For Yeats, With Disdain

You are the sun on my back that I so fear to turn around to face
For history shows that if I try
I will not be able to see you, and you will not be on my back any longer
And my back is, without question, my favorite spot for the sun

I don't know what that means
That the place I most crave the light is the place I can't see it
Honestly, I can only imagine it means my back gets cold sometimes

I am sick and tired of everything meaning something
Especially over the course of a meaningless existence
I wonder if I assign meaning more to distract myself or to distract girls
In the end, it doesn't matter
That's all.

A Deposition Of The Life In Question, Insofar As I Am Introspective, And You Are Listening (You Being Me, And Subsequently, Both The Audience And Subject)

I am something of a killer
I have killed
I will kill again
Thus, my initial remark

There may have been a time when I was not a killer, but certainly, it was not an era of any duration
Likely, I was born fated to bring death to some number of things
I can't, with any conviction, even estimate the number
It is arbitrary anyway

From everything I know, you are something of a killer
You have killed
You will kill again
And it would be quite the double standard to ignore the implications these facts have

Of the things I am not sure of, I am the most sure of death
It is, at the very least, a word I have used thousands of times
It is, at the most, the very purpose of my life
You can forgive me for not elaborating, surely

You have forgiven me before
Once for a very figurative instance of my killing
Often (unconsciously) for literal instances of killing
You are not in a position to grant judicial decisions, and I do not take your pardons as such
However, I do not fear that the courts will feel differently

As overwhelming as the forgiveness for my actions has been, it has not been so overwhelming that it could be described as "unanimous"
Should it be described as such, I would feel accordingly fortunate (and innocent)
I do not expect it to be described as unanimous

There is one girl that I know of that has not forgiven me
I would be beyond remiss to allow myself the belief that she is the only one
Furthermore, she is not without evidence, nor empathy from myself
It could be said that I understand her grudge
It could also be said that I do not mimic it

My willingness to say these things (and many more similar things) is not without effect
It is a trait that served me well, even with this aforementioned girl
It was my willingness to abstain from saying a single phrase that has put me in this situation
Or so I believe

I speak for another, for forgiveness, and for death
I admit, this is bad form
I admit, I will likely continue
Surely, There Are Worse Things To Perpetuate

Run

I used to be in love with the sky
So much so that it didn't matter that I couldn't reach it
And when I did, I felt joy

I used to be in love with the ground
So much so that I never left its side
And when I did, I felt fear

I used to be in love with the wind
So much so that I stayed up until morning listening to its song
And when it didn't sing, I felt anger

I used to be in love with the air
So much so that I gobbled it up
I made it into something different
Something that could kill me
Something that suffocated me
So I ran

But I couldn't stop loving the air
So I continued to breathe
And I continued to run
From the poison I made from it

If it ever catches up to me
I fear it will smother me

I used to love you
So much so that I loved you like the sky, ground, air, and wind before you
I made you into something different
And now I run

For I will never be able to stop

Stars

PART I

I’ve seen so many stars die that I can’t look into the night sky without being overwhelmed by the cosmic cry for help

There’s nothing for me to do except duck the plummeting lights and turn to face a faceless girl with a powerful smirk

I don’t want these stars to disappear

But I don’t want the girl to come out of her spell

And if I were to rush off to the aid of a diving star and help it back into its place and time in the sky, she would know

I am not from here

And I do not belong here

The faceless girls are too much for me to lose, but it’s getting harder to face the wounded sky

Each star leaves a fresh scar that nobody else is able to see

And the neighboring galaxies turn sideways and look at me with lopsided, imploring eyes

And their haunting symphony starts from the top

So many parts have gone missing but I hear them all as if the night was packed with stars in a blinding display

Each star strains now, to project both its own and the part of its fallen neighbor across a void that more vast with every day

Collecting the carcasses of expired stars that couldn’t sing any longer 

The stars that exploded with their last breaths into furious, miserable, screaming rockets desperately seeking the limits of the void

Only to fall off with a whimper and fade into the blackness with a final pleading flicker

I remember all of the stars that have met this fate

And I hear the hum of the void every day filling with tortured, murmuring stars, all calling out the name I used to be called by

“Snowden”

--

The void was never going to exist until the first star left

Until one light in a spectrum abandoned its place

To be a brighter light in a dimmer picture

He found a solar system he liked and bullied the star out, but he’d never had planets 

and moons and life to take care of, and burned it up all when he looked at it for too long

So he moved on to the next one, remorseless, but determined not to fail again

This time, once he had settled in, he remembered at once to look away so as not to set his planets aflame

He brooded off into the other direction, determined not to allow his new fostered worlds the same fate

But by the time he turned back to check on them they had sealed and frozen into barren landscapes of ice and rock

He spun once and his gravity launched the solar system into the far reaches of a new galaxy

Suddenly all he could see was an empty expanse, a black sea of abandonment from the  ocean of lights he was once a part of

A single tear fell from his eye and burst with a sizzling eruption into a flare, and he knew for the first time what it felt like to burn

Part of him was consumed by his own heat, but he welcomed and relished the pain it brought, and along with it, a smaller, darker being

The tears continued to fall and he continued to shrink, until he was hardly any bigger than a beach ball, and only as radiant as a moody twilight

Everything would have seemed enormous to him, but there was nothing around, nothing  left from his giant tantrum to see or fear or even disprove his solitude

So he felt alone

He felt alone in part because he was alone, and in part because he had never felt anything so real

Maybe it was because he was so small, but it seemed like all of his emotion had been forced out into the blackness before him

As if he had lost the room to keep all of his demons safe and shelved and they had been let off with every tear that fell on his searing surface, expelled with a puff of steam and a hiss

They loomed and swayed in front of him as if they were a massive wall on the eve of its demolition, and subsequently, his

And in this moment he made what honestly and truly felt to him was the solemnest of promises to escape the monsters of his past

He swore with such passion and naivety that, were there a watchful god, he would have no choice but to be consumed with adoration at the purity of the shrunken, broken star’s emotion

The vows were all the same, but phrased progressively beautifully, to the point where he stopped speaking in sentences and began to speak in verse

His poem went on for an untold time before a watchful god finally took pity and laid the crippled star to rest, and the little bulb fell off into an exhausted slumber

When the little star awoke, he felt guilt

Then he felt fear

Then he felt alone

He was supposed to stay awake, he was supposed to stay in verse, he was supposed to stay

With them

The darkness wasn't as dark as it had been before, but it was somehow bleaker

As if even the night had given up on itself

He could see all the scars now

He could see all the tears and the streaks across the night sky
If it was a battlefield, it was his

The sneer curled up his face and never left

Musing 1

Part in a disjointed series

I don’t smoke cigarettes but I live in smoke

I know what I want and I know what I need but I have no idea what I already have besides sentences and decent-at-worst looks

Quick, think of two words that make you look quirky and witty and hope to trick someone into dedicating a year to discovering that they actually hate you

If only to practice marriage, because our mouths are not calibrated to say “forever” and mean it yet, and our lives only go by in two year intervals,

That’s in-sane

Insane is still a word meant in jest or hyperbole and whoever among us youths has thought to imagine it as a real possibility, as anything otherwise, is in a darker place than we’d like to collectively imagine

So let’s not imagine anything and be scared of everything

And at least then our fear of snakes will be rationalized by the reality that this whole world is scary and isolating one thing about it doesn’t change that one fucking bit

And, they move funny

Half of the time the world is dark and half of the time the world is bright and all of the time it’s true that metaphors forged with undeniable truths of our environment aren’t necessarily more applicable for simply that fact but sometimes teens still ry to make each other fall in love by pretending that they are

And who are we to deny that magic

Because I clearly understand the way the earth’s orbit works and I understand a lot of other, more complicated things, but I don’t know how to start explaining love to a cynic

I am a cynic

I can’t explain it to myself either

And that logic makes perfect sense

But love doesn’t