Poem | Outside, Looking In

There is this dialect in the language of love

That I hear and see others use

Which seems forever unknown to me.

Though I don't need subtitles to understand it

I need experience to comprehend it.

Photo by Naitian（Tony） Wang on Unsplash

Poem | Under a Sheet

When I die

They will come for me

Carry me out under a sheet and

Wonder what to do with

My cats

My random notebooks full of words

That mean something only to me

My piles of towels and steel dinnerware

The plaid shirts and floral bowties

The ankle braces and walking canes

The daily medications and soymilk packets

The puzzle books and Kindle.

They won’t know what to do with

The memories that hover in each room

And on the balconies and terrace

In the bath and on the stairs

The endearments for each cat

The introspections on identity and desire

The monological battles fought in bed

On the couch and in the chairs

When the neighborhood slept or sped by in loud cars

The moments of desolation and joy

Of despair and wonder

Debates over loneliness or solitude

Over worth and privilege

Over rights and change

The poems that never heard words

The art that never saw color

The stages that never saw performances.

They won’t know what to do with these

Because they won’t see any of it

They carried all that out

Under a sheet

While they muttered about the weight

And wondered who to call

Checked their phones and their lists

For whom else they must pick up

Before they can say

They earned a tea break.

Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash

 

 

 

Things I Say

• When you frequently experience ambiguity and uncertainty, you can either spend a lot of time saying "Goodbye" and "I'll miss that" or a lot of time saying "Hello" and "What can I learn from this?"
• That we can go from happy and smiling to sad and hopeless in a blink of an eye is one of the great burdens and miracles of being human.
• One of the tropes I struggle to accept is the one says heroes have to die. Heroes don't need to die to be heroes. The few people in my life I call heroes are heroes because they genuinely change our lives by being alive in a world that increasingly makes it easier to not care.
• Cities like when it rains. It reminds them of when they were forests.
• Every day we're alive is a fight and a celebration, a piece of the past and a piece of the future.
• We are all a little bit of a lot of time.
• I live my life with the intent to be part kid, part adult. The kid keeps me from growing old. The adult keeps me from dying young.
• Life is hell for us rare long-range thinkers and big picture viewers. We see the future and we have no hope, while others see the present and think they have time, but they don't.
• Everything that happens in our lives has the potential to confine us, define us or refine us.
• Only a handful of us gain notoriety. The rest of us toil in mediocrity. 
• You may be surrounded by allies, advocates, and answers...you just need to trust, stand up and ask. 
• I had no choice" often really means "I didn't like the choices I had. 
• I feel like a battered flag at the mercy of the wind, the wars and the weary mile. 
• Reality is the hardest thing for people to accept. 
• The only thing you'll always be right about is that someone somewhere will always think you're wrong. 
• I'm spending a lifetime moving from "I have to be enough" to "I am enough." 
• Parents, teach your children that it's ok to love themselves. It may seem like something you shouldn't have to do. But trust me: On some future date, at 3 in the morning, it's going to be the most important thing they never learned. 
• You can learn more about yourself in the silence of solitude than in the words of the crowd.
• Sometimes the soil of our hearts must be broken to let new seeds of love grow.
• When the trouble began is when humans thought they could put their own lights in the sky and forget about the stars that used to humble them.
• Music with words may speak to my heart; music without words let's my heart speak to me.
• Sometimes it takes a lifetime of repeated events to make a memory; sometimes it takes just one moment.
• Though the world lays heavily on me, I find at the end of the day that I rest only lightly on it.

Introspection: Here at the end of things (25 May 2020)

Dear World:

You should have welcomed creativity over common, innovation over scale, critical thinking over revenue. You shouldn't have smothered the quiet thoughtful ones with your bombastic overblowing. You shouldn't have sacrificed brilliant minds and sensitive hearts for profit and compartmentalized anti-realities.

Now here, at the end of things, you are too many, those who could have saved us, too few.

You should have known better. You could have done better.

https://pixabay.com/photos/lost-places-rooms-abandoned-2096316/ by Michael Gaida

Introspection on 24 May 2020

People have no idea what a loss of freedom looks like if they think it's equal to needing to wear a medical mask in public. That's just ignorance. US history...world history...hell, today's headlines...are rife with true, lived examples of losses of freedom.

I wonder what the admittedly white and male founders of the US would think if they knew that 240+ years from now, people would think they were standing for freedom and justice by coughing and spitting on people and refusing to wear a 17.5 X 9.5 cm piece of cloth in public.

If you stand (16 May 2020)

If you stand for what's correct,
I'll always rally to your cause,
While others suffer bystander effect
With their bleary lil brains on pause.

Opinion: Don't say Love is Color Blind

My opinion:

Love *does* see color, love should see color, love sees color and loves even brighter, harder, deeper, and stronger. Because color is beautiful and color is a part of beautiful people.

So please don't say love is color blind or love sees no color.

That's not love.

Personal Introspection: 11 April 2020

You wake up one day and find you're lost
in a sea of obscurity.

But these are waters you now realize
You've always been treading.

Gain notoriety or toil in mediocrity
We're all statistics, either way.