I am circling back on years missed,
Prudence dictates that I train for my marathon at night,
While kids sleep and employment relents
(Marathons are more-appropriate insanity,)


No time to write. Must ride ny bike. Dark. Night. Air. Youth. Cement. Grass.

Don't Ever be Afraid to be Embarrassed

To live is to be
An asshole to some extent,
Jesus ain't hiring

A kid once told me I should be a butler,
Guess I'm polite, subservient, relatively well-spoken
And I've been one of sorts for years,
Taking rich kids to the airport,
Walking them to the gate,
Carrying their luggage to keep their hands
Free to play with screens,
Texting their Hollywood royalty parents
When I have watched their plane take off,
And returning to the treatment center resort,

But today,

Today it's just me and my backpack
Breezing through security,
Popping on headphones,
Sipping coffee,
Ignoring anyone I please,
Until I rise with the new sun
And head closer to the ocean
And the woman waiting there

There may or may not be a phrase in the bible about a potter having the privilege of using some pots for noble purposes and others for base or common purposes. And it utterly ruined christianity for my young world-saving self. Cause we are equal, dammit. And there's a bit of a memory I have wherein a very young version of myself is writing out a sort of personal constitution and the one thing I knew for sure was that we all start out on a level playing field. And my mom chimed in with 'well, we don't really though do we?' Stuck with me for some reason. And I guess the conflict may have had something to do with confusing purpose with value. The pot may be an oil lamp or a bedpan.  And their respective value is a very separate thing from their intended purposes.

I feel, considering the aforementioned stuff and some other possible bible verse about man being in God's image and Bjork's comment about having a universe inside her (which I love although I cannot stand her music), that I might be an ear in this incarnation. Maybe. And maybe listening is my intended purpose, base or noble or otherwise.

Negative Space

Negative space
Is a term that always sounds pretentious,
Much like the word "pretentious"
And people who use it,
Especially in writing
Where you can't dumb it down as easily
With a "ya know?" Or a "or whatever the word is."

But what I wanted to say was something about a place
Being so familiar that it blends into the background
Like Compton sirens,
So that you no longer search for the feeling
You had as a child when you crossed the street
At that one certain spot on your way to get a slurpee,
But instead you search for a feeling of the time
When you still could remember that feeling,
Seeing if there's still an echo of the echo, or something like that

And then feeling guilty for searching at all in the dusty past,
When maybe, just maybe, you can still make new echoes
Now,
Small ones yes, but for starters you realize you've been bicycling
Surrounded by migrating monarch butterflies,
Which seems like it should be worth remembering

 I had had the answer and it had made people mad
 So I started walking west.

And when I got out west I met a Presbyterian boy
Jaded since age 8

We made love, and the answer lost its crispness.

Later, I was run over

By a born again Christian who would leave her cell phone at home
When we spent time together.

And it was barely visible,

I shook hands with a bright-eyed Pakistani man and
Questions overshadowed

And I wondered

What story to start now that
My old thread was spent.

An alien who both forgot his mission

and

Burned his means of return.