Erosion

Cut away the fat, carve the meat from the bone, dice and slice and mince and pinch and tense the calm, the good, the right, the positive in the carver's kitchen, in the meat locker, in the court room, in the pitch-black bedroom, inside yourself in an unconcerned crowd.

Do it again the next day, the day following, the rest of the week, the week after that, then continue onward as if that is what life is...the beating on yourself, the hobbling, the binding, the bending, the breaking.

Turn off your eyes and ears and heart and mind and life and blood for things you cannot change but are married to, enjoined with, infused into, burned by, melded...and stop making them hurt you long after the caustic bright chemical reaction, emotional poignancy, intellectual delve, sexual twist or careless cluelessness disperses.

Leave these rainy nightmares of the sticky, putrid past to fade, discard that dark hue that climbs out in rancid, acidic sweat to taint the sweet-rose dawn of each breaking day, and believe there is more, so much more, beyond now.

Derail

Another of my found writings, which just show me how far I've travelled since this feeling made me take pen to paper to permanence.

Can’t feel anything in this flight from you or myself and the empty roar within in me. My thoughts are scattered across the past, present, and future in a reconstructed haze of recollected premonitions. Your nose-wipe life befouls any dash to restitiution and deadens the point of the directional needle. Where is which-way, and who are they; am I to confuse when with how? Riddles for the sake of insanity and limbo read like obituaries in my latestest yellow journalism sensational. Hot off the press, lingering bathroom piss, tortured daily remiss: derailment of bliss.

TooL

Tool's new album 10,000 Days is out now. Go get it and freak yourself out, you deserve it.

Follow up: Yep, it freaks me out. Tool never ceases to amaze me and conjure up strange rhythms and imagery. Sometimes spooky, sometimes driven and forceful, but always, forever original and unique.

Rehabilitation

What hurts most in things of the past that turned out bad?

Is it the memory of the event? Or the pain endured because of actions?
Is it the hurt of being wronged? Or the guilt of craving revenge?
Is it the confusion and the bluffed feeling?
Or is it the letdown of knowing that you are human, that despite your best defenses you are still capable of being injured?

Or maybe it is that hard-swallow, sinking, Sucker feeling of bitter regret due to events, courses, actions, or words?

And if that hurt can be narrowed into any definite source, can it be erased? Eradicated? Overcome?

What makes hurt? And why do we continue to hurt others, as humans, after we have felt such pain from that action?

Time Capsule

Finding old things, forgotten pieces of a life before mine, connects me to my father. I am fixing up my mom's backyard as her birthday gift. It is an large project involving saws, machetes, rakes, wheelbarrows, bags, etc. Today I found the wheelbarrow had a flat. Easy to fix, but my toolbox was in the bedroom. Instead I went into the old shed out back. My father's long-unused tools sat quietly in his large chest, the kind of tool container you see in a garage when you are talking to Joe 6-Pack about how you accidentally hit the curb (leaving out the alcohol content) and why your car pulls to the right, while Joe just looks at you like are talking too fast for him.

In this toolchest I found order, care, and surprising cleanliness. This was a peek at my father's way of doing things before the confusion came over him like a rising tide. I found tools that I had no way of using, from sheer confusion of their purpose as well as lacking something as massive as the tools were meant to be used upon, and amidst the connection to my father's past I managed to find some things that could remove the wheelbarrow wheel. After some air at the local gas-n-sip from the 50-cent pump, I was back and removing sticks and crap with renewed vigor.

I was careful to put my father's tools back where they belonged. They are, still, my father's tools and I merely borrowed them for the task at hand. He doesn't need tools these days, but I respect them as if he would come out and give the toolchest an inspection. I know his hands curved around the handles and put the sockets in with the adapters, so I replace them in the same manner. I wipe my grease-covered fingers with a rag he most surely wiped his hands and tools with sometime in the foggy past.

This is the closest I've been to my father in 18 years and it filled me with content and satisfaction. Thanks Dad.

Hope Searches

Take a rectangle, put inside a picture of us behind the glass surface, and clasp it there. Turn the angle of the frame by the tips of the wooden edge and cast the sunlight of your captured remembrance across the surface, dancing shadows into the corners of this static feeling. See how the light cascades across your frozen smile? See the shine flip back in my blue eyes? Does that make you remember the things that smolder in these days of physical separation? That confined, stiff portrait is only a frame of the moments of life, of time...of things now known and conquered and encapsulated. Tell me unknown things instead of those scared feelings, the fears of hurt and regret and the septic past. Who talks of the days of the unknown without trepidation?..only those seeking the unestablished sugar-coated in hope.

Verbal Pink, Orange, and Red

Thorns rip me across exposed skin in my haste to blend into the thicket of woods and brambles. Solitude and serenity is my quest; a simple thrill in viewing the sunset alone, undisturbed and introspective, from a hidden natural setting. I bleed as I sit amidst the stunted-growth trees and pine needles and granite. It is Friday evening. I don't need a shower or clean clothes or phone calls or money or cigarettes or car keys or problems or rubbers or anyone. I crave this simple departure into the force of life that is bigger than any creature on the face of this earth. I managed to make it in time--time being relative to the turning of the earth and the clarity of the sky and the position my butt is resting--to absorb what too many people simply take for granted if noticed, blocked with sunglasses or sunvisors, or cursed/craved from behind a restrictive window.

Melding light and emotions and existence into the passing colors of tonight's sunset alters my direction and outlook on my life. It isn't easily described the inspirational power to alter in hues my life, or the opportunity to let the passing of time affect me merely in a reflection of skycast light, but the hum inside my body resonates from this event. And my earthly form was changed, my soul was touched from a bright-white source, and my thoughts were reconstructed based upon my deviation from my draining, deluding ritual of happiness or fun.

I've been impressed upon, influenced, motivated. How do you capture the passing of time in words? A picture would simplify the event. Words are harder; truly try to write about a sunset sometime and see for yourself. I chose to write this out of a day of thoughts, situations, and adventures for sheer survival of the captured beauty I shared with forces greater than I. Words are cheap, positive thoughts are lucky, impressions are rare, and finding the footpath of direction develops the receipent blessed to experience the transformation into motion and permanence. This is gratitude.

Myself

For Shannon Fisher, a good friend who is truly missed. This represents how I imagined his last moments to be...

When shadows creep, talons piercing deep, time drips slowly and the edges of fear bear sharpness.

When darkness pours, inside the wind's howling roar, forcing me to crawl and hide, disgusted inside.

When the feelings surround, an empty, hollow sound, the wide open abounds, and I breathe sadness.

When the hope-glow flickers, a solitary lingering sliver, a loneliness is triggered, echoing notes of failure;

Here within myself.