophony. But it is a charade, a thin curtain. Awake and thrashing or succumb to slumber with baited breath, I am a beast in a cage. It is a strange existence.

If anything, it keeps me honest. My past reads like an old, forgotten battleground overrun by moss and weeds. Only eyes that were there to witness the carnage can spot the mortar craters and bones picked clean. I will not let myself forget, for I have a lot to answer for. The best I can do is take my past mistakes along for the ride like a roadmap of misfortune and simply try not to cause as much of a mess. Not much of a plan, I know, but I never said I had one. Then again, if this self-inflicted penance has wrought any reward it is that I've gotten to know my own wretched self well enough - warts and all - not to become destabilized by people trying approach and untangle me like a puzzle box with a given ruleset and mechanics. If their efforts succeed in depressing me, it is because my heart goes out to them, for their benefit. I gave up on trying to fit in many a sleepless night ago - and emerged a better man because of it.

To live as I live is to suffer just a little bit from each tick to tock. A drop of blood for each bellowing slam of the hands of time as I engage in a lifetime's endeavor of chasing after shadows. It is a life of thirst punctuated by seldom victorious moments of gratification. Drop by drop. And it is a struggle worth every second. Above all things I fear waking up to the sensation of being completely fulfilled; may such a day never rise, for it would be my last.

I am blessed to live in this haze between dreamscapes and physicality, blessed to see inspiration where others see mere alleyways and creekbeds. Blessed to know there is no difference between moonlight dancing upon spring waters and diamonds forged in imagination's foundry. I don't have time to be too busy for anything worthwhile. I don't have time to not have time.

Sleep is not the enemy. But it is a terrible, terrible waste.

Conundrum

I fit in well, yet I will never belong. I adhere to structure and discipline, yet my home is built upon chaos. I know how to love and what it is to be loved, yet all forms of this sensation remain trapped in an ever-shifting caleidoscope. I walk in the footsteps of others with delicate ease, yet I loathe the day I set foot upon the trail with each passing step. I know what it is to discover priceless monuments of sanctuary, yet by each new dawn my heart yearns to conquer another unattainable landmark, shifting its stance across the horizon like a mirage trapping a siren's call. These words hold true for us all.

We all know the abstraction of walking as unanswerable riddles on two feet in a world of answers, wrapped in gowns of pre-filled questionnaires and squeezing ourselves through strict, unforgiving molds while the ironclad ink of accountability dries upon our sensitive skin; and we are worse for it, day by day. And we suffer because of it and suffer great pains to attain it, day by day. Our obstructions number in the infinities, and they are all man-made monoliths we've ironically enough placed ourselves to guide our collective focus.

Herein lies the puzzle I face each morning, noon and night. I watch passers-by watch me, lend an ear to their commentary, letting their staunch bewilderment glaze over their eyes like dawn's first light tingling upon frozen waters, then react with straight lip and clenched jaw. To friend or stranger I owe no explanation, my mind declares, and my heart concurs. A novel reaction, I know - and dangerous. The imp of the perverse, as it were. There is so much room for exposition, so wide a pathway towards clarity and the forging of new bonds of communion. Enlightenment, even! But I am not a puppet, chauffeur or orderly. An occasional, happenstance leader by default. Not a guide.

Yet the question remains. Its answer - if there is such a thing - aloft and joyfully elusive. Am I nothing but a self-strung marionette upon a stage of my own making, pulling at my own ropes and winding up the broken music box again and again and again for all with a thought, a minute and a penny to spare? Perhaps so, but at the very least my strings remain untethered, the song flows through the air uninhibited and the stage is my own handywork. That accounts for something. It has to.

What a specimen I must make. The winged monkey, led to center stage by cuff & chain and met with sounds of awe, yet by nightfall nothing more than an ape in a cage. At least the cage is my own. So I fly around my enclosure, gnaw at the scraps I'm given and watch spectators enter and exit my abode none the wiser through each encounter. I watch them place rectangular shapes in front of me, then cylindrical, and so on. I do not fit, which is a given of course, but they continue the endeavor. But I don't fit. Of course I don't fit. Do they? Does anyone?

Admittedly, it is no more than pride fanning the flames of these tirades I entertain within. I can withstand few things worse than the incessant, obtuse perseverance with which some elect to drive the heart, soul and flow of another into a neat little box to service their own disassociation from the scolarship of depth, as to fit the construct of humanity gazing back at them into their constrained mental collection of neat little boxes. No one ever fits, so some things must be clipped off. What you leave severed upon the floor is a choice you're given freedom to carry out in whatever bloody act you choose. Quite the priviledge, don't you think?

We peer into the depths of one another with shears and scythes in hand, the call of the norm ringing in our ears as a deafening wall of white noise, ready to dislodge artistry from reason and sight from vision to service our own needs as one-eyed insects racing towards the top of the anthill we so scarcely and sparsely understand. Our eyes would burn through so many obstructions if we only allowed them the chance to peer into the ether without our own hands as shields in between.

Dress the aura of another in heavy chains and feel the weight press down on your own ability to fly like an iron anchor. The strangling hands of convention are universally indiscriminate in their grip unless you simply deny them your throat. Yet so many - so many - grant them access. We are so quick to dip our drive, desires and even our spirituality in the tar of structure to render our aspirations flightless and stilted. All things must adhere to dogma and rulesets, lest we all fall into a maelstrom of waterlines and discovery. It makes me sad. We are capable of so much more.

Every poor wretch under the sun owes a hefty purse of blood to every other poor sod in their sight, if for nothing more than for the solemn oath we've all taken upon the altar of compromise. None of us peer at one another without the bars of the cage obstructing our view. We search for common ground and end up constructing prisons in our minds. Prisons for neat little boxes. As gatekeepers and wardens we are amazingly steadfast; as escapees mere amateurs.

The struggle of the civilized world is to walk as a shadow in a land of shadows, but the quest itself is a disservice to every hope and dream we harbor. A blade pressed upon our ankles. Chains cackling in the dark, beckoning us to wear them for safety and parade them as jewellery.

Our gift of strife is to remain evermore challenged and hunted by the rays of light devouring all stowaways upon the vessel of life, burning away all recollection of the unremarkable with relentless, unmatched force. Leaving no sign or headstone to remind us of what once stood there. To leave this world without having burned my initials into the earth is the one true horror I carry inside; and one that I carry with not only dread but pride. It is healthy terror. A beast at my back driving me onwards with gnashing teeth and a constant pace.

A shadow will never forge its mark on the sand; it will merely pass over it on its path towards oblivion. I consider this parable every single day of my life.

A good question

There are evenings when I catch myself wondering how it is that another angel-faced antagonist has leapt from the page or screen, twirled the room around their finger and, having effortlessly taken center stage, seems to now mime words I keep hidden yet are none the less my own. More often than not these figurines of fabled flesh are artists of monstrosity. Prime examples of blunt force precision locked in a masquerade of human interaction. Tortured masters of mimicry, toes dangling off the precipice. Your Patrick Batemans, Tyler Durdens and Dexter Morgans. You get the jist.

They do not come from a world of monsters. Nor do I. They function, emote, empathise and retort through a blank, hollow chamber of echoes inside. They project, but not from a place within. They are like mirrors, blank slates. A swayed tabula rasa of puzzles and reflections, a boneless contortionist endlessly shedding his skin. Every encounter is like determining the trajectory of a ball based on where its thrown and where it will bounce back from. It may land a feet or two amiss, but the general area is close enough. It suffices.

It is a constant exercise of scripted clairvoyance and eloquently enacted foresight in a theater of predisposition. I understand both the triviality and the necessity of the charade as much the anger and the disdain stemming from its constant upkeep. I understand how demeaning it is. Survival and suffocation in plain sight under the blazing sun. The perspective of a caged beast through the glass, de-toothed by convention and chained by the illusion of normalcy. Kept at bay by the simple desire to keep breathing.

How truly brittle the shell of perceived safety we wrap around ourselves when the winter winds come a-callin'.

Perhaps my world is overwrought with introspection and I simply gravitate towards notions of self-indulgent wolves among sheep due to my detached nature. But I can't help but think that perhaps the butcher and the poet have more in common than most would dare to admit. At the center is a crooked parallax and the trek into the arms of others is through a treacherous, misaligned gateway. Perhaps I can simply appreciate the macabre, the majestic, the brutal and the bravissimo in equal, mutually inexclusive degree. Perhaps it is because I understand what it feels like to be weighed down by a world of masks, facades and glimpses - being splintered into tinier and tinier shards - that the notion of losing one's sense of self into but a glimmer of static feels plausible. The walls melt and the light bleeds out as the blank canvas where emotions should have left their trail disappears into the white noise. It is the cold room I've known since I was a child.

Secrecy and self-preservation are dangerously similar. Fraternal instincts sharing a bloodline. They spill onto one another - into one another - and form a dark pool bereft of flow and reflection. I do not feel like others feel, but I've learned to quell the noise, drown out the storm. Isolate the particles. Nothing is ever enough and everything is always too much, so I funnel the oceans roaring inside through the smallest straw and spit out the trickles through a smiling maw. Sometimes I feel like every word, every letter I write is a speck of blood dripping from my fingertips. I know fully well that not a single drop is truly appreciated, but that's pride talking. I consent to the ways of the world and reject them wholeheartedly. A life of banishment to a kingdom lost and stacked with riches. The melting room in the bleeding light.

This, then, is perhaps why such blood-thirsty jesters and I seem to speak with a common tongue, if only occasionally. I appreciate flamboyance and bravado when fused with purpose and lined with meaning. My world remains organized, sanitized, alphabetized, compartmentalized... and evermore but a finger's flick away from burning to ashes. The soft bed and the hard floor are a nightly choice. I revere the allegory of golden ideals draped with rotting cells, quilted with dead feathers and gloriously embellished with dabs of blood red. I celebrate the poetry of petrified flesh and the vibrancy of unquenched desire. To be complete is to be dead inside. To deny breath - to take where others would fall limp and passive - is not only a means to an end, but a test of the heart.

It is peculiar passion that drives one to slave over a creative endeavor only to watch the completed piece burn. The art of love and the insurmountable ends of destruction. I've done it so many times I've lost count.

I reminisce about a dream I've had many times over since early childhood. I come across a campfire along a dirt road in a forest. The devil - a devil - sits beside it, dressed as an old man, warming his bones. His eyes rise to greet me with bitterness and resentment. I sense danger, but not projected danger. Its body en masse, its aura. I ask the man questions of worth, greed, ambition - and loss. He responds, yet I do not understand the words. But I feel them, one and all. They reverberate through my very essence. We understand the mud is an angel's wing and the stone is a demon's grin. We hear the heartbeat of the earth and the song of the water and know - know without question - that not a single word, chord or trinket of wisdom could ever evoke this spirit into essence. We talk until the dream disappears into the flames.

A kind gesture, a faceless advance, a warm palm and a cold gaze. Some days it's all the same. Above all things I regard the brew of artistry mixed with routine the most nourishing. I constantly arrive at crossroads between calm precision and animalistic drive. My world is meticulously in pieces. Some would call it a clash of sentiments, but such words stem from a place devoid of vision. I am most complete when completely chaotic and compulsively systematic. It is how I operate. A carnivorous cross-breed of the melodical and the methodical. A series of absolutes and antonyms. A pieceless puzzle swept up by violent winds. The dead calm beneath storms of contradiction.

I enjoy thoughts like these. They keep me sane. To test the excesses of imagination until I become fearful of my own mind is to vanquish the self mirrored in others and find serenity in the throes of solitary solidarity. The pedestal beneath my feet disappeared long ago, but so did the ground. It is a calming notion to realize that under all this cool, collected control lies an unsightly labyrinth of insanity. Were it not for my creativity, this veneer would shield the machinations of a truly vile, unscrupulous person.

But the question is... would you know?

Black coffee

Winter's grace. Fierce, empowering and above all cruel. A fortification against all things bathed in heat and dipped in deliverance. A cold room for a cold man.

And so it goes. Faces form in the howling rain, have their laugh and disappear, evaporating into cold steam when met by but a warm human breath. Poetry drowns in a river of spit, helpless to find reprieve as frost nibbles at its tail. We are rats in a coffin, squealing helplessly as the air grows thin and our options thinner. The only way is down, through the ribcage of the corpse. So we dig. We devour.

We burrow through rotting things only to lose ourselves in the cold ground.

Here stands the jester, drenched in his own blood and weighed down by other people's spewage. Freshly foul from another swim in the sewer. Growing more and more defiant as the fingers turn numb and the face drains of color. These blue lips are colder than you know. If my efforts are constantly undermined and subject to the whims of petty individuals hunting for yet another pound of flesh, my facade of compassion will eventually shatter and I will assume a stance of combat. Ask and ye shall receive. You have no right to act wounded in the aftermath.

This airless space has no room for good intentions. People flash their fangs at me, because they assume they can get away with it. Spewing belittling, hurtful things. Attacking, because they assume that's what they're owed. By whom and for what amount, you ask? Your guess is as good as mine. They seem to retreat back into their hole before I have a chance to clear the issue.

I've done my best to be more approachable and less of a frightening figure, as much for my own damn sake as for the benefit of others, only to have cowards spit in my face as my hand reaches outward. I've let them have their say, take the measure of blood they so covet and stitch up some unnamed tear in their ego at my expense. I've taken the sticks & stones without a snarl or growl, but to what end? I've played myself down and taken backward steps like the man I thought I should be, like the man I truly tried to be, only to watch as cancerous, contagious beings advance in tandem with my withdrawal, trying to steal back something they've lost from my pouch. Enough.

People take whatever they can get as long as you award them that luxury. Flash your teeth back at them and watch them scatter. I'm using two thirds of my strength not to punch through a wall just to watch myself do it.

I don't want to know, I don't want to say, I don't want to be involved. I simply can't play the benevolent confidant if I'm expected to comment approvingly upon self-important fumbling over other people's feelings. I recognize the marks it will leave better than I care to admit. My pleas fall to deaf ears as people chart their unsuccessful attempts at draining each another dry while debating with themselves which embrace can offer the most warmth until the next pair of tempting arms appears. Pondering whose blood is most nourishing. I have to bite my lip not to lash out in anger at their profoundly disgusting behavior. I'm burning gallons upon gallons of fuel just to lull myself into believing people are worth even a shred of respect.

This loveless, violent world deserves no more than a cold heart and a hard fist. I am nothing if not a believer in fair dues.

There is no reciprocity, only the push-pull of one giving and another taking. This I know now, and will react accordingly when approached by those drenched in fear and frailty looking to ascend a step higher by standing on my back. Trying to fit into this cardboard cut-out of a cordial, good-willed individual has grown far beyond tiresome, for the results it yields are nothing more than providing a patch of fresh ground for fools to trample into decay. My efforts, upfront and clear-eyed, are met with disdain and malice that equal all my meager attempts at taking others into consideration with warmer sentiments to a tee. You want the indignant, arrogant and withdrawn asshole you all seem to want me to be? Fine. You can have him. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Friendly fire - ain't.

The surrounding vista is a bleak sight. Pompous, passive aggressive tricksters all around. Mouths wide and words asunder against menial tribulations and the wind against their stride, hands drawn and fingers erect as they scour the room to find someone to pour a little misery on. Sharing is caring, isn't it? Their fists shake wildly at whatever nameless adversary or mildly draining aversion they're currently addressing, just so they can clear the air around them with a mouthful of stale bitterness. But it is all a show. The dog's bark is loud and fierce for his teeth are soft and his jaw weak. We are rats in a coffin.

So I will drink my coffee black, black like the winter sky on a moonless night. I will address your arrogance with indifference and your anger with silence. I will disappear into the smoke long before you have an opportunity to inflict another itty bitty wound for your perverse pleasure. I will repay threats with tooth and nail. I will close off my heart from thieves. I will spit venomously and vehemently when spat upon and watch you deflate in the face of true strength.

Believe it or not, I tried so very hard to believe people were worth more.

Samsara

This is a place of leaving. A place where skin departs from skin. Wounds tear open where there once was a touch. So I will leave before I arrive. It is all I know.

Everything feels pre-chewed and once digested. A miserable merry-go-round for a weary soul lost in his own nomadic footprints. Cyclic and in perpetual motion, filled to the brim with rotting things. Nothing brings fulfillment, not even excess. Especially excess. A vacuum to fill a bottomless pit brimming with emptiness. I don't know who I am anymore.

This is no kind of life. A form of existence bereft of inspiration and grandeur, breathless loitering on the airwaves devoid of electricity. I look into the crowd through glass and see absolutely nothing reflecting back. An insect in a jar, wingless, denied escape, devoid purpose. What does that make you, I wonder.

Even among friends I feel like I'm being watched. They don't know what to do with me. Discomfort is met by discomfort and we find ourselves wingless. Denied escape, devoid of purpose. Minutes turn to stone as words become discord and static. Noise cascades up my throat and through my teeth like a river of pointless palindromes. As hollow and witless as the flesh that uttered them, for they carry no substance to warrant their existence. It keeps getting harder to convince myself that I am welcome, that I belong. I am growing mute and completely detached. This is truly frightening.

To ignite and burst aflame! To be burnt by passion and be instantly rejuvenated! To have something worthy of this heartbeat, to pull it close and feel the drumming in tandem. Against the blood of another fine beast, running wild. But these are words I whisper in the darkness long after my feet have carried me away from warm smiles and soft touches. I am in love with images drawn in waterlines and drowned in fallacies, an idea, standing as a barricade at my door and a hand over my mouth.

I try to explain, to expel, but sentences evaporate into echoes and syllables crumble into murmur behind this glass enclosure. So I turn to silence. It isn't right, because I see true affection and worry in people's eyes. People who care. I can offer them nothing in return beyond more distance. It isn't fair. But I don't know how to end this quiet withering. My heart is bathed in acid and my eyes dart across every room with but one aim: find an exit. All I can do - all I should do - is walk away. I'm not the sort of man to burden others with his struggles. At least I try not to be.

The notion of faith makes me cringe, because I remember the weight of its hand on my shoulder just as vividly as its disappearance from view. Whoever lives in this skin now does appear to look, act and sound just like me when viewed from afar, but upon closer inspection turns out to be a faceless, voiceless marionette. Ashes of a bygone fire. So many pieces of me have fallen by the wayside, hacked off into tiny bits and hidden in pockets of time I can scarcely remember. A slow death or a painful rebirth? Who knows.

Underneath the dirt is just more dirt. I can't remember what being whole even felt like anymore. Perhaps I've never known.

Confession of concession

A scent of familliar yet exotic flavor grips my senses. A touch warmer than three suns, enervating and igniting beyond words. I see a silhouette approaching these two weary eyes stapled to the thick, headstrong skull of your storyteller. An approach fargone, for it had already happened. Time was left to stand still ages ago. Ages? Minutes? Hard to say. My cluttered viewpoint is cleared by pearly limelight, encircled by hues of fragrant azure. We are surrounded by warm shadows swimming in vibrant green. A seashore, perhaps? A haven, a sanctuary, a hiding place? I will never know.

We are in a dream and so we shall remain. She is a dream and so she shall remain. I awake in the arms of black stone and feel deprived and nourished in equal degree. Given aplenty and viciously stolen from. This was what I craved for and needed to replenish of, this is what I was drained of and left without, no more and no less. Acceptance is half the battle - winning and losing are unrecognized concepts on this battleground.

Rainbows burn through the skyline where words once took to rule, and with the passing of their reign, all is without as all is overabundant. I am fire and water - striving higher and running further. Red as my burning blood and blue as my dreamscapes. Balanced by complete chaos as the stone I was set in weathers all storms, every minute upheaval we fleshlings come to awaken. You can cast a stone, break the water's flow, but this river will always run, it has no home. Written upon succulent melodies and sung in heartfelt harmony supported by rapturous rhythm - a crude confession none the less.

This is how I see the world. Through colors. I see it in the music, the note upon note upon thought upon a foul growl of the soul upon the wind of sin of your kin, of hearts aflame hiding the shame that cleanses us all like neverending rain, defining our domecile like a painting's frame surrounding each grandiose spectre of passion and bliss plagued by the neverending and never forgotten kiss, screaming songs of lost beauty and a secret world never bested, in the fiercest fire tested, no matter whose yesterday calls for your tomorrow to rise in whatever way. My world through my eyes, wide and warm, frail and worn.

There is disharmony and contradiction in all that surrounds this house of shadows and savagery, but I am nothing if not a skilled sleeper in the fire. Catching a glimpse of beauty beyond comparison fills me with strange sentiments and release beyond reprieve. Disappear, says my soul, and I agree without hesitation. Run run run away from them, run run run away again. Heart sinks deeper, edge grows steeper. By twilight I will swing at the gallows of my own creation, clutching the executioner's cowl with a death grip equally severe and serene. This I accept.

Acceptance is key, for it grants me clarity without needless embellishment. Strikingly beautiful skin draped over foul flesh - and worse - is an entry in the beastiary I know all too well. Those decorating its pages will no doubt have a chance to bury their fangs in the marrow of 'morrow should I step over the treshold, so to bother with the trivialities of shadowplay would be to dive into the pit like a witless waste of air. The languish of disappointment stares back from the void beyond the everclear in every direction, so I will simply forge a way through the pitfalls as best I can as I chase strands of sunlight to whatever end this earth has to offer. To journey to the end of a path only to discover more affliction is a laughably fruitless endeavor. A lesson already learned. Ahead and around, my dear entrapments - know that you are noted in my journals, marked with an X of glorious sanguine and reminded to steer clear from each new dawn. I will do my best not to deter.

The winter is kind and gentle to those who embrace her touch rather than reject it with scorn. I am an agent of winter, serving but one goal, dedicated to but one end. One you need not trouble yourself with, for its machinations of manifestation are shrouded in secrecy I protect lavishly and forcefully. Ostara may have scolded this stone to red-hot splendor during her brief stint of bewildering dominance, but her throne has shattered and the spirits of Samhain now reign over the land. Frozen in the bittersweet honey of this everlong enclosure I will remain, endure and flourish.

I will pass, passively, in passing. Reveling in revelations cruel and mournfully truthful. Thoughtfully fruitful, even. I am no one, for I am no one's and no one is mine. A faceless world. It is both a poisoned dagger as the wamest embrace, the soft hand of the most tender murderer before feathers fall and the killing blow is struck. Questions remain unanswered, but the questionnaire remains hidden and its rich veins untapped. A quiver of arrows flies high, one by one and side by another's side, seeking fresh flesh to penetrate and end their skybound travels in, ascending against a backdrop of skies bathed in darkness. But they are one and all denied. They will find a home in the hard earth.

Simple and mazelike, tattooed and pierced, loud and proud. Here I stand. Simple to comprehend, mazelike upon closer inspection, awaiting a touch to burn through this thick skin, pierce the surrounding glass, smashing the slumber of loud and shattering the veneer of proud. Were it never to come, I would accept this cruelty with a bold stance and plow through to whatever lonesome destiny I am able to craft for myself. The possibility of the impossibility of contentment has been vigorously considered, I admit, but I have too much faith in the undiscovered to succumb to such bitterness wholeheartedly. Closure of any degree is always denied, but it is a fate one learns to carry with strength, clarity and backbone devoid of the bittermost sentiments. Believe it or not, my optimism is hard to quell and impossible to extinguish.

As noted time and time again, I seek comfort and release. Though often denied, I am a traveller who settles for meager surroundings and humble nourishment. But among friends I feel like a king, the highest of servants, an unassuming enricher of the better in us all and virtues hidden so deep. For what are we if not gophers and kings, each role we take filled in spectacularly mundane fashion as we stride upon the grasslands of perpetual sorrow and momentary bliss. Gleeful jesters and harbingers of woe one and all.

Love saturates and envelops even the world of mine, but I recognize warmth's deceptive nature with a keen vision and respond to its advances with cold forethought. I can't change who I am, nor would I want to. We may share a palmful of water at this oasis, exchange a story or two with a wink and a smile, but we will all leave to chart this desert alone as night falls. Taking or leaving anything substantial from our momentary exchanges feels superficial at best and were I to allow them a foothold, I would eventually find myself burdened with yet another quiver of questions. So should one who knows better partake in the masquerade for no more than a pauper's pay for a attempt at mastery? Of course not. There are enough lies and deceit in this sorry world. I will say what I mean and mean what I say and let the downfall concern those who find such concerns the least bit inviting to begin with.

While some poor wretch may call the undersigned a wordsmith of some note, know this: in the company of people whose light shines amidst, afar and through and through, I am at a loss. When words of praise and promotion should fly unhindered and become specks of illumination left to linger in the recesses of another's memory, I am at a loss. At a loss for words and appreciation, unable to push through to the surface. The toymaker lost in his own puzzle of senseless elaboration and eloquence. For that I can only apologize.

Yet who is there to speak to, to share with? No one. An absolute, an abhorrence, an absolution. Argumentation upon discertation for the weighty sum of butt-fucking nothing. I have acquainted myself with distance once again, tied myself down to detachment and burned away the desires that plague most others, and find immesurable treasure within the deceptive depths of solitude. In service of this I will succumb to being the buffoon, the scribe, the incidental. Some say they wish to know me better. To them I say: you do not know what you're asking. The measurements are sound and encased in crass reason - it is better to be alone. I am not weary like Miller, depraved like Bukowsky, enraged like Carr or bedazzled like Thoreau. I haven't been tested like Lawrence or strengthened by strife like Henley. I am excluded, estranged and erroded like the Ward that I am.

There are sentences and sentiments that will never escape these lips. I know that now and appreciate their clandestine nature such as it is, indifferent and irreverent of how much is left without utter or approach. Perhaps I am a lesser man for not being able to conquer the elusive nature of what I keep hidden and refuse passage to the light, but perhaps these cracked jewels were never meant for this world. I wasn't. This, if anything, I've come to know and accept beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Heed these words not as a manifesto of ego or self-indulgence; they paint a picture, yes, but one of vanquish rather than vanity. I have played the games of others to the absolute ends of tedium and come out a sore loser, so from hereon I will create my own pawns and boards. Unconquerable puzzles they may be, but only my fingernails will leave a mark upon these hallways stretching to immesurable lengths under a concrete sun. Entrapment can be a choice.

All absolute. All devoid. All fulfilled. All empty. What a life. What a lie.