Crying as if in opposition to the rain
pattering outside on the pavement,
staring blindly at her plate,
still full,
untouched,
mind away from this place,
could this really be happening?
Just a year ago
the same place,
same person, not the other,
there isn’t another,
same date, not year
but the same
Yet somehow different and sad.
1st April
A foolish heart
A foolish heart
What is one?
The one that does
or the one that says
or the one that just feels
The one that walks away loudly
or the one that fights quietly
or the one that stands still clearly
A foolish heart
A foolish heart
Mine is one.
I cannot give in. Dragging myself to my feet, I trudge on. Each footstep is thunder and each ragged breath is hell. Every rumble of my stomach, deafening. The averted eyes of strangers pierce my soul. Their blank faces loom in and out of focus. Muffled voices ask about my wellbeing. I stumble and fall. No, stand, please legs work, please, oh god, please stand up, don’t let me fall, he’ll catch me, he’ll take me, oh please, stand…
Gripping the wall, my head pounding, I begin to buckle – again. My knees threaten to collapse altogether. But I walk on. Stumbling, staggering, slow. This is me. My once round face is hollowed and hungry for food, for anything.
He stands on my thin shadow, almost tripping me up. His black robe rustles at my feet. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see his face. Afraid, I careen into a crowd of no one. I fall, hard. He gently lays me out, placing my head on the side. I struggle. Not today. Please, give me another chance. He places a mottled hand over my mouth. I am mute. With the utmost care, he reaches into my heart and plucks my battered soul out. The wound heals instantly.I lie in his arms, tired. Hours march by.He takes me up, whispering soft reassurance. He tells me you sleep not in empty doorways, but on clouds and you are served food on golden plates, instead of scrounging in the bins. It does not get so cold your bones ache as though you were eighty years old. You do not line up once a month at a centre to bathe. This he tells me, is heaven. But I disagree. It sounds like paradise.an explict sort of rhyme
is in tune with my head
erotic
neurotic
it all seems so dead.
To try and put two
and two as one mold
You used it
abused it
how hearts grow so old….
It’s churning
and burning
a hole in my mind
replacing the words
I can’t seem to find
so lost
in the cost
of a sickly sweet high.
someone remind me
just how far to lie
before I feel guilt
consumed
amused
it’s so entertaining
to watch this girls.
horror
and what are we gaining?
and hope
that the dope
will last through the night
is killing me
willingly
this feeling’s got bite
It nips at your gummy sweet
cherry drop eyes.
and lemon sour
on the hour
falling for lies
and this explict sort of rhyme
so in tune with my head
it’s erotic
so neurotic
it’s like porn for the dead.
I found myself at the usual spot yet again. It seemed that I ended up there more and more these days. Maybe it was stress, maybe it was despair, whatever the reason I really didn’t want to think about it. My concentration, or what was left of it, was focused entirely on the half empty bottle in front of me. When did it get so bad that I didn’t even use a glass?
It never ceased to amaze me. The emptier the bottle got, the fuller my life felt. But it didn’t seem to be working that night. I’d been feeling bad all day. Nothing was working to improve that day. All my usual tricks had failed miserably. My happy place was desolate and empty, the alcohol didn’t seem to even effect me past my hand eye coordination and ability to form a proper sentence, and the pills just made me tired. There was just something about today; I felt it as soon as I woke up that morning, that ominous feeling that something was going to happen.
I don’t claim to be psychic, but on the brink of a disaster of any scale, those whose lives are changed forever because of it always feel something out of the ordinary. I didn’t know the scope of what I was going to be dragged into that night, and if you’d told me, I would have called you crazy. Even today I wonder if I’m still sane. Maybe in my position, being insane is just as good as being sane. This ominous feeling had been building all day. It was the calm before the storm…
~Diary of Samuel Collins
It was amazing how far I had traversed the shore that night, in complete blackness, with only the sound of the waves. They rolled astonishingly gentle along that stretch. It was as if the waves whispered to me the tender secrets of the ocean, things that I never have and never will know, but they hinted to me. I feel they hinted that there is beauty in the ocean that rivals the splendor I see in my own world. Something equivalent to the wafting of wildflowers, the buzzing of dragonflies, or the scents carried on the winds that roll down from the mountains. Birth; I figure that too happens in the oceans.
Where I was born, the waves crashed with vehemence. My seven siblings and I were frightened of it in the early months before we left the hole. We imagined it was a great and terrible beast that waited for us to emerge, and once we did we would be eaten within moments. I had not the ability to even engender an image in my mind of what this beast might materialize as. I only felt it in my chest, the agony of fear. We all felt this despite the soft chiding of our mother, who insisted it were only “water”. To us then, that meant nothing.
When we first emerged, I remember I was the only one of us whose fear was completely shattered by unparalleled awe. We all stepped charily out and peered over the crest of the rocks, with the morning sun casting everything in what I now know to be early sunlight, and the first of the waves that crashed sent them yipping back to the hole with even more terror than before. Not I. I flinched, yes. I flattened my ears to my head and crouched until my belly brushed the rocks, but I was not afraid. I remained still for a few more crashes, but before long I was standing again, inching closer until I actually felt the spray. I believe I felt then what it meant to be a living thing.
Every day since, I have walked abreast with the ocean, often with the waves more violent than that, sometimes less. I recall and relay this moment of hearing a gentle ocean for the first time as being my very first feeling of real peace. I realize that may sound odd or even overly dramatic considering the peaceful things I have seen on land, but the ocean to me is a symbol of my birth, of my upbringing, and my survival. I rely on it and live by it and know it as well as you can from the shore. I have heard only anger or sadness in it for all my life, and to me that created a dismal notion that this on which I rely is something possessing a great deal of ill intent. That changed though that night I walked and heard it actually speak softly to me. As if it finally knew me rather than I only knowing it.
I had emerged from the wood at dusk, walking a straight shot east, as I have been doing now for the past five years, and the sun had already gone down. As is my norm, I walked down to the water to wet my feet, as I am fond of feeling wet when the weather permits. The quiet penetrated me then but I did not yet give it thought, I thought only of the moments prior to exiting the wood. I mulled the moments over so intensely that the sinew in my frame felt tight. I was tired, agitated, pained and hungry.
Once my feet were wet I trotted along the water, just past the licking of the waves, at a steady, even pace. I held my nose to the air and remained oblivious to how gently I was received, but as the tension in me finally began to dissipate I was conscious of how calm the evening was. This was when I felt it so truly that the ocean was being kind to me. As I felt it more intensely I did not do what one would expect. I did not stop; I trotted quicker, faster and faster until I felt youth in me again. A carelessness springing from happiness rather than an absence of mind, the waves whispered and sang to me until I felt joyous enough to run at times. I felt freedom in my tired heart that allowed me to sprint when there was no need to at all. I think I may have even howled once.
Morning though, morning was when I felt in me a sense of joviality unrivalled. I was of course exhausted, and sat back from the waves. If they can be called as such, they rolled too small almost to be waves; too kindly. I continued to watch them as I sat upon a boulder, whose surface was smooth enough so as to not trouble me, and so the sun rose.
At first it was fairly unremarkable, as the horizon simply turned a different shade of gray, but it unfolded rather quickly as something crafted by an otherworldly force, knocking thought and words clear out of me as if I had been told to keep quiet by Mother Nature herself. The clouds seemed to explode and the sun crept up, turning everything into a rusty red that reminded me deeply of my mother‘s coat as I remembered it. They billowed and formed in large arcs as the sanguine of the sky was mirrored over the water, and a window formed to show the first blues of the day. The clouds actually seemed to form a golden pathway into the sky, and for a moment I felt I was witnessing the unfolding of a miracle. Fear may have taken me then had I not been so overcome with joy and longing, for I desperately wanted to follow this path before me. Though my reason firmly held me, and still I sat.
I sat more still then than I ever had in all my life. So still that the seagulls ceased to see me, so still that I felt my heart beating. So immeasurably still and silent was I that I felt nothing existed in the world but this scene, this area, this indentation in the world that only I had seen. Nothing else mattered then. My sigh was as deep as the ocean itself, seeming to come straight from the depths of my soul, for I was truly content.
They say fishing is calming. A relaxing sport.My, aren’t they wrong.As I lay here, my thoughts swim to quickly to comprehend. Like little piranhas, that would bite off your hand at the first chance. So I give up. It’s easy to sit back in my boat and stare at the sky. The hopeless, jet-black sky. I sigh.I try to fish in the sea that is my mind with the consciousness that is my rod.I pull a vague memory of love.Love?What’s that? It seems; a new breed of thought. One I’ve never known or seen.It smells like oranges. A man, and a blanket, warmth. Fatherly love. I laugh, and toss it back. That one isn’t worth a damn.Mid-laugh, something pulls on my consciousness. At first, it’s a curious sensation. Then, it’s anger, fear. More urgent now. Pulling with a vengeance.I’m pulled under the surface.Fishing is delightful, eh?
Dear personal overachiever,
You can’t sign a treaty with perfection because it’s always taking refuge up in trees and you refuse to climb. You can’t offer death a cigarette and socialize because it’s trying to quit and you don’t even smoke. You can’t send life a bouquet of roses and a letter home because you don’t know where it lives, just somewhere between heartbeats and rib cages.
Well,
You just can’t, understand?
You can’t change the course of rivers,
you can’t seize the cycling grief of lakes.
You can’t promise to send the world shaking
when you’re too afraid of your own damned mistakes.
You say you’re a traveler and yet you haven’t left home,
you say you’re a singer but you haven’t risen your voice.
Well, you can’t tread oceans without your feet becoming tired and you can’t shout a song whose chorus you don’t know. You can’t ride on the backs of sparrows or paper airplanes because, let’s face it, you’re just not as weightless as you try to make yourself believe.
And finally: you can’t gain knowledge when you’re reading books with faded pages. Remember, age does not make history. I’m not even sure it makes experience anymore.
Sincerely,
well, you just can’t
