festering and rotten

how many words escape one's mouth through the course of a lifetime that are suddenly something devolved from the original thought that sparked the intention behind them? out of the blue the immediate reaction is apoligetic and remorse filled, but the ax has been swung, the incision made. no matter how many times the midnight oil is burned or suns set, somehow those words echo more than the complementary or meaning filled syllables. this is the founding factor in so many guilt ridden headcases and elementary level cat fights that rob us of our purest relationships. so many times have i eaten my words, like a wolf over some carcass, only to find the festering flesh is going to destroy not only myself, but those that i care about. no matter what has happened, as the get up kids put it so elegantly so many years ago, there's no need for reminding, you're still all that matters to me. this is a realization i came to long ago, and it rings as bell across a fresh blanket of snow through the countryside. it is a sign of the times, and that nothing has changed. you are still ringing inside my skull. the revirberations are deafening, but the silence is deadly. you are my only drug, you are my last elixer, and the final dose is wearing thin.

angels and ambassadors

posed against a rural skyline, not the wide open stars of a blanket sky, but one complete with housing developments and an old semiforgotten river, i found something tonight. i wasn't anything of concrete value, or a realization that can comfort future generations who will inhabit this floundering planet, but it mattered under this unkempt face. each night i find myself wandering the half filled streets with a half empty soul of this town which i once called home, and tonight was no distinguishable exception. as i exited my seemingly abandoned residence and began to crusade through an upper middle class neighbor hood, all while a cigarette was firmly secured between my lips, i spilled syllables out to myself in a raspy voice explaining how i ended up on this crusade of sorts. i began to contemplate the simple fact that i am drowning in this misery because i have so chosen. as freinds fled like sparrows from burning trees i stood watch, trying to extinguish and restore things to their once shimmering grandure, whilst behind my back everything marched on uneffected and unaltered. i have been bonding myself to something that can not be tied down, something so free it can not be tampered with or changed. i have been trying to oppress and contain the human spirit for so many months, i had lost sight of what i had originally envisioned. the only suitable course of action is to let the reigns go loose and forge for some uncharted and unblemished landscape. a place where the stars hang down and meet the horizon. i am searching for a new set of eyes to lose myself in, and a new hand to grasp and hold tightly. i am smiling, ear to ear, i am holding a grin so big angles and ambassadors should be jealous. tonight i found something unescapeable. tonight i found peace.

where you want to be

i recall when i was a freshman in high school an overly zealous english teacher forcing me to sit at a desk and write what i felt. what was composed inside that mass of twisted metal and fiberboard was a poem entitled "a tree stands alone." it spoke of a withering tree on a desolate plain that was a marker of a once more prosperous time, and i had been referring to only some higher power knows. however, now as i sit isolated on another sunday afternoon in this vacant outpost of modern culture, trying to carve out what i am going through, i reflect back upon that mirror of my current life that i managed to compose several years ago. how had i seen, from a classroom filled with portraits of western movie stars and inspirational sayings, my life on fastforward, to where i would stand the withering and half living tower of a once shimmering time. for me high school was never a place of acceptance, it was a place of fuck yous and have a nice days. the immortal summer that has been forever bookmarked in the history held by my mind involves a close group of unlikely friends, an old decaying pick up truck, voyages through early saturday morning garage sales, all paired with the current releases of what are still some of the artists closest to my heart, or at least where it was before i handed it out for little more than bus fare. since those days faded into autumn and my sophmore year of high school, i have been left voyaging to find what has left in those deep, well worn seats inside that pickup. as we grew the bonds faded and frayed, and we have chosen so many things over one another at least at one time or another, always returning on chance to those evenings where we can haphazardly throw in taking back sunday's where you want to be, and somehow be mystically transported back to the time where we did want to be. as of late wanting to be has been a problem. i want to be nothing, i want to write, i want to think, i want to express, and i want to forget. but, like locked in the verses in that fateful album, i remember more than i would like to forget. i recall the smallest details from what she wore on her sixteenth birthday, to what her favorite animal was the day we voyaged to the zoo. i forced away those who had shown me the deepest confines of brotherhood and compassion for a chance at her heart, however marred and untimely that shot may have been. so now i stand here, a tree withering on a desolate plain, somewhere near a northern outpost. i am still the same panic stricken runaway who fled that place. i am still running, now, someone needs to catch me. someone needs to catch me before it's too late. i am meeting the four winds, and dismembering to accomodate them. hurry, the panic is fading into darkness. say yes, say yes, say yes......

the course of a free man

contemplative structure may be the best action to chart a course, however, by the time our dreams are going to cement, we have always drawn the blueprints over fault lines, they all crumble. i have planned so many extravagant days and then when i reach them they have the shimmer of a tin can misplaced among railway ties. all evening it seems as though the endless turning mill inside of me has been draining poisons from this system, and maybe they are entering instead of finding a panic filled escape route. i am dying, slowly, each and every day. so are we all. we all have our addictions, misconceptions, and passions that take from what was once left our innocence. we are a short walk from the grave on these evenings, and all though we may not know the time or place where we will rest our bones, we can feel it growing ever near. short of breath and long on excuses is how my sentence structure seems to escape my mouth these days. i never know what to say to that one girl. people always seem to ponder what we need to survive in life. i have everything, my whole life it has been given to me. what is the one thing that i need? there has always been the girl who i could look at and wonder what it would be like to be given her whole heart. so many months ago, as a scribbled words and images on those pages and passed them into her hands, i gave her my heart. now it sits beating in some landfill or buried under several seasons worth of debris in a darkened closet. still i know when i see her eyes and hear her voice that everything that has happened will always matter behind my fading blue eyes. she is the past for me, she is a ghost, who for the price of a two hundred miles can become visable once again. so many nights have i sworn her off as a sidwalk prophet would a demon, but still i need her. she is my world, she is my everything. yet, i know that it is a fading dream, like a child who has outgrown his comic books, and now just revists them for the innocence they can still embody within their images. i now walk the twenty or so odd blocks down the park where i would play childhood games, fulfilling nothing outside of a sense of reconciliation with the past. maybe that is the someday i am looking for. the day where i can stand upon the precipice of free thought and proclaim myself a free man, a man no longer a victim and slave to memories held inside this mess of organs and veins. i try to paint these pictures so that you may understand that this is not what everyone else has experianced, and that i will not heed your advice. you tell me to forgot what has happened, let her memory pass from inside me, and find a new face to replace her. it as though i had walked through a department store after an earthquake, and picked out the only china doll with its face intact. everyone else is just a mass of chipped porcelin paried marred and shattered limbs. i need no other face, and i have finished searching to find another. i love her's with all of my heart, the same one i handed to her scribbled on that piece of paper, the same one that has been lost to the wind. i have been lost to the wind, and the four may spread me across the earth. only she can find me, but only she does not want to.