Caritas, with apologies to St. Paul

Everybody dies alone, but does everybody live alone? Which is worse, which is more likely? The morally ambiguous protagonist who glides through the murky alleyway of good and evil, all leather jacket clad, blowing smoke out of a smug mouth. Revenge is personal, and by extension, selfish. Can redemption be selfish? A solitary consumption to alienate, isolate into the secure realm of self fulfilling prophesy. The unanswered questions which form our personalities, our later choices and affirmations about the world, in which we were are the tiniest of significance. Looking up, surrounded by the expansive black we are our choices. Everything leads to now, a swirling mass of the was and the maybe and the no. People and loyalties lie in different directions. We get torn asunder while we pray for thunder. It all comes down around us.

Your fantasies are unlikely. But beautiful.

I cannot believe the Saints won the Super Bowl. It's like this alternate reality filled with possibility, or the script for a terrible Spielberg film.

"If you have been rejected many times in your life, then one more rejection then one more rejection isn't going to make much difference. If you're rejected, don't automatically assume it's your fault. The other person may have several reasons for not doing what you're asking her to do: none of it may have anything to do with you. Perhaps the person is busy or not feeling well or genuinely not interested in spending time with you. Rejections are part of everyday life. Don't let them bother you. Keep reaching out to others. Keep reaching out to others. When you begin to recieve positive responses, then you are on the right track. It's all a matter of numbers. Count the positive responses and for get about the rejections." Thom Yorke

An Emerging Pattern

Wake me up sometime before the end of the world. Why, so you can experience something great before it ends? No, I just want to see it happen
"What we once were informs all that we have become. The same love will infect our hearts,even if they no longer beat. Simple death won't change that"

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Pain from Old Wounds: Pink Scars and Empty Bars

Tongues and trips, tasting of acidic bitterness. The cowards and the martyrs dropping ash on the self-serving altars. We wore world weariness like a dead father's coat, a familiar history tainted by hormones and growth spurts. Spurt of the moment, changing every time we closed our eyes to see the stars. You saw the good in me like fog on the stained glass window of a burned down church. Settling for happiness over the nose bleed head rush of the high ground. Take some bad advice, get hurt and accept humanity for all the ill fitting promises of divinity. Every time we spoke of setting the world on fire, I knew you would be our fireman. A St. Paul surrounded by wounded atheists: our hearts ashtrays, our bodies landfills, our minds filing cabinets for the ongoing quid pro quo. Once at that stone bench, across each other with a pack of cigarettes I told you I would save the world if I didn't hate it so much. As if I could be an anti-hero in someone's story, powers of cynicism and fear that the world isnt that bad peppered with bon mots. I'm ready to accept the redemption that gets neglected in the metamorphosis from damaged to productive. To stop saying what if and how come and say so what. That last bad year of tabloid headlines, then to today, all the blood shed along the way. The collateral damage of Stockholm Syndrome suicides. The "I think I like you because I hate myself" greeting card gets burned at the self improvement is exasperation seminar. I want to rewrite the shooting script. Take it as it comes, not how I think it should or want it to. When the environment begins to show in the destruction of the free radicals, the nuclear holocaust becomes a bit less funny, and a lot less romantic. Good writers kill themselves. I'm not ready to take that step. I want to hold the mirror to the lines being cut of my generation. People want the graphic details of a familiar story. They arent ready for unknown beauty, I can crack wise and philosophize, but the simple things keep eluding me.

In to out, left to right.

	St. Vincent And The National - Sleep All Summer .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

	Mountain Goats - This Year .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

Finish what you start

Appreciates death to illuminate the importance of now and everything we neglect or protect.

Dropping standards like your pants,
Nobody comes here just to dance.
The motion, the movement,
the music, the ocean.
Dates on a calendar.
I don't like anyone, haven't showered in days
Spent over a decade, saying it's just a ph(r)ase
The time has past, and has become as such.
A rippling puddle and a splintered crutch.

Continuation

They had film noir, we have bubblegum grit. The reimagined neon splash trope of genuine emotion, skewed to service this demographic. No future.

A signature, proof - a pretty face and a puddle of blood. This fine artistic noose we fashion for ourselves, playing hangman with our style until the bloated corpse of our body of work becomes a derisive epithet for "selling out/buying in/feeding the floating shark". That's a lot of integrity for people who grow up wanting to be famous of something, instead of becoming something.
Crayola's Dildo: Growing Up in Technicolor.
You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics. Bukowski
I still want someone to draw this comic for me, about a gay superhero called the Ice Queen that transforms smoking crystal meth.

It's not the greeting card, or the radio hits that are responsible for this feeling. Everything meaningful was a moment in time. By something crafted and precise, we approximate the intangible happiness of a single perfect moment. If we blame the media, we neglect the action. We want to be happy, happy is there, we stay for as long as we allow ourselves. It's that simple.

Older and Far Away

My sister was talking to me yet again about significant others... in an attempt (probably) to help me. She feels I am too picky and thus will be left with nothing. Like significant others are the limited art books or that one Hunter Thompson book that isnt Fear and Loathing at the Friends of the Library book sale, and if you arent awake before time itself to search for it amongst the other faithful, you will be left with a used, stained, cat calendar. My thought before writing this was "The reason people enjoy supernatural things are because they allow deep dark humanity to masquerade as an alien or vampire to distance ourselves from our darker, some would argue, true self." Especially when it is agreed that we are speaking in metaphor, the understanding and emotion seems to be more palpable and less overtly hokey, when all things are really just soap operas. Regardless of the costume and posturing, we all want to see human relationships being created and destroyed like the atoms that comprise us. So in that sense, still waiting for Hiroshima, praying for the fallout.