Partake of Partnership?

Separate avenues

paved and rough cut

uncut footage found

you on the trail

and on the dusty path

I found you sitting there

along the stairs

would loneliness prevail

reveal the truths of what

I've hidden there

our lives intertwined

though distance kept

our simple lives behind

rewind to bitter times

on the fast track to

a better life

and you could not understand

that the path I take

Is no longer on demand

you reprimand

me for that which I cannot change

for separate chances take

a turn of paths

and my rough road is set

our time along the road is met

on all sides with troubles

we are beset

so take the high road with me

if you'd like to see the view

but know this: we are both askew

from what a lovers life should stew

my pot is empty, yours is brewing

overflowing with love true

I'm a ticking clock

chains overwrought

with weighs I cant undo

but we gave our love a shot

buck shot scattered over you

backfired and desired

more than I could ever do

my perception filters down to

my self image underdone

uncooked ego under wrung

and each ladder rung is

grease coated and lose

so then we come to THIS

our original path

full circle we've come

and it has come to THIS

should we travel together

or continue on alone?

Its more than chance

that we met along the roads

undisclosed were our destinations

hidden arrival times

and reasons to live on

but every step we took

it lead us closer still

to the one closest together

to the place where our dreams

would be fulfilled

I cannot predict the future

barely can I remember the past

so should we walk together?

No longer lovers

but still with hands clasped?

I am a bitter stranger

pill hard to swallow

but sweet upon the tongue

you are a lonely lady

needing comfort

BUT require time in the sun

and my path is shrouded

from the light that you would need

to prosper makes me perspire

and I simply cannot take the lead

so make the call or flip a coin

take the reigns or leave it up to

by chance we meet one day

it will be as friends

unpainted by rose glasses hue

So we meet again, three am...

aiming low and hitting
emptiness and grief
my belief is that this time
underhanded deeds will release
the reasons why I took so long
to fly my flag high and render
the tender replies
I owe nothing to the world
it responds in kind
and it doesn't really matter
if nothing really matters
if matter isn't substance and
each moment shatters
splatter my face on the edge of a coin
see which side lands upright
uptight deployed
exploiting my good nature
is a matter of choice
though each prospective partner
gives voice to this point
shun my daylight time walks
shower only in summer
encounters start to flounder
as I'm buried under

Recollections of Sleepovers Past

I lay on the inflatable mattress, eyes pointing toward the ceiling but not seeing it, focused on the conversation that took place between us.

We talked about our youths, mostly "guy stuff", mostly to pass the time.  It had been a long day and we were moments away from turning off the light for good and sleeping.  Something was familiar about this moment, something intimately real about the way we both lay there talking after a day of hanging out and goofing around.  It was just as it had been when I was a child staying over at a friends house, only he was nearly forty, and I was closing in on thirty.  We weren't children, not by any stretch, but our FRIENDSHIP was.  Suspended in animation by his youthful sensibilities and our mutual lack of responsibility, and in that moment it was real.  I was twelve again, before the fall of my innocence, before touching all the mature things that would spoil me.

Then the lights were out, and I was left alone in darkness, the only remnant of my companion the steady breathing that would soon turn to deep guttural snores.

In that moment I, too, remembered how it was in this moment in my distant past.  I had ALWAYS had trouble sleeping.  If I were twelve again I would have waited a half hour or so then asked him if he were still awake, if he wanted to talk some more, wanted to play.  The day would be wasted, but I wasn't done with it, wasn't ready to let go of all the fun I was having.  For when the morning comes, I'd be off to my home again, off to the grim reality of living in poverty and having no connections with those I called family.  Only now, in the present, in the NOW I had no family to return to.  I had a cat, a friendly one,  but a cat all the same.  And though she needed me in the way family needs each other, she couldn't respond in kind with soothing words and gentle handling of my issues.  My family was gone.

Not in the sense that they had passed on, but that I had passed on from them.  The connection we once bore was gone forever.  And there WAS a connection, though in my flights of fantasy I saw myself as the black sheep among black sheep.  They were so close, most within the city limits, yet I couldn't find the will to make that connection again.  At family events they  made me nervous somehow, as if surrounded by a pack of wild dogs that could strike out at any moment if provoked.  They had given me reason to feel this way, yet the feeling was still, in its heart, unreasonable.  Even when they reached out a kind hand, I looked on at it with suspicion.

No amount of time would heal those wounds.  I was truly and finally alone...

Clockwork Heart

Time... It clicks forward at a rate constant yet intangible, ethereal yet all too real.  I feel myself aging, my body working a little less like it should, my face carrying more and more of the weight of living, and each day I inch closer and closer to my next milestone.

Twenty nine in less than two months, then a  year to to thirty.  THIRTY, that all important age when you are no longer TWENTY, when you can't call yourself TWENTY anymore, when your age finally starts catching up with you.  NOTHING good can come of being thirty.

Sometimes the reality of life rears its ugly head and I know that it is fleeting and nigh pointless.  I think of the span of time it took to get from my childhood to my teens, and from there to here, and its most definitely speeding up.  Like a foot grown heavy on life's accelerator, I'm heading for a cliff I cannot avoid.  What comes after thirty? My THIRTIES when most adults have there heyday, and when for me it will be "all is just the same".  But not young, no longer youthful or energetic or full of LIFE.  I'm inching closer to death.

Were it possible to suspend the aging process and live forever I would, even if it meant living in the relative squalor I currently occupy.  I'd be the immortal cripple if it meant not having to face death.  That's the truth of it, I fear dying, and what, if anything, comes after.  Part of me screams that this is it, that when we pass we blink out of existence and go back to the forgotten darkness of before we were born.  I know I wont care, because I wont BE, but that is cold comfort.

There is so much of life that I enjoy, or have yet to experience, and I'm wasting what little time I have.  I'm burning my brief period in the light on stress and anxiety and depression and each moment gone is one I can't ever get back, but I can't stop.  Anxiety has a purpose, or so my therapist says, to mask other feelings (his theory, not mine).  Am I really that choked with anger that I need to stress life that much?  I don't know, but it doesn't seem right.  But, life goes on, and its all good...

IT'S GO TIME

So this is my white boy version of REAL TIME...

She waited till I was drunk to lay it out for me, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth...

So help you god?

I'm angry, all the time, and it burns inside me like hot irons in my soul.  I think hateful thoughts about people on a near constant basis, I fantasize about hurting people, and none of this is even remotely ok.  My anger has been building up since I was four years old, from those early transgressions that I didn't, no, COULDN'T protest.

And she saw through me like a pane of glass in a porn shop display case.

I'm displacing the blame for everything that's my fault, every fault of mine that I delay fixing, because I can always say...

"It wasn't me...  It's not my fault... THEY did this to me..."

And its not even remotely ok...

She took me from three sheets to the wind to dead sober just by bee-lining towards truths I hadn't even considered, yet in my heart knew to be true.

I'm in a cage, and its made of my anxiety and suppressed rage.  One feeds the other, the right hand washes the left, and it keeps going on in a circle without end.

I'm not ok, my situation isn't ok, and I'm doing nothing to fix it because its oddly comfortable to be this paralyzed, because the alternative is facing the truth.

"Talk to Jim..."

...her only answer to the simplest of questions, how do I fix it?  How to I rewrite a lifetime of programming from both internal and external sources?

Its not so easy, I don't know the answers, and she can't give them, because i rely too heavily on her and others to "fix me", when they most certainly can't.

They can't even understand me, for the most part, because so much of what I feel is hidden under layers that I THOUGHT were impenetrable.

"No one can tell, EVER..."

But they can, if its obvious to her its obvious to others.  I'm a wreck, a nervous hateful wreck and its not going away overnight.

And I can't expect her to fix me, even if she can so quickly an eloquently point it out in a moment of my weakness.  I'm on my own, but I don't have to be, I need outside sources, outside people to befriend or even simply associate with.  I need activities, responsibilities, and things to call my own.

And she can't fix me, maybe she never could, maybe I've been looking for solutions to problems only I  have the answers to.

Maybe she'll read this, and maybe she'll post a comment, something quick and witty and sharp to the point.

And maybe I don't need her to, maybe I need to find my own voice, my own identity, my own song...

I need to find myself, and only then will I be ok...

AC/DC And Kittens

"its a loooong way"

...sings ac/dc on Pandora, the best way to listen to hair metal is by happy accident on a music streaming program.

"to the top if you wanna"

... they blare out, I lean forward on the over-arched curve of my back and give my cat a little kiss on the nose,
"It IS a long way Mojo, a long way to the top..."

"ROCK AND ROLL!"

...they finish there train of though, and I keep listening but in a distracted manner.  Those lyrics are the ones that keep repeating in my head, as if on a loop, and the rest don't really seem to matter much.  A long way to the top, of course, but mostly if you are in the mind of rocking and rolling.  The platitudes I give to my cat are just a way of forcing my issues on her, I tell her "I know Mojo, I know..." as if she were just issuing out a sigh and expressing her disdain for all the troubles life is presenting her with.

"I know what its like to be a kitty, little Mojo..."

...which of course I don't, she doesn't seem to mind what I say, as long as I use "the voice"... The voice is a combination of love and soft tones that makes her happy, all she needs from me is a generous petting, a steady supply of food and clean litter, and of course the voice.

Its simple being a cat, you accept love, you demand attention, and you sleep... so much glorious restful sleep, so often that it dominates your schedule for the day.  What are you doing today? You're going to SLEEP for at least seventy five percent of it, and when you aren't sleeping they'll be a soft lap to sit on and someone to use the voice on you so that you can sleep some more.

I know what its like to be a kitty, I can describe it after many years of observation, but I'm not a kitty.  I'm a grown ass man with responsibilities and people counting on me to be my best, even when I'm not.

"It's a long way to the top, little Mojo, if you wanna rock and roll..."

Pretty Things

Someone told me how to live my life without saying a single meaningful word.  I learned by example and, though it took years, I picked up on all the subtle nuances of a lifestyle of simple decadence.  Oxymoron to some, but everything to me.  When I need to feel better I act silly, the more absurd the better, and it helps.  When I need to feel a connection I have that person on hand at almost any time.  Though it hurts inside to be cut off from what most consider normal, I keep on going, because it isn't the job that makes the man, nor the social circle.  I keep going because at any time I can escape within a world of endless adventure, and its because of her.

It seems simple enough that when she hurts, that I follow suite.

I look at this person, this icon of my very well-being, and when she is laid low by the tragedies of life, I do my best to help her.  I give her the advice I'd like to hear, because our situations are oddly mirrored.  And when it doesn't seem to help I question the validity of my life, but only briefly.

It took ten years to be my own man.  I let myself be guided by family and friends and loved ones and gurus and psychologists and none of them could put it as simply as she did.  But I am myself now.  Ten years to be born, and now the roles seem reversed.  I am trying to be there for a person who I thought had all the answers, a voice of reason that never faltered, and never let me down.  And it makes sense that things should come like this, full circle, when I am finally and fully self-actualized.  I have an identity, a purpose, a reason to wake up even if its just to spite those who said I couldn't.  Each day is a struggle, but that's life, and my life has its rewards.  I don't have to drudge away working jobs I despise or pretending to like people who aren't worthy of my love.  I am free in that way.

Simple pleasures, silly diatribes, names for every occasion.  I thought it was the heroes of books and film that led me to myself, but it wasn't.  In the end it was me, mirrored in everyone I sought guidance from.  I am my own savior, my own father, my own brother and friend.

One day it will all be better, and if its not I'll keep trying, because sometimes life is pretty, and that makes it worth it.