Fair, unfair

I spent an hour
Today, blessed by 
A girl (or more accurately,
A woman)
Who made my everyday reprise
Of wantonness, and of regret
A breeze 

That blew adrift
The seed that carries change
And that should turn the rare, rare flower
Into reality
That then stopped
The tiresome, selfish monotony
Of "Everything is wrong;"
And, "How could this be?"

She paused me -- gently
And severely,
With a spirit pure, and young
Beyond her years -- reminded
Me that fair and unfair
Are just words;
Not how things are.

A miracle
Which jostles you
Out of your older, time-worn ways
Into the liberation
Of the concept that
The world does not revolve
Around a guilt-inspired system
Of entitlement
And of peremptory penance.

We are led, too young, to believe
That life unfolds a certain
Way that has to do
With meritocracy
And with an elusive, karmic light
Surrounding everything we do
And everything we say,
And if we "work real hard,"
And "do the true, right thing,"
We will be sure to reap
Rewards incalculably.

But this is wrong.

You see, the key to
Living your life happily
Or even getting close
To that is not to base your worth
Upon the "right" and "wrong"
Or "fair;" unfair, it's just a tie
That binds you to
The version of a life that bleeds
While who you are
Sits patiently
Awaiting your consent
And your consignment.

Life -- it IS. It's simple.
Trust me; when you spend a single
Second giving in to what they say
You should be, you 
Have wasted all the beauty
Of what IS. Without regret,
Without the motivation
Of the guilt, the pain, the recompense
You have been told, since birth, you will deserve,
Your life, it happens!

While you try to force it
To make sense.

In our periphery

A wisp, a wary
Weave in but far more away
From the transient sparkle
Of the dance;
The weary and gifted glance 
Into a life
That is not ours.

You say life is complicated.
I say life is simple
But circumstance
Circumscribes and circles
Me, always;
Such is my lot.

In life, we have moments.
Quick, shocking,
Unexpected,
Beautiful
And awe-ful, terrifying
Trysts of what we want
And what deceive
Us,
Glittering in front,
Behind
And in our periphery.

But most importantly,
There are moments
We feel the awe that is with us. And just
For a moment,
We just
Let it be. When we
Forget all else, we are

Alive. May we
Be so unthinking
As long as we can be for
There is, just, nothing else.

Down wind

And what is this?
It gives, it gets
Off. On.
What gives?

Is this
All there is?
Or is the more buried
Deep,
Hidden in the depth
Of the danger
Of the black
Of the shit?

Smelled like safe to me.
Then again,
My nose is too quick
To ever trust 
What that must be like.

I swim
Barely in, almost down.
Wind.
Blowing fast
On flames that feed
Off the many dreams
I used to, foolish,
Feed them with.
 

No good fight

The "good" fight
Is never good while you're fighting
Because there should be no fight.

But we risk wasting life on
Should-be's 
And being sucked in
To arguing over what's right
When it's simply not an argument.

It simply is.
Right?

A sliding scale,
A moment defeated,
But "defeated" is, too,
Just a word,
And words are supposedly
What set us apart.

Truer words have never been spoken
As true, true words will never be spoken
As they tear us apart.
 
And so we must fight
For the right to be good
In a world where right is spoken
Into being,
And true good is being and not spoken.

While being happens,
Everybody else
Argues it away.

Off with the show

You'd think I'd be daunted 
By now
By the things that
Gather behind stage-right curtain,
Waiting, with impeccable comedic timing,
To pounce and make
The audience laugh
And the protagonist cringe
But one must carry on
With the show;
Especially when there is no show.

The show comes to be
When people watch
Sans empathy
And conjecture
And think they know what is going on
Within the object of their
Voyeuristic gaze,
Which is great and all
But if you think about it
(Think? I don't have time for that...)
The show is, as since 
The days of the Colosseum,
A purely sadistic thing.

And so unwitting, some who are just being
Become the subject of some
Grand entertainment scheme.

Change as you must, yes. Life
Requires it.
But when it comes down to it,
I am a certain thing
Who does not bend beneath the sweet refrain
Of guilt and duty and parlay
When it requires
Untruth, vengeance, revenge, fear, a fleeting or enduring grudge,
Or worse:
The fickle, responsive flavor of the day.

Ace it

Run straight, keep pace, keep time
Until you can't breathe, but
Keep it up, leap it up, anyway.

There are promises to keep
And tribes to bolster
And chaoses to hold from the brink
Of destruction
And there are things to do
And, far more than you,
There are those who have dealt with 
Much, much worse.

It's not like you hadn't expected this
To fall apart in your face, anyway.
 
But what you hadn't expected was
The falling apart to face you with
A slew of people who
Hold you
Upright
And a calming hand 
To whisk a bit of the burden 
Off your tired back. 

So today stop whining.
So you fell apart. So what? Keep trying 
And reverse the curse by
Wording it your way.

And laugh at the comic nature
Of life that is
A comedy of errors
And of impressive triumphs.

Ace the test, now.
Face it strong,
And ace it.

Penny-times-twenty

I'd give a penny (times twenty;

I'm poor, you know) for every time

I could open up my head and heart

And put you there so you could see 

Every time I think of you, or see you,

Or witness you in your

Endless, beautiful action;

Or just you, quiet, unmoving

(Which is rare) without your

Arsenal of self-assuring practices

You ensconce and you bulwark

Yourself with, even though

You are so more-than-perfect,

And daresay more-so, perfect,

Just the way you are:

The way you wear your heart

Inside the tiny creases of your brow, as you

Carry those around you on a back

That yes, is broad, but tired, and

No one sees that, and you try to reason with

Yourself that you

Prefer it that way.

The way your voice grows softer,

Almost-growling when you try to

Let your defense down, but still

Are scared and trying to deny the fact

That you have needs and

Wants that you have finally

Attempted to accept; if not

For my sake.

The way you could be one who drives the

Biggest, most expensive car

And wear the best, expensive clothes

And talk the highest, haughty talk

(As you have the right to!)

Walk the least-besoiling walk

Above the people you’ve committed to

Like those who put you there
So horribly do;

But there you are, chin-deep in grease

And running breathlessly and grinning

With your tray of service, honesty,

Betraying who you are.

The way you stop.

Lie down amongst the strangest places:

On the very floor where those you serve 

Have sprung from. 

Or the way you look
When you place fingers to face
And close your eyes,
And are,
Thinking no one is looking.

Or, the way you come through for me

The way I need

Each time

Each way
Each unexpected moment
Of each day,
Infusing life back into me

Beyond what I possibly could have

Envisioned for myself by far.

Pain anticipated

Pain unexpected is preferable.
There's the quick knock in the head
That throws you down, the rush,
The Rushing over, the mind's
Delirious time catching up with what's real,
The picking yourself up after
What is by sheer nature
Blurry and apart.

Pain anticipated is a slow half-life.
There's the dizzying noise of the countdown
Testing you each moment
Over and over as you briefly forget --
A-part from you --
If only to rinse your mouth 
For a moment of the acrid taste
Of fear you can't embrace
Because you're too strong for this.

"Suck it up." 
Sure. I can do it. Screw it.

And then you remember what's coming
At you headlong
In blinding haste-come-frozen-time
Like an undodgeable, watchable bullet
That ticks maddeningly toward you
With your name engraved in it
In red diamond flourish.

You try to convince yourself
That you can look away,
But the vanity and the glimmer
Bring you interminably back
To the engagement-gone-wrong thrust upon your finger
That points toward the pain.

All the way over

You're all the way over there,
And I'm all the way over
Everything.

Unfortunate, since
We could have been under each other,
Alternately, 
Everywhere.

But nothing's fair
In love
And politics.

To de-scribe

Words are just a thing
We do to create a world
That garners a bit more sense
Than what we would 
Have been gifted in a day
Deemed normal by others
But others lose the sense of what 
Is normal, what is
Worth fighting for
Or worth wording
And most don't have words 
Or sense to be in a position
To describe things adequately
Anyway
And so
I forge on
With words, that fail, and I
Am both confounded by and
Thankful for
The inability to describe
The persistent absurdity that is my life
When what I do is scribe
And de-scribe things
For a living,
Fighting always for 
That living, and become
The rock
For those too afraid
Or too underpaid (as I).
Thank you (or whomever I need to be thankful to)
For the opportunity
To be all that you'd hope I wasn't,
And to write it, word for word,
When you fight so hard
To deny it.
You
Make me thankful
For who I am.

Close to clarity

A light entered her one morning
Unexpected, almost as
She accepted what she couldn't plan,
And blurred the line between her dreams
And blurred the line inside her soul,
And simply blurred the line.

And then it went away.

But floating through the day, the memory of that light 
Carried her and fed her and she fed 
Herself into the early night
And dropped into a long, deep sleep;
Awoke to find the self-same light
Was there, beating
Through her veins
And through her mind
And through her soul
And all the blur turned to
Something close to
Clarity.