,;:l

Epic waste of time.


It's not that I don't want you to breathe.
It's that you think I'm an epic waste of time.
And every single breath you breathe
fuels your facade. The air is ammunition
as you fire cliches at strangers in the room.

But you won't fool me, not this time.
I see through the fake smiles that you do.
The things you say only work tonight.
They don't apply to tomorrow and you're
as fake from five feet as you are from ten.

But sure, I'd love to dance with you.
Let's move in motions lacking meaning
amidst the flashing lights and pumping sound.
We'll talk about that time you can't remember
And how you woke up on the floor.

I'll laugh and talk about your victory.
How you don't have to suffer remembering
the person you're pretending to be.
I'll wonder where you come from in your life
And you'll seize me with your hips and lips.

I'll want to take you to a coffee shop to see
If you see the world as a tumultuous whole.
You'll invite me to "go out" to the bars.
I'll sweep away my work and friends
And dance the night the same with you.

And at these bars, I'll buy you your drinks.
You'll pass out by 2 and I'll drop you off.
I'll go home with a fleeting satisfaction,
But I'll wake up again like I always do
knowing that the epic waste of time is you

The fight for what's right

Do I compromise the fight for what's right to right a couple wrongs?

I'm wearing a muzzle on the internet where I might otherwise express everything I truly believe - what is right.

But I can't.

I will represent it all with jumbled letters, though.

Idnbgje k ein thet lisjdkjf oa sfo amriajguana beocuehd it aslkjs lidkljldjs;oi aishdjweliis idjp9wklje alksnlitjpoaysh yej osduifn hasi sjhidj.

I hope that you can glean something from that.

poetry? no thanks. this will do

I walked down King Street at 2 am
Hoping to find you again,
But instead I found a gentle man.

He held a violence in his hand,
A silent violence, you understand.
He breathed it in to spout it out
Into the air he never cared about.

His potential had been all used up and his dreams remained corrupt
From a youth that never struck the luck he’d hoped to find.
Now he’s living off forgotten dimes that lie in wait,
Dropped by college drunks who couldn’t stop
To bend half-way down for a tiny piece of Roosevelt
Who spent his later life wishing he could bend at all.

The gentle man had called me over
I wasn’t drunk, but I wasn’t sober.
I had the urge to pass him by,
But there was something in his indifferent eyes,
Lacking any sense of desperation,
Or any half-tried emulation.
He seemed as ready to live
As he did to die.

What had separated he and I?
He told me I carried far more lies.
So I gave him five more of those lies to cling onto.
I gave him the printed, green tinted face of Abraham Lincoln
Then i moved through the night and kept on thinkin'
of you.

Yoga doesn't cut it

You have no idea who you are.

You think that you've had time to dissect all the layers of who you are. You believe you've peeled them back, assessed your faults and your tendencies. You seem to see yourself in a new light as if you've reached some realization - some tangible idea that you've concocted that has no holes. You know who you are. You just know. You're sure of it.

Guess what? You're wrong. You don't.

Every layer you peeled back was a figment of your strange imagination. Every perception you have of yourself is merely a false prediction. Language is limiting and defining yourself can only limit you. You lack any perspective on who you present yourself to be and your analytic abilities could never begin to assess the intricacies of your intentions and your makeup. You lack an outsider's perspective of yourself and the person you present yourself to be is but a fragment of what others see you to be. Your wants and needs are justified by the flimsiest principles and rules invented on a whim and enforced as if engraved in ancient stone tablets. Principles are just guidelines for the least offensive actions - rarely grounded in anything but the concern of judgment - including your own. The inner peace that you preach about comes from the hour of yoga that you do on Tuesdays and Thursdays and is no real reflection of what's going on in your mind.

You convince yourself in such a way that your actions could not have happened any other way. You claim to have weighed the so-called "pros and cons" and objectively decided upon a course of action. You plan to stick to that course of action and you go so far as to say it's part of who you are.

But it's not. You're nothing like who you think you are.

The sooner that you admit that, the sooner the chains that tie your hands and feet so close together will fall. The sooner you embrace intricacy and accept inevitable defeat in your search for self, the sooner you'll discover pieces of who you might actually be. But you'll never really know. And you don't have to.

Just live. You'll pleasantly surprise yourself each day. Free yourself from pseudo-discovery and embark on a path to true discovery.

Or not.

the roads we travel on

Dried twigs are lying on dead grass
In a hundred thousand fields
In a hundred countries cause
There's no water and no food.
No way to quell a young stomach's swell.

Lawn sprinklers whip around
In a thousand different towns,
Coating green grasses with clean
Water that rolls down the blades
To imported soil lain beneath.

A million teenage girls are frantic,
Screaming in the bathroom mirror
While tribal enemies take aim-
Shout and shoot and scream
At frantic women and children.

Men in suits are shouting out

To buy or sell the latest stocks,

While homeless children bear

Blaring winters without socks,

Without shoes, with little food.

Plastic gnomes watch over yards
And pugs patrol inside homes
While a million Indonesians scramble
To escape a tidal wave that washed

Away all they've ever owned.

I type lines of poetry on my computer
And realize its thousand dollar price
Could feed a village while
A billion people fear to speak

Or laugh or hope or dream

Of a life free of struggle, free of strife.

The New York Yankees

I have dedicated so much of my life, so much of my time, every year since I can remember to watching the New York Yankees play a little game called baseball.

Early on I was rewarded - it seemed like every year, my team won the World Series. 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, almost in 2001, and again almost in 2003.

Did I give up after the heartbreaks in 2001 and 2003? No. People called me a fair weather fan, but I showed them differently. I stayed dedicated. I kept watching. I gave so much of myself. Invested emotional. I even came close to physical fighting with people over the results.

Last year, my Yankees didn't make the playoffs.

This year, we won the World Series. I gave this season everything - and it paid off.

I love you, New York Yankees. You've given me so much and you're giving me so much again.

2009 WS Champions!!!

Haunting on Halloween

I think we're all terribly haunted and distressed by the constant exercise of our minds. For me, it's borne of lacking some concrete, infallible objective toward which I can direct my most basic and most intentioned actions.

And so I hold that all of us struggle with contentment. We wrestle with ourselves on a daily basis for a tranquil ordering of our thoughts. We take comfort in hobbies and in friends. We breathe easily for much of the time, but we're still haunted in those rare moments. Alone in bed before you close your eyes to the world. In that car ride to and from wor

k. During that history paper you care little about. We are haunted and we struggle to eradicate it.

I've come to fear the power of my own mind. It can grasp and break down far too many things. Intricate and seemingly self-explanatory endeavors are called into question by my haunting spectre. Skepticism runs through him rampantly and he demands certainty before he is to commit to anything. Thinking twice before doing something is a foreign concept to me. I think 12 times for each time you're supposed to think once.

Then I fight back and act on impulse. Consequences result. Spectre lets me know I should have listened to him. I fall back in line. Apply this to all matters of simplicity and of multiplicity.

They say that in an argument, there are no winners. They say that nobody wins a fight, both people just lose a differently. I am sympathetic to this view. On Halloween, 2009, I've decided on a separate course of action. Embrace the haunting. It manufactures some of the most basic human beauty. Songs that send chills are often borne of such hauntings. Beautiful pieces of art are often borne of such turmoil. It's tim

e to turn my hauntings into something beautiful. It's time for you to do the same.

I've started dancing with the demons that float around in my head.