Something That's Not a Poem

So it's a rainy Charleston day. The power to my apartment is off until either later tonight, or tomorrow morning. I barely slept last night and got up early, so I'm tired. As a result - I'm sitting in the Kudu coffeeshop, using their internet. It's good times.

Last night was a very interesting one - I uncovered and analyzed a few layers of this strange belief structure I have. I also was introduced to a new side of one of my friends. All in all, an intriguing night.

One of the things she and I spent a lot of time last night talking about was "purpose". Between coffin nails and drags on cigars, we hashed out a lot of interesting topics.

And for the first time, I was able to express coherently a belief I've always held; that because of the fact that humans are intelligent, self-aware creatures, with individual personalities, we each have a reason for our lives - a "purpose".
I don't believe that this "purpose" is a result of any creator's plans - I am an atheist and I stand unmoving on that issue. However, because all humanity shares a collective destiny - a result not of a god, but of the introduction of our civilizations coupled to our basic biology - each of our lives has a reason for being.

At this point in time, I am starting to believe that this reason for being is not a specific thing. It's as if each of our lives is the vague beginnings of a song. Subconsciously, we're all aware of what key the song is in - we know the time signature. We're tapping out the rhythm with our hearts. This song - our individual "purpose" - is something unique to every person. It's based on our personality and worldview - both the one we're brought up in, and the one we see.

We know the general direction of our purpose, and the point of our lives is to develop that. We're here to write the entirety of our song - to sing the melodies clear and bright.

But it can be so hard.

This is why I believe that people can be corrupt and can act harshly. This is why I believe cruelty exists - harmful people are people who have lost their sense of purpose. They are people who are either deliberately or unconsciously ignoring their instincts, and are acting to further their own ambition, to gain power simply for themselves.

Right now, I believe that my purpose is to attempt to express the world as I see it. I'm here, and I have this gift with language, in order to take in what I see around me and present it to other people. I'm here to strike a chord that makes others hum along.

Lifting Away

Spent some time the other night doing some free writing. I had a huge creative jumpstart in the form of an open mic, and this is one of the things that popped out. Enjoy, criticize, do what you will.

A Happy One

Love is what ties us together,
what comes above the hate and the jealousy,
to tie into the music and simple creative soul,
find ourselves and create ourselves –
allows us to love ourselves:
Our self

Man is the animal who laughs, and
laughter is for the soul –
music that reaches inside of you and finds the places in
your heart where it can resonate;
a creative mind can think with a pen,
along the strings of a guitar and sliding over the keys of a piano –
a creative mind spins the world with love and with
understanding,
to hit the right notes that will tell the story of the world and of human life.

It’s a man standing on stage,
it’s a man with a guitar,
it’s a man spitting verse and ink into words
through a microphone,
it’s every human being
who stood up and played just because they might as well have died without.
It’s the actress who truly finds herself on stage,
shining flame flashing through the steps of
a scene with all of the skill of a dancer
and with more passion in her heart than she could ever contain.

It’s the clarity of thought of a summer afternoon
in the sun and the simple contented fuzziness of mind
when waking to a cold winter morning
in the arms of the one who loves you.

So take it, and embrace it,
and find comfort in the simple acts,
as we spin our great web of human creativity
to find what we can create
with love in our hearts.

Jacques

This one's a poem that I wrote during one of my workshops earlier this year. We had to write a piece about a room that meant a great deal to ourselves. This is what turned out.

Jacques

We’re alike, this room and I –
both of us wanting,
waiting for the slender, quiet figure
to step back in, to fill
and sit smiling,
to be the one who fits naturally here.

We’re both waiting for him to come back,
To smoothly turn on the
gleaming corner lamps, forcing out
the shadows of lost summers.

He’ll drape himself on
this carpet –
jeans stark against the sea of woven brown –
breathe in the musk of
the room’s anticipation and replace it with
his clean air.

And then lean over me, strong fingers
gently handling my plastic model airplane,
tracing its curves and corners with thin, rough fingers,
applying the same considering caress he’ll give to
the blossoms sparkling outside the front door –

This room is waiting for the gardener to
return and cultivate, but
for now it’ll have to make do with me,
skinny boy with orange shorts
playing in the weeds

Self Affirmation for the Uninformed

This is what I believe.

White Dwarf

We’re told

Our self is something beautiful,

filled with the pure creative fire that explodes in an

artist’s eyes,

across a canvas,

across the sky.

We’re told

Our self is meaningless.

Our self is garbage.

Our self is the perfect butterfly

humming its wing-song, ending lives

infinities away for all eternity.

We don’t know!

We can’t know!

We’re all trapped inside our own minds,

gibbering to ourselves while we pretend to understand

this reality revolving around us –

because the human way is to live by conjecture based on

illusion based on perception.

The capacity for our sanity must be enormous,

because if it’s otherwise –

if our bag of marbles has smashed open,

and we’ve self-imploded already and this

life is just the last moments of the neutron star,

fusion dead and cold, ready in its spinning speck for

the supernova -

then God help us.

Why do I bother trying to understand the universe?

When there are universes enough inside my voice,

unnumbered unfound doorways,

a few of which I take and lovingly empty

onto these pages, tracing the birth and dark

of incredible worlds with the

rolling ink of a pen.

Oh, to have the ability to give up this

life and jump into my own eternity,

to spin my own humble heaven –

I’d make myself a small house with a porch,

sit with notebooks and pens to

watch each day as it walks by,

to write

until every cell

winks out and I am filled with

billions and billions of supernovas.

Because each and every one of us has his own path to walk,

and the only meaning to find is in what we do in the

absolute moment of our existence.

And I know now that meaning can be found even in loneliness,

but never in blank reams –

So I plan to go with pen in hand,

scribbling my voice as the

bells begin to cry in that grey morning light –

worried only in those final racing moments

about finishing my last piece.

Ten Paces and Gone

Been thinking. I'm about to leave Connecticut, and how I've been feeling about it is wrapped up in this poem.

Ten Paces

On the shaded and winding roads
swept over by a summer
and drowning in humidity,
all of the cars are passing me by.

Kept between and around each slow beam of sunlight,
I am driving south.
Kept behind the steering wheel, I am drinking coffee
just to stay interested.

These days, writing myself dry in the dark mornings,
I am finding my way clear of
the stench of déjà vu -
breathing heavily to empty lungs,
air spinning out to stop and slow,
harden into concrete.

Driving away from this place,
all of the pretty Connecticut girls
are passing me by.

These days, lifting and carrying, straining with everything I have,
I’m building up again -
finished with living in rubble,
of picking through debris and
calling it justified.

Kept inside this rotted tree,
I am sick of scrabbling for cracked open acorns -
fallen crabapples.

Driving as fast as I can,
all of the pretty Connecticut girls are going north,
wrapped in sunglasses,
passing me by.

An Anniversary

If you live your life to be judged only by the things you leave behind,
leaved behind something worth judging.
It's in your hands.
Our speck of light in the span of history is
identical,
quivering symmetrical to every pulsing beam
that reached a broken conclusion.
On the surface,
the historian is the same as the meth addict -
the country music idol jangling the same three chords over
and through the cracks in his crooning voice has no more
impact than the sacrificed boy
lost in the mud in deep
old Europe -
It's the details,
the simple, tiny irrelevant bits that mesh together to form
the winding down gleaming clockwork of our
haste,
the scraps of our lives that stay after consciousness drifts and
tired eyes sag.
These are what defines us.
What defines me, to date,
what I'd leave -
three grudges, two of them justified.
Six guitar strings stretching to hum notes and quiver the dust away -
and my poems.
My deranged dancing of ink on paper
carved grooves of my thoughts blazing inside notebooks,
winking from the whitewash of a computer screen
My poems, pulsing with the rhythm of my heartbeat and the
flashing race of pen flying through to touch
and bring a smile
slip in and lay itself on a heart,
echo there amidst the love and hate
reverberating with joy and barely
repressed anger,
filling the depths of heartbreak,
whistling the soft breeze of a chuckle.
Here is where you'll find what I choose to leave behind -
words given life with love and having
all of the power of meaning behind them
etched somewhere inside
you.