Why Why Why, Tell me.

Perhaps I ain't the finest version of meself. Maybe my language is half-broke. My kindness took a hit years ago, and so I hit back when threatened because it's easier than wincing. When they see you wince, they know they can make you flinch again.

I never want to flinch again. And maybe that's why...

That's why I use slang and 'hick' language more than sophisticated words that I used to.

That's why I light candles around my apartment, but never near the windows...They don't get to see the light inside.

That's why I don't work a job, I'll keep up my 'outgoing' self, but then as my social battery drains, they'll wonder how I really am, and at that point I will need to quit.

That's why I don't skate. I did in 2016. The rink supported me, her glove supported my mittens, but after I fell on ice, I hear the laughter, and then the pouring cocoa, and the separating sound of our lips, but the sharpening grindstone of steel and ice always cuts down to the blood beneath the lake. She became something in the medical field, drawing blood from layers and layers down...No amount of frostbite can hide this River of Acheron.

That's why I've got a crush on someone new, but acting on it would be a fool's errand. It's smarter to put a melon on my head, and go stunting in skate parks with diesel engines. (Not my worst, also not my most self-destructive)

That's why I've become privy to the things that are the most different from what I remember of her.

That's why I keep blogging, writing, singing, expressing these things inside, but to my audience isolated. If the others knew. Maybe they would judge, that would be fine, so would criticism, but if they related...That might just make me fall again, and we can't have that...No no, we just can't have that again.

That's why I name the months after her.

That's why every hour, at the end of every year,

has her name chase me through the wind.

If I could ever condense all that I mean:

I would,

but that's why...

If this was the first...

And if this was the first. The previous 469 posts, reduced to crumbled Q's and 'P' and 'R' rubble...

Would I write of what I wrote then, or what I believe now? Is there difference in the passage of time. Or do we wake up, stretch, and carry on with whatever we've got left? I'm gonna make a conscious choice right now to not allow anymore questions marks for the rest of this entry. Does that sound okay?

As far as I could tell, in Grade 6, they denounced Pluto from being a Planet, because it was just too damn small. Now I was an average sized kid. Skinny, but I always have been. But something about that was taken personally. It was a good planet. Nice solid outer crust. Small, but traversable, no doubt secrets underneath the surface. It just was in the shade of it's brothers... Oh how Hades was wronged...

If this was the first...Would I rush out the door to where she might be, wilting flowers in hand, and my sharp, charismatic smile that always got me into trouble? A promise to: "Last forever this time..." And when 3 more days go by, the moon cycles again, I follow suit, and all of a sudden I'm no more man to you, than the river is land to the rain.

Maybe that was a bit too scattered, but collecting my thoughts has always been a rain barrel. Either in drought, or overflowed...

I only ever knew a couple of things. As I got older, I learned the things I knew, were closer to the things that I didn't know. That doesn't mean they were worth forgetting. But I did anyways. And all of a sudden, people got mad at me. They got mad at me, like they got mad at Pluto for being too small.

No, I couldn't I help it. Nothing could have changed it. But whether it was strategy or sermon, my bib-logical batterings, never assured them. If the scholars can't be saved, little chance for the bishops still on the board. So I suppose they better jump off their light coloured squares and try to rule from Rio, not Rome.

And if this wasn't the first? If all the history has still existed before this writing. If I really did meet her in the middle of a country road, and we still walked through the night until the dawn winked at us. If she sat in my car in the spring, and I took her hand to reassure her, and that moment really did make a difference in how she got through her day. If the day I held her in the rain, my Ultramarine blue hoodie stained with tears and straw... She said: "I don't wanna cry alone anymore." I couldn't cry with her. I knew I had to be strong. But looking back, looking forward, in any direction my mind, eyes, hands, and heart will go....Could I have cried then, even if I wanted to?

I saw her once again on 82nd avenue. I saw her car once again in traffic, then no more. I never saw her again, except for posts on the app where people compare for coins...She's a barista now. Maybe someday...

But the question to ask in all of this, is well answered by a quote, I keep with me in my breast pocket...

"If you did this Life over, would you make the same grand mistakes? Yes, given half a chance, Yes."

But it's not the first. It's the 470th.

Time marches on.

She moved on.

I trudged away, with all the stars of her galaxy chained around my ankles. Ready to build a garden for Persephone. A cluster bouquet of Luminary's...

I've got something.

I've got a question for you. And after I ask it, it needs to be answered off the cuff. No hesitation, no time for you to ponder on the 'right' or 'correct'. It's a simple blurt-out. I won't judge. But I will accept whatever you give me. So you can choose to be dishonest, but it will only be lying to yourself if you do. So here goes.

How much do you suffer in your sufferings?

Because I do, a lot, more than most. And I suppose there's no real way to quantify a measurable scale of how much thing suck. But I just know. Because I do. Because I've been bearing burdens for a long, long time. Long enough that my friend circles have come full circle, long enough that the hope died, came back, died, came back, resurrected, and perished. These words are no more than a clam's shell pried open by lusty scuba divers, horny for pearls.

I sip the drink, I'm back. I hope I'm still here tomorrow, if I'm not, it's just as well, but damn, the years have passed.

The years have passed, and I suffer in my sufferings,

It's not easier, not worse... just.... Different.

Many kinds of sadness are not caused by a solitary grave. One death, spurs a string, which a living soul carries as a burden, for many moments and years, until it's time, and is double knotted at the bottom of the second tomb.

And that's why I suppose...

I walked in the cafe, removed my coat, chose a table, unloaded my bag, opened my laptop, blew on the top layer of my tea, cocked my headphones, loaded the gun of my musical library, prepared for homework,

Sorted the sorrows and sonnets of my own head, and braced for the war that ink and memory has always caused me.

Casualties caused by the end of it, but a more free country at the end, where the dried blood rests, and the poppies grow.

And I recognized the local faces who hunkered over their digital devices. Writing a screenplay, biology paper, composing texts to situation-ships, and drawing, trying to capture the ineffable beauty this world provides.

For me, that ineffable beauty misses me, by a minute or a mile, it's gone all the same.

And what I find out of this, is that it comes in stages. In plots, moments, Acts, and Seasons. Some days I feel the high seas trying to submerge my throat under salty tides, and other days, I'm lifted by Athena's grace to Olympia's peak. Pushed up by sunlight and ardent wishes, of gods just so divine.

Whether the weather punishes,

Despite the Spades,

Call my Fallen versions of a younger self you once adored,

and know that he's still here, he always will be.

I have more comparisons, and metaphors, and sneaky allusions, profusions, and ways to shout out, but the whisper that beckons from my lips only wishes these remaining words, for now:

And that's why I suppose people are the way they are.

Because they just don't know any other way.

And why is it...?

And why is it so hard to walk through a winter forest without succumbing to the frost?

And why is it so hard to follow the forest streams out of the woodfall, without trespassing onto private property?

And why is it so hard to dream of reasonable dreams, when, once as I was younger, the impossible seemed the most possible. The most unreal, close to touch...

And why is it so hard to hear those old songs...

And why is it so hard to fall asleep in my bed alone every night, with the aching reminder that I have no Cinderella to awaken...I used to watch her sleep next to me, and now the moon watches me from afar; I asked her to come closer once, shine just a little more, she stayed solitary and cold, in her private parking space in the sky...I called the Tow Truck for Dwarfs, he said:

"It's gon' take more time than you have!"

"Maybe...but could you try anyways, maybe I'll beat the odds, and suffer longer just to see this through."

*Hurmph!* "...Payment?"

I drop a bag of coral shells in his passenger's seat. It's the only currency the moon likes. She can't be close enough to see 'em, and they always sparked such a curiosity in her, much like her to me...

I'd like to use words that are as impactful as an artist's off-colour song. I think I've got the words in me...they just don't wanna float right now... (neither do i...)

//

Are there burning trees, on the cliffside shelves in the east? Eroding, Eroding all that kept us grounded. The hair of our nature, on end, sparking electric fires, impossible elements...

And why is it so hard...

To breathe the words softly, that my heart has been pounding, since my inner world suffered stalsis stasis...

And there was one...

Once upon a time, I begged for beggar-hardships, then found myself fallen over in the fountains, treasures galore, but the guardians of Poseidon with nightsticks, fast approaching to jail me for aquatic consumer treachery.

And once upon a time, I clenched the wheel harder when a song appeared on my radio static that reminded me of the way she flipped her hair, and kissed my cheek, where I never asked her to. I squeezed until my knuckles were the same shade as my truck, and flame inside engine pistons. Eventually, I relented, but the memories, much like urchins, heartbeat location unfounded, even with echolocation...

Once upon a time, there was one who said sweet words, then crawled through the fire like they were blankets she had worn for years. I pitied the pain, and, stupidly, I offered a hand. She took it, with grin and grimace, we traded. I slept under stars of fire, punctured needles in my spine. Backbone keeping the sky afloat, and she made her way back to town...The dark skies welcoming me to my new home, as the horizon kissed her with a swear of sunrise.

Once upon a time, I ended all time, I existed in a timeless space, answers all answered, questions unecessary, and songs syncopated, within emotionally exhaustive cradles. I couldn't tell another metaphor for the end of the day, so take one in the middle of a tale.

And there was one, who appeared in the legs and eyes of many. I touched arm to arm, and bone to brain, connecting experience with dreams until we shifted from possibles into poison, as my venom often does. One understood, one didn't, one couldn't, one wouldn't, one understood with grave acceptance, one, well I didn't know if they accepted it after all, but they moved very far away, which I suppose is an answer itself, one changed teams, one still dreams of me, one was never the same, but I think I changed more than any of them ever did, or tried to.

I don't need much, I won't ask for the world, while my hammer chips away at her rocky erosive chin.

All you need to know,

is my guitar strums, brought me closest to what perfection tasted like in her.

And there was one, that ended, without an ending...

Sunlight's Lustre is losin' her gold... The mornings are young, then the nights get so old.

and the first thing I noticed...

and the first thing I noticed, was the leaves on the trees, and their shade had dropped in colour intensity, seemingly overnight.

Yesterday, hours ago, it could be describe as bonfire crimson. Now, it is known by maroon melancholy. Perhaps it's my distorted perception of the world, and my distressed state.

But I noticed the elderly woman on the bench. She leaned over, not to tie her shoe, nor to feed the birds. But rather as the draw to the ground brings us all closer. The feeling of Dante in all of our Greek sandal soles.

The snow was peppering the ground in a rally against the purity of white December. The meaning was lost in the traffic circle, no car knowing the reason they kept circling. The traffic lights that I obeyed, the yield signs that I didn't, and the spark of butternut squash joy knowing my much-needed cafe would be open.

I want to squeeze a breast, quite desperately, and I could convince a friend to do it as a drunken mistake at the bar tonight, but I figure it's better to play it safe with a kiss on her cheek, and a howl to the quarter crescent moon after the 5th bus stop ride home.

I don't know origins as well as destiny's that might not come true.

But I want you to know, that I'm fightin'.

'Bout the best I can.

I fought back the tears on this one.

The spotlight is blinding from the tourists who need to know me in this life right now, but never stay for more than a third of an Act.

The scarecrow, lonely in the field, waving to the crows, an invitation to have a conversation, they just peck and peck his fibres, never knowing the rich kindling of which he is made.

The couple at the table across from me, he reaches and with his small finger, cleans a bit of foam from her bottom lip. The distance between them, a minutiae of grain particles, between me and the last time I did that with someone, A railroad journey through Nebula's.

It rained on my truck's window in September, I was working on my album, Million played from my laptop. I could have walked for a thousand years, with one hundred footsteps, with ten's of muscles and one set of legs, and a new thought of how I loved you could have emerged from each heel-to-toe contact with the asphalt where my heart bled.

When I think on you...and how you looked so good in a plain t-shirt, or the dresses you seldom wore, or the volcano of emotion you kept so far underneath, or when our arms hung over my balcony, smoke flittering away in the wind with the paper ashes of our story unfurling into the close...When you asked to cuddle, just cuddle, because you really needed it that day, when you sat on my lap, when I cooked in the kitchen, when we drove, and drove, and song after song played, and you knew they mattered to me so you listened, and I should have listened more to you, and I suppose it doesn't really matter now, but what matters more than anything, more than the condition of my heart, and more than the blossoming of yours, is that Love is something to be shared, and not hoarded. It is not the gem in the Dragon's Keep, or the Pearl at the River's Riptide, or the Lone Cloud in the Desert Sky, (a bluff, or promise of rain);

Love is a gesture from two hearts, on international highways,

trying to get everywhere, and nowhere all at once.

I thought that when we were together, that you got that.

And It's something that I think is worth repeating until your

Daises grow on Granite.

/ Myths and Moons /

It's so very exciting, isn't it?

Knowing the endless potential that exists in the subspace before each new beginning. Some say that opportunities shrink with age...But I believe that they expand with belief.

Age is a number you assign to life. Sure, numericals exist around us in the metaphysics of the universe. Even Aristotle thought so, but it can't define the 'ether stuff' that is within. The Primordial Goo of the universe. The way that the branches sway, the rivers gushing flow, the cities car horn honks, and the jingle from bells when you enter a shop.

There is no wicker basket that can hold enough strawberries to make you forget the person who first broke your heart. But there is enough juice in just one strawberry, to make you fall for someone again.

These thoughts, aphorisms, mantras that I write about such diverse topics like: Love, Love, Love, Love, Love, Love, and Love, and surely not diverse. I know this. But I know it's a form of healing for me. The end goal is not to be 'healed', or 'complete' or 'back together again'. It's to keep walking on, despite the reasons I won't want to.

Here's an old myth that I will part you with.

There was once a young man. Very early 20's in age. Eye colour China Blue, or Atlantic Grey depending on the weather. He wandered and roamed by day. Laughed with friends, made art, drank tea, and wrote in journals. But by night...

He searched through the fields in the after-hours of dusk. Making his way by firelight, he sang hymns and holy prayers. He prayed for things to go back, and to go forward simultaneously. He kept little on him, for he needed music in his ears, and smoke in his lungs, and paper to etch thoughts onto. But other than this, his hands were empty. Filled only with the blowing air that cascaded his fingertips and caused euphoric smiles to erupt from the corners of his lips when song, and sky aligned. // He believed in the power of Words. The effects of Kindness. The miracle of Melody.

He searched in those long nights, for the finest descriptors to try and emulate the world into a new world, of ink, and the blood that's been bled. He found answers, lost some too. But as the sun began to rise each day, and he returned home, and rested underneath the covers with pain his pillow, and blankets of grief; He knew that someday his art might matter to someone. That was always enough reason to press on.

He was a Hyperborean. And that meant something to him.

That was enough.

EverRed

New places, old habits and hair.

I haven't done much to alter my appearance for some time now. I feel like I'm beginning to be like an evergreen in the forest. Slowly growing mould, and the roots keep outstretching. The needles grow slightly ever-longer, and the hue differs a touch each season, but I'm the same man.

Even though I am not.

I'm not the same man I used to be. And you can say that these echoes and shards are the same, and I suppose in a way there's residue... But campfire smoke fills my nose with hope, and I seek it out as a priority in my city walks. I'm close to beginning sewer searches for Lighthouse Longing, I have no quarrel with anything but authenticity and the modern worlds obsession with avoiding it.

When I was 21, I was in Love (probably) and then it broke. But I didn't post about it, because I knew it would not do much good.

When I was 19, I was in Love (definitely) but I didn't preach about it, because it couldn't put the fire out of an evergreen ablaze, and I knew I still had passion inside, so I became a tree of burning fate, EverRed.

Over the years the times have come and gone...Times with friends, family, and alone. Probably that most of all...

It's when I'm surrounded that I remember those most isolated times. The welcoming vibe of Country Twilight Roads. Headlights of Heaven... The slow shift into the early hours of morning, and my late-sleep in's, so far into the afternoon, you'd call it the next day's DuskBreak.

I hope you understand...I don't want to be found.

I want to be understood.

I need to be understood.

Maybe not now, maybe not for years.

But even if my books float around in space, and in time...Someone or something will get what I felt, once, long ago...That's enough for me.

That'll be enough...even if the fire goes out...

All Ash and Pinecones now, Love...

We couldn't find each other.

I feel like the closest I've ever been to feeling God, have been the times I've nomadically wandered down railroad tracks, taking in the surroundings. Distant whistles, blowing reeds in spring, autumn, and summer. I don't know if I avoided finding him because I yearn for the search, or if because it's just better if we remain acquantainces; but regardless of our mutual understanding, I know what those tracks held. I still feel pebbles in my shoes years and years later. I remember which thoughts I had, and where, and how far I had to travel, just to end up back at the beginning.

Once, I found a dead dog beside the tracks. It was a tragedy. Words cannot explain how my heart dropped. It's fur was not bright sunshine gold, like most retrievers were. It was an off-color flax. Like bone burned by the sun. It lay motionless, and I never knew if a car hit the dog, and threw it over the bridge. Or it had wandered there to lie, and eventually lie forever. Was it that close to getting help? Would the help have mattered? Do I ask these questions for the canine spirit, or because I'm afraid of losing my best friend someday. I already lost a best friend once, and then, well, again. How many more times until you wonder about the 'best' in that title...I still see that dog when I close my eyes sometimes..

..Thinking unrelated in abstract..Isn't it strange how Beauty and Love lead to consequence? More often than not. I'm no predictor. No professor. Just a journalist of star worship. (Not astrology mind you) I don't aim to be a preacher. Just trying to spread my thoughts across the battlefield paradise of my own pacifist wasteland. Where once was blood..Shall birth the flowers. And God is still so far away...

Runnin' down through the fire.

Does Age come with Wisdom? Or more the other way around?

I ponder in my puddle. The leaves are brilliant shades that have been described before. But today, I will do them justice, and keep their shyness away from screens that would distort their poeticism.

There is no nature in the cement cracks, there is no fear in the bungee-jumping scaffolding, and those skyscraper window-cleaners know only their next reflection, but never knew how the years creeped up on them so fast, despite the mirrors planted in front of their face each day.

I may preach someday, but for this day, I prefer a quiet audience of a whisper, and the perchance of a bluebird to hear my struggle to whistle on the walk home.

The groceries are price-rising, and my wallet is fund-dropping, but my stomach still has cravings all the same, so it's this that I am grateful for.

I forget the names of some of my friends, but I'm making new ones, and I suppose that's a good thing, but those memories are paper towels in this mind's Greek fountain. More distorted with each swirl around Fantasia and Lake Volvi. Bring me the marble and watch my thumb imprint the stone. No miracle of David, Goliath, or Constellation, but rather the erosion of century-heartbreak and soul-love-made inside of Neptune's very own crystal eyes.

Is there a lodestone inside of your heart? One that pushes and pulls you all the directions that your fiery, and irritatedly youthful spirit calls? I've got no quarrel. I've got no Quail feathers either. Just a Quasi-Poignant message that needs to be deciphered through 500 words, with a warm drink in hand. Century-future poets may find meaning, but modern dialectics find no meaning in my didactic dialect. Perhaps it's just the curl of my own tongue...and I miss the curl of her's...But if her's never made the shapes that they did, then my fingers won't curl the woes that they do now. My instruments would never know real feeling in their play. ...But maybe... My heart would still be intact marble..Instead of cracked and dusted, shadowy pyrite. Coarse on the outer, but polished from my thumbprint on the inside. Trying to love-stroke my way out of a hell, that only Dante ever knew...

Not too much longer before the semester starts, and I wonder what it takes to get through the eras of your life. I don't just use that word because Taylor Swift is on tour, and nobody will SHUT UP about her prescence in the damn city. But Eras determine who you might be in any gap of time. Sometimes the gaps of time needed to produce a worthwhile change are long, and sometimes they're as short as a night's sleep.

It took 2 years for me to go through that change first time thru university, 4 years through high school, and 5 years in my 'adult' era. Working jobs, then not working at all. And I feel that some people are convinced I'm lazy. Hell, I've even convinced myself of that from time to time. But if you try, but if you wake up, and you're here, no matter how stacked the odds are...That's gotta be worth something, ain't it?

I'm not looking for lightning in a bottle. And magic has been missing since the old world went to sleep. ... This isn't the first time I've had the following thought, but it has been a while: "Maybe the 'magic' I'm searching for. The mystic winds through the trees, and ethereal sounds produced by boxes of wood, making sounds so divine, maybe all these feelings and thought and beauties, are simply...Life.

A wandering thought, that seems to appear only after I've wandered through the wilds myself...A dumber man might not see the signals, and I'm only as clever as the ones who came before me...And...well...Cycles are meant to be broken...Maybe my genius will show this time through.

What I really know, what's most apparent,

Is I HAVE to want this, maybe even more than the first time around. IF I believe In myself,

my skills,

my heart, my mind, my bravery, and just about everything that glows...Surely, I'll make it through.

See you on the other side, Love.

I don't want anything but...

When I die, the same day I do, or the day before and after,

You can take my car keys. My wallet, phone, flashlight, and guitar. Feel free to raid my house for any valuable fine china, expensive computers, and electronic thing-a-ma-jigs. It's all yours.

But the poems underlined, from the books with dog-eared pages, I will keep.

The image of a flower, weeping by the sun, prayers for rain under it's lily-hood. That, I will keep.

The mountain adventures I had, where I conquered, climbed, summited, and surmounted my mental and physical fears. This, I will keep.

The memories, of the family members who were never there, when they had every opportunity to be...Regrettably, these I will keep.

The songs, note for note, and chord transitions like snow fades in spring...I will always remember these, for they are synonymous with my very essence of being and they can't leave me.

I will forget the names, some faces, the days we saw each other, the food I bought, the drinks I sneaked sips of, the books that went unread, the cinema films that peaked no interest in me, the countless wasted nights in front of digital horizons, always forever-expanding, the albums of jeweled, crystalline glory, but never found, lest you open your ears, the electric spark of technological advancement, the deers in the field that noticed me, and I, them, but neither of us had the broken heart to do harm to the other, the quilted blankets, the clocks from a time long passed, the drunken bar nights, bad jokes I made, and pool shots that were easy wins, and my 2 dollars lost, the curry that was made more mild than I would have liked, the burgers made fine, just fine, nothing more to say, the idolizing of past generations, and the way I know that Allen knew me, even though he never could have, the way jesus never came back, the way that my heart somehow did, the way that physical exercise was a burden and a blessing in every stage, the spelling bees I lost, the few chess games I won, the forgotten lore for the indie video-game, the riverside fishing trip where I learned nothing new about him, but at least it's more time spent together, the hospital bed cotton that is not easily forgotten, the corner smiles, the nickel dials on bowling alley candy dispensers, the halloween costumes worn once, then stored into Totes for another 362 days, the coffee cups thrown in dumpsters, the ceramic ones made with care, then forgotten with apathy, the love the love the love the love that I always knew was out there, and the lifetime I spent searching for it.

Some things in this life are obvious, others require a touch more subtly and nuance to make happen...I'm still not entirely sure what my existence is supposed to mean, all that I can say for certain, is even when the universe apparently wants me to perish, that's when I make the case for my survival, all other times...

All other times...

I breathe, I write, I stay alive.

Not for you, not for me, but because my heart needs it.

To Been.

It's a guilt that is felt,

not knowing if you will leave this world by your own hand, in time.

Or by sudden fate, taken by the shrews...

Or by time itself, grown old with all that you've become, equals departed.

There is no telling, there is circumstance and relevance. And I wonder when I decide what to post. I wonder when I decide where to put my time, and my loyalty, and where to place my eyes. On the world ahead, or the glimmering heaven behind..

There are too many questions in this head, and all enough answers.

I wonder...finally...if poignance, is earned..or simply just had at certain times.. My age, has grown, my age has passed, my age has died.

I have been.

Remember this.