Post 200 -- Retirement

It's been a good run here. I started this blog just under five years ago with a post on girls. I wish I knew then what I know now.

It started out with questions, concerns, hopes, dreams. It became a place for me to express my poetry, my heart, my soul. Recently I gave this address to a friend along with the quote:

Aedh Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven
by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

This place truly is my dreams in ways I cannot even really imagine. I posted here a little less than once a week on average. There are good posts, and bad, posts I look back on and wish I could more often be the person who wrote those words. And ones that I am ashamed of. Others are funny, out of intent, or not.

Above all else, I feel as though my life is no longer the same as it was five years ago, the supposedly required anonymity of my past is gone. I have fewer rhetorical questions, and more simple thoughts. I no longer attend school, and have started on a path of nomadic wanderings. Truly I have lost my home as a place and gained it as a state of being. As such... I have decided to change the address, I will not be importing anything from here there. It will be a fresh start. I look forward to seeing you there.

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Walking away (rough draft)

Walking away, just for a moment.
Gives the whispers a chance,
To tell me all the things I fight,
to fill me with the lies I refuse to believe.

Knowing that I soon must stand,
I wonder what strength I have.
Will tonight be when the resistance ends?
Or will Key still have something to write.

Turning away isn't possible.
All that's left is to hold on,
Till the fingers bleed
till the arms burn.

Where does the dreaming end?
And waking begin? When your
whole life is a nightmare
does reality even matter?

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The path to walk

Last night I saw two futures,
One, the me that had
through fire, trial and pain
Become a being of excellence.
The other, through ease and idleness
achieved a sort of non-existence.

I knew the paths each had took
I knew the way that led to
Greatness and obsolescence
What scared me was not
How high I flew,
or how low I sunk.

But rather, that on waking
I was not sure which path to walk.

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Poetry

I'm afraid to go to bed. I'm afraid of the demons that haunt me there. I've been thinking a lot about the kind of person I want to be, and what I think happiness is. The happy man I see in the mirror and around the corner is such a better person than this feeble body allows it to be.

Good Timber

The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
That stood out in the open plain,
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king,
But lived and died a scrubby thing.

The man who never had to toil,
To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man,
But lived and died as he began.

Good timber does not grow in ease.
The stronger wind, the stronger trees,
The farther sky, the greater length,
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In tree or man, good timbers grow.

Where thickest lies the forest growth
We find the patriarchs of both.
And they hold counsel with the stars
Whose broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much of strife.
This is the common law of life.
~ Douglas Malloch

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A reason.

There's a reason
I get up
day after day.

There's a reason
I feel this way
O, let there be a reason.
Some lesson I must learn,
some heart that needs to heal.

How long?
How long
since I could walk?
Searching all the wrong places.
Finding not
but broken dreams.
There's a reason.
Let me find the reason.

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An outlet.

Pitter, patter, water's hot.
Trying to burn away the feeling.
Alone at last, not really enough.
All the confusion, hope and pain.
Swirling inside, controlled for a moment
Remembering those Haunting eyes.
From dreams to dreams
Keeping in, keeping out.
Such agonizing hope,
The thought of tomorrow, of today.
Under my skin, in my head.
The starving man watching a feast.
Reaching out to touch her cheek,
Remembering those haunting eyes.
A part of me whispers,
"There is no hope."
While aching deep the need,
For pain, for love, for agony.
The two compliment the one.
And within their confines wring free
the emotions locked so far down
I'd thought them lost forever.
And free they range, burning sweet
Through halls too long empty
The sun warming skin white from the dark
Close my eyes, drink the dregs.
Torture that reminds me I am alive
And as sweet this is reminds me
sweeter still if lips could touch
hands entwine and grasping hold
Stand against life's tempests
Together.

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A million things to do

A million things to do today,
they clatter and clutter and
carve up the minutes and hours.
Bills to pay, and places to be,
Work to be done, races to run.

All is done, the sunlight gone,
By the bed I kneel and utter:
Father, I hurt today,
I did this and that, but am empty still
I needed you most,
and you weren't there for me.

Then to my mind a picture came,
Another and another.
My neighbor who with joints aflame
Waved through the pain.
The lady who worked and slaved away
Wanting only to be home and play.
My mother who called and asked how I was
A curt response that was please don't delay.

And with a small voice he gently replies:
These needed me too--
Through you I had hoped to be with them
So perfect to a task to fill up your hole.
Forget not the weary, the hungry, the cold.
In them I will answer, in them I will be.

And with a silent cry I rose from my bed,
"Better tomorrow, I'll do what you will."
A million things to do in a day,
They don't clatter or clutter
and carve up the hours and minutes.

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Prayers

A cry runs through the night,
"Father, I do not have the strength."
The silence whispers back,
Intangible caresses.
The heart once sealed is open,
The heart once safe can be broken.

"Forgive me my fears."
Horse voices in the dark.
A grimace to the world,
A smile unveiled.
The child held back-loosed,
The child held close.

Empty sobs breaking shafts of light,
"Help me remember."
A soul on the gusts of time,
Seeking hope long forgotten.
The mind set afire by a thought,
The mind set on a course.

"I will do, I will go, I will be."

-Asmond

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