KILL ALL OPTIMISTS

Every short intake surely precedes while in turn succeeding its equal return. The air flows in and out again...Again; I am found breathing without even realizing. It’s been four years of continuous continuing, a fact that is nothing close to living. My best friend is an objectivist and he explains that objectivists believe that there is no perception: there is an ultimate answer to every question. I want to understand his simplistic stylings but I am left looking at life like a modern art painting- always seeing something different with each glance. My own personal mosaic of moments has added up to twenty-two years of life and still has yet to make a rhyming sequence of scheme. Like the bride on her wedding day, I am struck by the realization that I never planned for the after- the aftermath of growing up. Graduate. Get a job. Get Married. Have Kids. I am twenty-two and have nothing to look forward to but a fifty year march to the grave; the day when the breathing stops and my body finally catches up to my brain.

I’ll stop before you begin to think this will end in suicide. It won’t. I can say no to life but I can’t say yes to that…that dirty word that creeps up behind us until we are so disgusted with the everyday that we turn and find it staring us straight in the face. Shocking us with its unearthly grin, we forget the careful tedium of balancing the positives and negatives of one more day of living. I am the heart patient on table feeling the shocks of electricity race through me once again. Yes!! Today I will love living!! Yet the heart knows its own security and falls back into the slow pattern I have crafted these past years.

I’ll do you one better, you believe I need the Lord. Glory Hallelujah, May Christ be praised!!! The religious always believe that their faith will save you from despair, make you believe in living again yet they fail to see the great irony. Christianity is a religion obsessed with death. You talk of our Heavenly Reward and the Judgment of the Wicked. When will these things occur? Today? On this earth? No. They are tasks assigned solely to the creator who we might get the chance to meet after we are dead (if we do everything right first). Have you ever played a game with all rules and no result? If I were a Christian, I would want to die everyday just so I could see if I guessed it right. In this light, martyrdom is not such a sacrifice after all. Surely this is a waste, just as my friend fails to understand. We are standing in front of that great painting and the religious man is shouting that the painting is so obviously a dog…. Really? Cause I just saw life pissing on a fire hydrant.

I am breathing again but this time there is something I must explain. It’s called perception. Every hurt, each affliction, is filtered through it and it is that which measures our level of tolerance and pain. You call me a pessimist. I call myself a realist. Either way, I say we kill all the optimists. Ah, finally a smile from your lips and I know my rant as found its mark. Tonight I will wrap my arms around this grown up life and remember what it felt like to have that swift bolt of electricity race through me once more. Today I say Yes.

An Excercise in Adoration and Prose

Some times, you're as real as
these times, you're breaking me with
these lines, you're delicate steps between
fine lines, you're oh so careful
fine rhymes, you're making me dream
all rhymes, you're giving me a word for

you're as real as some times cause you're breaking me with these times taking you're delicate steps between these lines you're oh so careful fine lines so you're making me dream fine rhymes while you're giving me a word for all rhymes.

You're as real as some. Times cause- you're breaking me with these times; taking your delicate steps between these lines. You're, oh, so, careful. Fine lines, so. You're making me dream fine rhymes while you're giving. Me- A word for all rhymes.

Sometimes I really do think you're as real as these times. Can't you see you're breaking me with these lines? You're taking delicate steps between fine lines and you're being oh so careful. These fine rhymes- you're making me dream in all rhymes! For you are- my muse- always giving me a word.

My Story is that I am Me

There has been a story brewing in my soul. Lines pass through me, ghosts of thought that cannot be adequately expressed or understood. Where does a story begin? Is a story created or merely found? Can we remain open to the universe of life, open for the fabled muse to enter in and guide our minds through the wandering storylines?

Where do you begin a story? I suppose where every story, every life, begins- I will tell you of the day of my birth. But that is not truly where it all began is it? There is a moment to which we can point and know that at this second we were created but there is a history to our creation. There is a story that began with my parents, and before that their parents, and before that and before that. It is the story we are born into.
Man's original sin in lyrical form.
What story was I born into? It is the story that has shaped my every thought and action. I am fully aware that at twenty-two years old I am far from my own person. I have tried to be. I have abstained from various vices of flesh and spirit to create an indepence that can assuredly be mine but I have failed. I am who I am. I am the product of generations of love, hate, knowledge, and dreams. I am a child of the sixties that was born in the eighties. I have lived many lives and died to each of them. I am twenty-two and the most invincible mortal being I know.

I am me and that is my story.

"It's a backwards attraction to your forward eyes
But you're so far-sighted that
you can't place trust in what or who you recognize. "

Working on a new chapter...