Hate Like.

Heartburn in your stomach.

Organic lattices grinding in circles

Against

Flesh that sparkled

Yesterday.

A temper,

An attitude

You can only halfway give up on.

Bad breath

And some stagnant sort of pall in the room

That won’t be ignored.

A waistband too tight.

A face furiously plain and

Red deserts along her cheekbones.

Tears trickle from complacent yesterdays

When this goddamn biosphere

Was toxically controlled;

When depression was a blind man’s game,

A hamster’s game

And ducks were able to form lines with their bodies.

A nagging sensation of no one

Evolves into cloudy, over-dreamt  

Tsunamis.

Wishes

In Middle America

Die two feet from the front door

And paint peels too quickly.

Nothing Is Everything and Everything Is Nothing.

Once I heard a man say, “Nothing is everything and everything is nothing.” The mutterings of a madman is undoubtedly the immediate consensus. But if one looks deeper, underneath the flaps of prejudice, there is a certain wisdom and understanding of the universe manifested within these simple words. The notion that our lives are so tiny and miniscule that, in perspective, any petty issues we have mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. We are a wild creature, led off course again and again by the mammoth planes of our emotion that we sometimes seem to get swallowed whole by our circumstances. But in retrospect, those who look upon past, deemed, dreadful situations with a new standpoint often find that all they were lacking was a dose of perspective and a pinch of wisdom to improve things.

Yet there are those that view the world in quite a different light than what is considered norm. There are some that find so much life, vigor, and inspiration in things so often overlooked; a sigh from a sleeping baby, a small utterance of love, the play of light over a translucent surface. They watch life happen in the most unexpected places, unfolding from their imaginations.  A faction of idealists, optimists. Those that do not want to be swallowed whole, those that wish to be a part of the breath of life, captured in the thrill of the nothing.

This has become one of my favorite paradoxes.

(Short story rough draft Thursday... Sunday at the absolute latest)