le deluge

I've been kicking up a lot of dust lately. Digging around. Delving deep. Wading back into the water. Sinking my hands in and searching. Feeling with blind fingertips. Tumbling my dark earth around, trying to shake out some of that sacred stuff. That rich, Garden of Eden dirt. The real deal. The dirt of history. The dirt of people and places. The dirt of war and disease. The dirt of love and time and healed wounds. My dirt. My dust. My ash. My people, and places. My wars. My plagues. My hope and heart, my scars, and re-set bones.

It is in this search... this journey, that I have discovered something. What I think to be some country of old, is perhaps, a Spain from another life. Or France through the eyes of someone a million miles away and decades in the past. Either road i see will lead me to the same place so I step forward. I take it in. I explore. Each scent massages it's way into the dark alleys of my mind. Each eyeful cascades over and blankets me in the feathery down of curious familiarity. Each sound, a siren calling me. Compelling my feet to move. My surroundings show themselves to be brilliantly new, and are yet, somehow, reassuringly ancient in both personage and spirit.

It is filtered through this faded photograph wall of my mind, that I begin to see something more. Something seeping in at the cracks. A light, a breath, a knowing. The filmstrip peels back and burns away. And I seem to have struck gold. Or at the very least, something heavy as gold, something solid. Something that shines as I brush away the mental debris cobwebbing it's way across the surface. The ground around me darkens. Grows soft. Shadows itself across the landscape. A humming in my feet. The rhythm beat of our drum. A pulse. A surge of tide almost overtakes me and yet in it's ebb I feel stronger. I am strong. But something is different. This is strength in a new mask. Strength of the poet, the artist, the musician. Strength of life and of death. The strength of sorrow and of joy. The strength of yesterday, today and tomorrow. The strength of love. Strings of the guitar and the blood of violins. It is a wildness, fierce with beauty. A halo in the depths, it rises with the moon and stirs itself among the stars. A fight to the death, and what's killed brings about a wash of clarity, purpose, determination of will. A haunted yearning, real and purposeful, rises up, begins to sway this soul to and fro. Back and forth. Ebb and flow. It grows and grows, howling it's way through the mountains and rivers and caves and canyons of my being. It begins to well up, threatens to burst through these caged eyes. I cannot contain it. I will not. It is the Duende, and it has fastened a jewel into my crown. A third sight that craves to tell the story of beauty and nature and the heart of all things. Mysteries upon mysteries... and a luxuriously lengthy stretch of road written in my name and set before me.

moved

you raise me up
"when i am down, and oh my soul, so weary,
when troubles come and my heart burdened be
then i am still and wait here in the silence
until you come and sit awhile with me.
you raise me up so i can stand on mountains.
you raise me up to walk on stormy seas.
i am strong when i am on your shoulders.
you raise me up to more than i can be."
-josh groban

my confession
"i have been blind, unwilling
to see the true love you're giving.
i have ignored every blessing.
i'm on my knees confessing
that i feel myself surrender
each time i see your face.
i am staggered by your beauty,
your unassuming grace.
and i feel my heart is turning,
falling into place.
i can't hide,
now hear my confession.

i have been wrong about you.
thought i was strong without you.
for so long nothing could move me.
for so long nothing could change me.
now i feel myself surrender
each time i see your face.
i am captured by your beauty,
your unassuming grace.
and i feel my heart is turning,
falling into place..."
- josh groban

hmmm... time for church?

beaten and unable to beat

how ridiculous
to continue in this vein of self-torture
given just enough to cling to,
just enough to seal it shut
knowing he is a fool for the dreams he has,
and dreaming them still

breaking hearts and breaking bottles
broken words from beautiful mouths
starving ears lapping up the poison
that craving that won't be pacified

so seeing the beauty he owns the pain
over and over and over and over
refusing to learn the lesson
just for the chance... for the chance

perfect men and perfect skin
perfect body, perfect smile
passing over something 'blemished'
refusing love
surrendering fulfillment

everything wanted but somehow not enough,
surely there is another who has it all
the pretty bow and the pretty soul
with perfect teeth and perfect beliefs

it would be too easy... so we make it hard
it would feel too good... so we stand alone
it would be too right... so we make it wrong

so then, a piece for you... and for you, and you
and what is left but something beaten and unable to beat
and nothing. nothing for him, and nothing for anyone.
how many fractures before the glue won't hold?

it's a tired game, played by tired men
who want nothing but to hunt for something
that is right in front of them.

welcome mat

so finally, having solved my writing crises - which involved three things consecutively: 1. absence of the necessary tools, 2. an utter lacking in terms of knowledge and understanding of those super-fantastic artificial brains-in-a-box, and, 3. the itch from the dime sized hole in my soul whose void most recently housed, and regretfully expunged, whatever i had left in the way of patience - i see myself fit to begin this journal. fit. so long as the definition you hold for that word includes at least three of the following: experiencing loss of motivation, disinterest, having a strong desire for sleep, a strong-er desire for yet another gloriously selfish and deliciously self-destructing hit, and lastly, the increasing need to urinate.

i'm a perfect 5. so then, yes, by my standards and yours (hopefully), i am in fact, fit. super-fit. famously so. and in being so super-famously-fit i will attempt to explain in excruciating detail (as is my style) just what it is that makes this boy tick. this boy. me. a server with a heart of gold and a fount of emotions that more often resembles a coop of chickens just off the chopping block. me. a lofty head, jam-packed full of dreams, hopes, and the artistic dust and clutter that's been gathering its troops for the past twenty-nine years - always threatening that fatal attack that will unleash the flood and take back those lost countries of song lyrics and painted realities, those cities of hand-made delicacies. me. a gay christian, with a pair of hundred-pound cement shoes.

you see, what i'm trying to do here... what i'm trying to prove, is this... that, on the eve of that ever-impending doom that assigns itself to the ripe old age of thirty, i have something to say. something that will mean something to you. something that will mean something to me. you see, what i am efforting to show is that, yes, i have accomplished things. yes, i have indeed learned... and re-learned. i have experienced. i have lived. i have survived. i have grown-up, matured, and marinated in my own juices enough to write it down. or what i'm really trying to do here is convince myself of these things. maybe i'm just laboring my way up the ladder, rung by splintery rung, heaving my load, trying to make it to that next step, that next purgatorial level of self-fulfillment. and maybe i have nothing to say at all. i guess you can be the judge of that.