How do you believe in
a make believe relationship, those squishy inside moments that only
memories re-live as telepathic intimacy? How do you rectify the
silence of too many years passed when you justified a generic
symbol as love? How do you accept the inhibited smile of walking
barefoot in a water fountain screaming out to the clouds of
childhood that evaporate years ago, but so close it almost drips
down the glass as liquid? How do you see yourself as any different
then you are, the monsters that crawls around ideas, the inner life
that you throw away for a foot in the door? How do you love that,
the shadows you predicted at birth and painted on the walls with
fingers tips, singing lullabies to dolls? How do you find the inner
strength to stand in the past of wasted opportunities without any
eyes, and only the nothingness of it happening, only the reasons
and reactions and the faceless words that follow you around telling
you their position on the argument? Those ceaseless raw emotional
words of someone else that got crammed in your ear one day, so far
down that in silence they have their very on stage, and in winter
around the dead trees covered with dirt, they are the only warmth.
The two sided face of love, the belief in someone’s paper thin
promises, the belief in a nightmare as you hold yourself awake
thinking eventually it will change, eventually the tap dance of
love on a vacant street will be special, it will be what you
thought it was, it will be what it is supposed to be, but in the
imagination everything is what it is supposed to be.

+++

Pressure

Feet being pushed into shoes, smiles being sown onto faces,
love being disguised as meaning again, telling you who to be, who
has the rights to your affection, controlling you softly through
the cracked voice of a mother who is nowhere to be found, through
the soft memories of a father who you constantly dream about, and
you sow yourself shut to sit alone in a room full of strangers
pretending to be a doll, pretending to be the person that is
soul-less, mimicking TV commercial statements, paradises on
computer screens, songs that can’t leave your head, people’s
footprints that you follow up the walls like wall paper. You close
your eyes holding yourself into this mold of woman, this supposed
to be doll face of sexual desire that comes so close to real even
her hair grows, this plastic perception of a helmet that ever so
neatly looks like a face, a voice with a reaction and a subtle
comment about life, a could be half is, who smiles because she has
nothing to says. And the stuffing creeps out more and more in the
birthday massacre.

+++

Chinese Takeout

Who am I supposed to be at every age, or the
minute before I was born, was I supposed to be someone then,
someone who had an agenda walking through life with a purpose that
was more important than the pitfalls and dead ends that society
seems to be known for, the mistakes someone else made that you hear
about over dinner in a foreign restaurant where half of the people
are from another country you can’t pronounce? Is there supposed to
be a pause of interest in-between the millions and ones stranger’s
faces I have begun to know by heart who all carry the same
conversations with the same tones just swooping out the nouns and
verbs? The broken bubble that seems to drift off into another
dimension where people question their own voice, did I mean to say
that, they ask walls, do I really sound like that, is that me
again, the repetitive question, is that me? The strangeness of
knowing yourself through the eyes of too many people whose tongue
is stuck on the half dissolved aspartate that replaces sugar. Do
you know me, we ask one another as we subtly change, cocoon again,
reverse, remorse, find the guilt behind a book and a locket that
was stuffed there? Is there a direction as we bubble back to the
easy going life style of compliance and who is who in our power
hungry directional perspective of constant production. Is there
another you, we ask the million yous all in the way? Can there be
another one, just one more, just one tiny one more, so I can feel
small with you, this little slim door that has opened up behind
your head again, that dotted gray blue line that we can dance upon
in thought thinking it was all made up, even our hearts can laugh
away our lives through a theoretical predicament, we can just laugh
it all away with one solid breath, one more version underneath the
solid stare of an unknown place we all go back to.

+++

What we learn as children

The head-ducking of
another age that has gotten stuck to our mind, like glue and tooth
picks all wrapped in a ball matted on the side of some girls head
who fell asleep in the sewer beside the drug addicts and the lost
souls, again. The smile that lost itself from being washed off a
face too many times, in an upside down moment, while a little girl
in a white dress twirled beside a music box and a grandmother’s
dreams. There will be people there says the villains who push the
mind back again, the irreplaceable irreversible bubble that we find
ourselves bouncing off of for a neutral story, to love all human
kind as long as we don’t have to personally know them, the before
we forget as we barely hang on beside white bath-tubs and hand
shakes, and the flame of love dies in a man’s eyes, the man we
loved before we met him, the because it will happen that girls put
on makeup and mothers tell their daughters how lucky one day they
will be, just wait as we hold on tight to fight against the war of
empowerment and superficial compliments, all the pain will matter
once someone finally worships you. Keep fighting say the demons as
they finger over porn in day dreams sitting on a toilet calling all
women whores and bitches because we have bodies they will
eventually be held accountable for when the dead pile up, and we
cry endlessly sometimes the rivers and oceans and greed that hold
us all apart, thinking a relationship with another person is a
reflection of good deeds, a belief in beauty is the same as
sacrifice as we all play an impossible game for accomplishment,
while we are watched and guarded by the ever growing
relationship.

+++

Two plus two equals four

You know this soul of
a body you can never forget, your words laced within theirs as
these imaginary moments unfold, this whose who, why not, why me,
moments that you can’t take your eyes off of, as life moves forward
like a babbling creek rushing over rocks, and you get stuck in
those moments, those beliefs in God, the faith because all
humankind is trustworthy, the I told you so, so it will never
happen again moment, and you believe for a slit second in someone
else’s eyes in an inner beauty that won’t ever die, in a life that
is always floating off the ground, in an irreplaceable love that
follows every hardship, and you love for a second, this powerful
unknown force of unconditional love, of every quirky every weird
odd thought, and strange hair and beauty mark and innocent reply
moment of love…and it comes so sweet like the drippings off an
orange in the middle of the summer, it feels like friendship and
watching the shapes in the clouds, and you take that moment and
think it has to be, he has to do this, he has to love me back, he
has to be with me forever, as life turns into a narrow one way
street…and there only feels like one way out again, one way to
break free, one way to turn around and be in the lazy ponds of half
hearted thoughts and whimsical cares. And as you sit admiring
someone else admiring who you thought you could be, this inside
charm and belief that 2 plus 2 equals 4, you find how easy it is to
change, how easy a second or a thought, or a string of long sighs
can be forgotten. How it only takes one person to forget and look
away, it only takes one. And everything that mattered, every moment
in the sun, every longing look and high five and almost there, and
belief of making something happen, and throwing yourself on a
timeline of innocent replies thinking someone else was watching, it
only takes one person to make something so beautiful become an
embarrassment, something so healing become a mark of shame, a
memory you can’t forget fast enough, a person who you can’t run
away from. A horror of whose who and why me again, and you thought
it would be different. It only takes one person.

+++

Assumptions

There are often a million people all stuck to the
same person, the same in-between moment inside out, the because I
want it to happen belief, and the we are stuck singing the same
fairy tales, the same lives that have become so repetitive they are
painful to re-live, they are painful to pretend to understand,
because it feels too shallow. There are often a million and one
people who say the same exact thing, the same exact thing. And in
our era of communication we become fixated by it, the every moving
clock, the ever understanding facial expression that swing around
superficially like the time, like the repetitive laugh during a
joke, and we fear what we don’t understand but we run there too,
like detectives searching for answers, and like story tellers we
become whisked away by the outline of other lives and the better
beliefs. But it is a strange moment to realize the running and the
questions and the social behavior we pride ourselves on, the broken
hearts and shattered lives that we neglect or avoid and at times
worship to try to heal, only stands upon the meaningless
non-consequential ambivalent forgiveness of stranger’s
accidents.

+++

Kyle

Are
there more people were you come from, so many more that I can cover
myself from them, pretend that they come from another time and make
common day conversation about stupid mistakes that have become
repetitive in our culture that we like to believe is fascinating?
Can I lie to you, tell you my eye color is blue instead of hazel,
tell you I am old instead of young, make you believe in me, even
when I can only offer you empty words to dead ends? Can I tell you
to be with me, cold and alone in a bed made for one instead of two,
inside the night sky where the eyes have widened and closed on the
edge of the ocean, on the edge of a hurricane developed years ago
and a million lands away, when we were safe. Can we pretend to be
safe? Away from humanity again, away from the people who knew my
name before I was born and pretended to love me before I asked. Can
we pretend to be old again? So old we are near the end of life and
can get boundless sources of sympathy for doing nothing at all,
laughing at how close to death we are, pretending to be doctors and
higher professional and grant the respect of the nurses who were
never ambitious to begin with. Can we pretend to be someone else
again, someone who remembers everything, someone who will never
forget, as we carve away the days and the nights on the wooden
trees outside our lives, in the forest we have covered our skin so
thick to see through that the owls seem to have eyes. Can we love
again like we will never forget each other, you won’t just turn
around one day in the middle of an empty classroom and pretend not
to know me, you won’t laugh and I will smile behind a still piece
of glass, and move on. Can we pretend to always remember, at least
for just one more moment?

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