Halfway There

My heart is cracked and broken

with every passing year.

The months are dissappearing

and most memories are unclear.

The people that I loved and lost

in time are slipping by.

The spirits floating in my past

are echoed in my cry.

I wish that I could turn back

and relive those faded days,

but life is just a brief respite

before it slips away.

I miss my friends and family,

those gone and those still here.

To waste a single moment

is my solitary fear.

The child that I used to be

is still beating in my heart.

I wish that I could let him out

and have a brand new start.

But dreams are just like memories

and wispy strands of thread.

The only thing thats left for me

is to live until I'm dead.

Our lives are prized possessions

and our love is what we share.

It's not the final destination

but the roads we take to there.

All I Want

All I want

is a little bit of exhalation,

a little slow and with anticipation,

a little give and take

goes a long,

long,

long

way.

All I want

is a moment

that is trapped,

frozen

in time.

It is all that I ask for.

All I want

is a moment and a memory,

and eternity

can last

for a moment,

and forever

can be a day.

I want peace.

I want blue skies,

I want repose,

I want the storm to be calmed

and the world to be new.

What do you want?

Age of Awakenings

These are questions that matter,

all these and more,

flashing before me with crystal clarity,

and the power of timeless beliefs.

Who am I?

Where do I come from?

Where am I going?

What will I leave behind?

Legacies and truths are there to behold.

Reality is mine to recognize.

I can either decay or augment,

accent and enhance.

My vision is crystalline with silence.

I focus on everything new

and choose to add to the body of knowledge

in this Age of Awakenings.

Shuffled

When you see me

what do you see,

what you wish me to be?

I am as I was

and I will

what I am,

knowing that

I haven't changed.

Aspects

have been rearranged.

Growing mad

I climb the ladder

and step past

the final rung.

I fall down fast

to the bottom

of myself

to see what I can find

in the shuffled pieces

of my mind.

I see puddles of people

melting into nothing.

What was once human

is now

a pool of tears.

It's drowning

in itself

and their endless sorrows,

sacrificing youth

for a lifetime of fears.

Picking up

the pieces

of my broken dreams

I can't seem

to make them fit.

So I toss them aside

and hope

for the best

and climb

out of the pit.

The Light Outside

Like language

without the command

some things

are not meant to be,

some people

are not meant to see:

The light outside is

the vengeance of unrealized

potential.

The crimes we commit are

the dreams that were left

unfulfilled.

The pain that we feel is

the lacking of something

inside.

The loss and the guilt are

the echoes of what

we can't reach!

Answers have no insight.

They cannot

understand the questions.

There is no reason why,

we must live

until we die...

King for a Day

Words of wisdom from the graves of kings:

wealth and power mean nothing

when you are six feet under.

Make me King for a Day

and I will proclaim myself a god.

You have been dying

ever since the day that you were born.

And I will live beyond you, until the end of Time,

never reaching the promise of Eternal Life,

having found it already.

Creases

Gravel voiced and losing sense,

I'm falling from my memories.

I take this trip upon my back.

My weight is doubled, I'm on my knees.

I try to deal with how I feel,

my eyes are blurred by broken lashes.

The whip she cracks in her defense,

it smacks me back until she crashes.

My shattered sense can't get it straight,

it tries to pick up bits and pieces.

When the cracks begin to break

she folds me back in little creases.

Madness is drawn in a moebius strip,

the lines on my face mark this neverending trip.

I can't escape it's tenacious grip,

my mind has slipped again.

Fifteen minutes from my nervous breakdown,

with fear I fall, I'm fading fast,

I'm just this far from flipping out,

my sanity doesn't seem to last.

September 9, 2002 Goodbye

"Goodbye" is never an easy word.

Sometimes it is necessary, but it is always painful. It needs to be said on occasion. The past is forever a part of me. For all human beings, it defines who we are. Our time is limited in this world, and the choices we made yesterday, and the people we encountered, befriended, and loved, all led to who we are at this very moment. Right now this seems very obvious to me, but it isn't something that I am always consciously aware of, even though the truth of it remains buried deep inside of me.

My memories are vivid; it has always been this way because I am a visually oriented person. I rarely forget anything that happens to me. That is why art plays such a vital role in my life.

It gets worse as I get older. Sometimes I will remember an event from my childhood frozen in time, other times a long-lost friend, a well-liked teacher, or an ex-girlfriend. This happens to me at odd times, like when I am driving, or as I lay in bed trying to sleep. Some are painful memories, others are pleasant, and they are all a part of my spirit. They have all led me to where I am now.

But to get on with your life you have to let go of the past and forge new trails. You have to learn to make new mistakes, instead of reinventing the same old ones.

There are some who will remain a part of my life until the day I die, because somehow they keep ending up in the orbit of my life, and there are others who I have to make an effort to keep in touch with, but sometimes that is an unwise choice. Most of the time, when you have to make an effort, it is because you are finding difficulty uttering that word: goodbye....

And of course my family will always be of the utmost importance to me. Maybe I will be lucky enough to start my own someday.

Sometimes you can love someone very much and be forced to say goodbye because it just didn't work out. Sometimes they say goodbye to you. It was nobody's fault, even though you want to cast blame when there really is none. Nobody wants to look in the mirror and see their own faults gazing back at them. Sometimes you have to say goodbye to an opportunity, or to a person that you wanted to know, but the realities of time and circumstance prevented it. Other times you have to say goodbye as someone dies or moves away or moves on with their life, and that is the hardest thing to do. And sometimes you have to say goodbye because it is a wise and healthy decision. Some people are bad news.

We get caught up in routine because we like familiarity. We like the fact that any Wal-Mart or McDonalds we walk into is reasonably identical in any part of the world. We don't like change even when it is good for us because we are creatures of habit. We don't like people who are "weird" or "different." But life cannot be fit into a shoe box and placed on a shelf with its label sticking out. Life is unpredictable. People are unpredictable. Things are always there to surprise us, terrify us, make us think, make us learn, and make us dumb.

I didn't like change when I was younger. I wanted everything to stay the same forever. I wanted to live in my cocoon. I wanted my friends to always be here, I never wanted to grow older, and I never wanted to break up with women that I actually cared about. I never wanted to see people die, and I never wanted to lose my youthful optimism and idealism. I never wanted to know that there were evil people in the world.

I never wanted to be a cynic.

I only wanted to see the good in others. Unfortunately when you always look through rose-colored glasses it obscures your view and you end up getting burned. But I refuse to become selfish, stupid, and intolerant.

Now I embrace change, if only because, ultimately, I cannot prevent it.

Now I accept the past, but I must let it slip into my subconscious, and I must discover new avenues of thought and expression, new ideals to believe in, and new things to discover. Maybe I can learn new tricks.

I have to let go of the past.

"Goodbye."

The Sketchpad

The mind's eye is quicker than the hand.

The thousand word pictures swimming in my head

are distilled into sketches,

watered down on the page.

Drawing is

responsibility, measured

by imagining and imaging.

Limitless

are the possibilities,

infinite on the page,

testing my will.

I am

attempting to capture the wind

by permitting others

to see

what is on the page.

Culling is

drawing out

what's overwhelming my brain.

Neverchanging

Following

is wallowing

in another's past glories.

Fools don't make rules;

they follow tradition

into perdition's flames

as a trendsetter's fame endures,

becoming

a tradition in itself.

So Fantastic an Image

My mind is as lost

as the words

that I cannot find

to describe what I see

within my mind.

(I'm viewing a world that I never viewed.)

(I'm looking through spectacles at spectacles through spectacles.)

What I see

can hardly be expressed,

for words seldom have

the grandeur that is possessed

by the Imagination.

Yet I search for the words...

My mind is as lost

as the words

that I cannot find

to describe what I see

within my mind.

What I see

can only be seen

by me...