

Purple
It's still there.
That feeling.
A slight pain I get
When I remember the times I was able to see you
On a regular basis.
When I remember the days of silence,
The days of sadness, of hope,
Of crying into each others arms,
Of laughing at the stupidest things
Until our eyes were wet with tears,
And our stomachs burned in protest.
Of sitting outside the school against the wall by the trash can
Sweltering in the heat or shaking a little in the cold
And waiting for a parent,
Or waiting for a parent to forget we exist.
Discussing music,
Or discussing death.
Texting with our phones like normal people,
Or texting over a Google doc
To communicate
About the smallest
And largest of things.
Watching Meat Canyon,
Or just sitting there,
Watching each other.
As we lived our lives out
And laughed and suffered about it,
We would watch each other.
I watched you bleed yourself out
And murder your brain cells
For a passion that you never, ever
Not even once
Gave up on.
And you watched me
Make my way through
All of the emotions
That were eating away at me.
And then you watched me leave.
You watched me travel miles away
To pursue the same passion,
But you're already miles ahead of me.
And I'm watching you slowly
Start to live out more pieces of your life
That I can't watch.
But I'm so
So proud of you.
I hope you know that.
I just miss you.
And honestly,
I wish
I could take it back.
The tiny, momentary hesitation
That was the borderline between an opportunity and sameness,
But not quite sameness.
One day, several hours
Was all it took to destroy a path
I had no idea
I wanted so desperately
Until it was gone.
I'll be okay.
I've moved on.
We've moved on.
But as much as both of us have moved on,
It sticks with me,
That feeling.
I wonder if you get that feeling too.
Wanderlust
I want to experience it with my own senses, my own
Readily astonished mind.
The ending of the Universes,
The beginning of them;
The creation of stars, the pull of Nothingness,
Resourceful civilizations, reckless wars.
To witness Life in a place so far from reach,
So differently entangled in the same laws of our Universe
That their appearance, their necessities,
Their breath, their brilliant thought, their environments
Are unlike any we picture from this sheltered, lonely world.
A true vision of Afterlife, Afterdeath, the Void;
The Creator, the Destroyer, or neither. Nothing.
The births of souls, of spirits, of Life,
And the mirror they look within
To See themselves.
Particles within particles
Within particles within particles.
Systems within systems,
Cycles, sciences.
What do we have wrong about our Existence?
What do we not know?
Everything, all at once, that ever has, is, and ever will
And Nothing, none at all, that ever didn't, isn't, nor ever will.
Dog Days
It's actually hilarious
How often I end up here.
In this exact moment.
The moment when I realize
I'm the only one
The world doesn't spin for.
Where I look around
And see that I'm the only one
Who isn't moving.
Familiar figures,
Motion-blurred
Like long exposure photography
Dash past me with an impossible momentum,
Leaving a swift burst of wind that ruffles my hair
In their wake,
And all I can do is blink.
Once.
Just once.
I can only blink one singular time
Before they're miles away from me,
A small black dot in the distance,
With tiny shining white eyes
That do so much more than blink.
I don't want to just blink one singular time.
I want to sprint, as fast as I can,
Carrying my giant, hopeful white eyes with me,
And become a small black dot
Myself.
Did It Even Happen?
In this life,
I can forget.
I can hear the unfiltered, warm voices of humanity through the phone,
Feel the vibrations of their existence through my palm
And keep those voices next to me, late into the dark hours of the morning.
I can feel the heat of so many precious arms that wrap around me,
That gently carry me with them,
And I have no fear of being pulled from their grip and thrown into the cold.
I can taste the flavors of the foods I once ravenously hungered for,
And they linger on my tongue for so much longer now, giving me strength
Long past the next meal.
In this new world, I can be undone
In the way I intend.
Intentionally.
And yet now I sit here on the floor
Of that life
While I unpack my bags
After having been in the sky for two hours,
With enough clothes for a week
Strewn across the carpet
I once bled on.
And yes.
It feels like home.
But home is where I was undone
Over and over again,
Painfully, chaotically.
In other words,
Not intentionally.
And still I put myself
Back into the hands of these strangers
On holidays,
Undoing myself intentionally
But not in the way I intend,
Because I have nowhere to go
If I don't.
Proximity
[Verse 1]
Come,
Let me lead you astray
Just a few feet away from
The world that you thought you knew
Out
From under the gray,
Let me be a warm ray of light
In the storm that's surrounding you
[Prechorus]
Your silence is louder than you think,
You don't have to speak
Because I can still hear you
Words never did much for me
Would it be had to breathe
If I asked to be near you?
[Chorus]
I converse through the mouth of existence,
A language of footsteps I match to your pace
Quiet is better than distance
To hear the things no one knows how to convey
Can I have proximity?
[Verse 2]
Home
Was hell on my tongue,
You heard it through whispers
Of wind as I came undone
That was month one
When my voice wouldn't come,
Yet you'd sit with the quiet
As I pulled the air through my lungs
[Prechorus]
Your silence is louder than you think,
You don't have to speak
Because I can still hear you
Words never did much for me
Would it be had to breathe
If I asked to be near you?
[Chorus]
I converse through the mouth of existence,
A language of footsteps I match to your pace
Quiet is better than distance
To hear the things no one knows how to convey
Can I have proximity?
[Bridge]
I hate wasting time,
So let me bide my time
With you
I guess it's probably time
I say
That you're one thing I can't stand
To lose
Give me proximity
Can I have proximity?
[Chorus 2x]
I converse through the mouth of existence,
A language of footsteps I match to your pace
Quiet is better than distance
To hear the things no one knows how to convey
Give me proximity
Can I have proximity?
I converse through the mouth of existence,
A language of footsteps I match to your pace
Quiet is better than distance
To hear the things no one knows how to convey
Give me proximity
Can I have proximity?
Weird Weather
It’s hard for me to tell
What color the plants should be right now.
All the grass keeps dying and waking up again,
Like the predictably invincible characters
In an anime that should've ended
Three seasons earlier.
It’s March,
And the trees, eternally half-blooming
With tiny bright caterpillars of warm green,
Are still caught in the prolonged stranglehold
Of the mistletoe that thrives in cold winds
And frosted bark.
In my eyes, It’s almost as if
The parasitic chandeliers could be hesitant;
Lingering around, uncertain,
Loitering and pacing
With invisible little plant legs,
Tortured by the annoyingly realistic possibility
That there might be
Just one more cold morning,
Just enough time
To squeeze one more drop of life
From the thin fingertips of another
Before it wanders off again
In the heat of the evening.
After-School Frostbite
[Verse 1]
Kicking the TV
And wondering why the static's
Slowly crushing me
My channel-surfing white noise
Sleepless thought machine
It's getting colder
I'm freezing over
Eighteen below
[Chorus]
Salt-and-pepper alibis
Every future petrified
Footprints getting lost in snow
SCP-2949
Cross the tundra, blur the lines
Show me something I don't know
Hypothermic freeze
I can almost see my breath
Caught in the monochrome
Salt-and-pepper alibis
Every future petrified
Footprints getting lost in snow
[Verse 2]
Carve me from the ice
Chip away at every broken part of mine
Preserved under the time zones
Melt my peace of mind
It's getting colder
I'm freezing over
Eighteen below
[Chorus]
Salt-and-pepper alibis
Every future petrified
Footprints getting lost in snow
SCP-2949
Cross the tundra, blur the lines
Show me something I don't know
Hypothermic freeze
I can almost see my breath
Caught in the monochrome
Salt-and-pepper alibis
Every future petrified
Footprints getting lost in snow
[Bridge (2x)]
Black against a white scene
I can see the gangrene
Slowly creeping up my arms
I'm losing feeling
Can someone hear me, give me something
Tell me it's not all for nothing
[Verse 3]
It's getting hard to breathe
I'm getting nowhere finding patterns in the screen
The walls are closing in
My muscles start to seize
It's getting colder
I'm freezing over
Eighteen below
Know Me
There exists within them
A quiet understanding of my world.
They see the concepts
That words don't exist for;
The ones that structure my existence.
They knew from the beginning
That it would take them
A very long time
To learn me.
And yet they still sit here
Connecting me;
Patiently reforming my complexities,
Weaving synapses
Between the things I already know.
Knitting me without a pattern
Because they know I don't have one,
Nor do I have the desire to predict
How they will change me.
They are tethered to me
Not with conversations and interlacing fingers
But despite them,
And instead leaning upon
The intricate language
Of mutual sentience.
Pantheon (God of War)
[Intro/Chorus]
We are a god of war
Walking down below
On severed heads
And bloodstained stone
Our world doesn't like us
Oh, we already know
But it's Ares' burden
To strengthen weak souls
[Verse 1]
No, we aren't done yet
We've conquered the earth, but not ourselves yet
We have necessary chaos seeds to plant
Grudges, money, and filthy hands
And we repay ourselves in blood debt
'Cause we're the deity we worship
On the market is our flesh and bone
For half the price, give it half a home
[Prechorus]
We don't live in a society
If we kneel to gore
Shackled by our own adoration
But not the things that we adore
[Chorus]
We are a god of war
Walking down below
On severed heads
And bloodstained stone
Our world doesn't like us
Oh, we already know
But it's Ares' burden
To strengthen weak souls
[Verse 2]
Another dogmatism outbreak
Another martyr's been erased
We barter in our own morality
Is perspective worth our humanity
[Bridge]
They build statues for us
We just leave them to rust
What are we here to protect, to be a god for?
'Cause we're walking on ash and dust
Oh, are we still pretending
Like there's
Anything left on this
Planet that people won't just
Die for (impact)
Note: After the bridge, repeat the chorus but overlay the prechorus with it. Then accelerando & crescendo until tension peaks; after that, everything just abruptly stops, without resolving any chords.
Some Light Reading
As my world burned, I sat down on a soft patch of grass amidst its chaos. The citric scent of my steeping Earl Grey pierced through pungent fumes of ashen smoke that clung to everything it touched. The two odors blended together, invading my senses with a turbulent redolence as I turned to the next page of the book that was resting on my lap.