Into violent swells,
I don’t miss the chaos
The way I thought
I would.
I find joy in the balance,
And rest in the serenity
Of peace at last.
Here is love without jealousy,
Passion without anger,
And hope without anxiety.
The monsoons have subsided,
The seasons have changed,
And I’m all the better for it.
Chapter Four
Cosmic
Minds
Chance
Created by chance,
We dance in the flames,
Our existence uncertain,
Our place among the stars
Hanging by a thread.
Looking up at the cosmos,
We wonder:
If we blink the wrong way,
Would it all vanish in an instant?
You Were Always Like That
I think about the way you would lean over me to stare out the plane window if you were here with me. You would give the beautiful city lights, set against the vast sea of darkness, all of the attention they deserve, enjoying it this time as much as if it were your first. You were always like that, you know. Hungry to devour all of the small gifts life offered. You were not the type to sit back, jaded and exasperated by any kind of experience. Even the remarkable duality of soaring through the air unrestrained by the bounds of the earth, set against the drudgery of the human beings packed like sardines in a tin can, could not dampen your spirit.
It’s times like these when I miss you the most.
Projection
To create art
Is to project your soul
Into the physical world,
To be seen and judged by all,
Open and vulnerable.
Art has the audacity
To proclaim,
“I have the right
To be who I am.”
Nostalgia
They will romanticize us,
Yearning for the supposed simplicity of our time,
Mythologizing our artists and musicians, our philosophers,
Adoring the way we see the world
As if we were not human beings just like them,
Fallible and uncertain,
Making it up as we went along.
Ode to Silence
I have had quite enough of music;
Every song begins to sound the same.
Instead I prefer the music of silence,
Which is always the same, yet always feels different.
There is the silence of the morning
With the freshness of rain just past,
There is the silence near the sea
Colored bluish green like the water,
There is the silence of a sunny day
Cascading down with gentle joy,
And there is the silence of the night
Which hushes creation into slumber.
Among all these silences, the most beautiful
Is the one within your own soul,
Which makes all the other silences
Much more beautiful still.
Summation
We are not merely the sum of our
Sunsets and sunrises.
We are not the math of the rotations
Of planets, moons, and stars.
The pacing of mankind’s calendar
Is not the thudding heartbeat
Of your story.
We can be free of the iron shackles
Of patterns that dictate our lives.
We are alive, we are free, we are
Human.
A Beautiful Abstraction
What a beautiful abstraction, music is.
It serves no purpose for our survival,
And yet, here it is;
It transcends utility,
Existing for the sake of its beauty.
Music proves to us
That life can be more
Than survival.
Talking About the Weather
Someone once told me
That interesting people
Don’t talk about the weather,
But I don’t think that’s
Quite true.
It is the most
Because no one is ever
Talking about the weather
When they
Talk about the weather.
A husband and wife are walking in a park.
“I want to save our marriage,”
He says with a “Nice day, isn’t it?”
“Too late—my heart has moved on,”
She says with a nod and “Uh huh.”
An old couple sits together on a bench.
“If it ends today, it was worth it with you,”
She says with a “Cold out, isn’t it?”
“I have no regrets, not a single one,”
He says with a “Here, take my jacket.”
Sometimes the most beautiful gems
Are buried deep in ordinary-looking rocks
Disguised with many others
On an ocean shore
Stretching miles in the distance.
Sometimes the most beautiful I-love-yous
Are buried in ordinary conversation
And disguised as trivial comments.
Tell me you love me,
Show me you care,
Come talk about the weather.
The Purpose of Poetry
What is the purpose of poetry?
If it is merely self-expression,
It is literary self-indulgence
And the reader is unnecessary;
If it is to comfort the reader,
Then it becomes little more
Than empty pandering;
If it is to be relatable,
It must be watered down
Into vague clichés.
What, then,
Is the purpose of poetry?
I think perhaps
Poetry exists
To rise above function
And elevate the sights of our souls
Beyond the horizon
Toward hope.
Rain
We are engaged in a glorious collaboration,
You and I,
The author and the reader.
If a poem calls for rain, and I write it so,
It does not rain unless you allow it.
If I intend the rain to cleanse the soul
But you are a flower in thirst of rain,
Then together we have created
Something different—
A moment that belongs to the two of us alone,
For no two readings are the same.
Infinite Worlds
There are so many worlds
That exist in the universes
Of our minds.
We could never travel to all of them
And learn their secrets
Even if we had many lifetimes to do so.
According to multiverse theory
Every possible universe
Exists—
Every fictional world
Thought up by brilliant writers
Actually exists
In reality.
I like to imagine
That writers don’t create these worlds—
We merely discover them
As the ethereal tendrils of our minds
Reach across univer
ses.
By the same token
Every dream and nightmare
We’ve ever had
Is also a real world;
Perhaps our minds are like televisions
Flipping through universes like channels
Performing inter-dimensional travel
In our sleep.
Perhaps creativity
Is just the ability
To journey through worlds
And perhaps we are not dreamers
But travelers.
Psychonaut
I remember the feeling of ego death
When I was no longer myself,
No longer anyone, in fact—
Just an outside observer
Of the greater consciousness,
Like an astronaut
Floating peacefully through space,
Watching the earth
From a distance.
I was so far away, yet unafraid,
Simultaneously part of it all
But not one specific part.
I was the whole of it,
While not being the only one
Who was everything at once.
Emerging from a Dream
I take joy in the simplest things:
In the alignment of the moon
With the tips of the trees,
In the jolt of reverie
Emerging from a dream,
In the sweet scent of pine
In the early summer’s breeze,
And in the first tint of yellow
That tinges autumn’s leaves.
The greatest synecdoche
Is to exist in our beautiful world
In solace and harmony.
Breathe in the Warm Air
I had almost forgotten that the world could be colorful and bright. I’d spent so much time looking down at windswept concrete and staring at decayed leaves drifting away in the wind that the very idea of summer had lapsed from my memory. Then everything came back to life, freed at last from the unyielding, clenched arms of winter.
Life is a force that pushes and pulls back, receding like an ocean tide when conditions are bleak and coming back in when the time is right. It hibernates when it must and thrives when it can. It has no path forward, no desire, no force of will—it only exists when it can exist.
And so it goes on, lighting up the drab scene like a Christmas light taken out of storage—flickering and unsure at first, then with full force. Beauty arises from cold crypts, and blue sky shows through the clouds like water showing through cracked ice. This is the beauty of the season, the beauty of color coming back to life. Nature takes a breath and exhales beauty.
Tone
The greatest harmony
At the end of the universe
Will be achieved
When all of mathematics and physics
Is unified down to the last detail
Into one great, simple theory.
Then, as soon as the universe
Has fulfilled its desire
To understand itself
Through intelligent beings,
It will collapse completely
Into some novel form;
A single auditory tone.
And this one tone joins
An infinity of others,
Creating a full audio spectrum:
The music of the multiverse.
Art Becomes Complete
I struggle with the realization that the lyrics of the greatest of songs are often composed of clichés. Somehow, when put to music, these simple lines become the most incredible emotional experiences.
This has shown me that great art does not exist in a vacuum. Art becomes great not when it is scrawled onto paper, but when it is imprinted from that paper into the soul of the observer.
Art becomes complete when it moves entirely from the mind of the creator into the mind of the audience.
Immortal
Time may progress
In our limited consciousness,
But moments never die,
Which means
Moments will always exist
From when we were alive;
And so we cannot truly die—
We are immortal.
Blot Out the Stars
I held my hands up in the air
Against the jet-black night sky.
I dipped my fingers
Into that endless ink
And blotted out the stars,
Forming constellations
That belonged only to me
In that moment.
But the moon came again
Out from behind the clouds,
And an artist I was
No longer.
Lightning
It seems day by day that nothing changes
Until one night you wake up
At four in the morning,
Sitting up straight in your bed,
Suddenly seeing things clearly and
Wondering where the past decade went,
Wondering where everything went wrong.
Change is a funny thing;
It sneaks up on you
As unexpected as a stroke of lightning,
In a flash, ensuring that the world
Is not quite the same
As it once was.
Become Less
The greatest lesson
Psychedelics taught me
Was that the ego
Only brings you pain.
The more you are able
To starve your ego
Into submission
The happier you will be,
As you will become less
And yet
Feel all the more
At peace.
Broad Strokes
Life makes a cruel mockery
Out of all our good intentions.
Love turns to heartbreak
Friendship turns to animosity
Peace turns to hatred
And life turns to death.
We are painted in broad strokes
By everything
We wish we had the power
To not be.
Art Gallery of the Soul
Different windows, different lenses,
They all point inward.
I am afraid that at this point
You know me better than I know myself.
I don’t know if that’s a bad thing;
I suppose I could refine the edges
Or hold back the colors,
But what would be the point of that?
Shattered glass and black sands,
Run them through your fingers.
Collect them piece by piece;
The only thing it ever meant
Was “I am.”
Let It Be So
If I must have their derision
To speak my mind,
Let it be so.
If I must accept hatred
To set the souls of strangers aflame,
Let it be so.
If I must offend sensibilities
To stand for what I believe,
Let it be so.
A lighthouse does not fear the waves
Or care for their opinions;
It is in the business of guiding ships.
Iris
I often wonder what stories
Are hidden away in black holes.
All the light held captive
In that mysterious orb—
What secrets are stored away
In
that cosmic iris?
Perhaps alien empires spanning galaxies
Stories of love and conquest
Horrors and atrocities
The birth of the universe
And questions of god and man,
All locked away in that blackness,
Trapped by the laws of the universe
As if god had sealed away
All the forbidden knowledge of existence,
Never to be uncovered.
These stories can never be unlocked,
And such a tempting fruit
Begs to be plucked
But promises death
In return.
Saturation
I didn’t notice until I stumbled upon an old photograph—and suddenly, there was a bridge between that past moment and the present. I looked across it and marveled at the saturated colors, the vibrant light, the air dripping with possibility and creativity.
I grieved for that moment like it was a lost loved one. I mourned the beauty of it as I returned to the present, the walls themselves seeming to hang loosely like decaying flesh on bone. This was a dark, grotesque caricature of the future I had once looked to with such hope all those years ago.
Childhood is the one time in our lives when we get the chance to see the world as more than just what it is. The world positively glows—
But that’s just nostalgia. The world didn’t change; I changed, tossing away my rose-colored glasses.
Final Pictures
It’s easy to hate yourself
For all of your small mistakes
Which seem to add up
To a terrible picture.
But rest assured:
No one sees the erasures
In the final picture
And yours will be
Just as beautiful
As you’d ever hoped.
The Invisible Man
I was alone on the corner of Third and Hawthorne. The sun had just dipped below the horizon, leaving only a dim pink hue in the lower half of the sky. The air was still warm with the heat of the day reverberating against the old brick walls of the city block.
The air was uncharacteristically devoid of nearly all noise save for the occasional purr of a car engine in the distance.
In this scene, I can pinpoint the exact moment when I realized I loved you. I know the exact window I was standing near, the exact tree growing on the opposite end of the sidewalk.
I began that walk with uncertainty. Somehow, invisible to the outside world, something changed within me that would alter the course of my life. And yet, looking from the outside, you would never know it—not even a hiccup in my step would betray my thoughts. You would have never guessed, if you could see me walking there, how much the moment changed me. And yet it did.