Drink make belief tea and play pretend

There's no such thing as normal, as socially well adjusted.
Not in the classical sense.
There's instead a societal average, almost an equilibrium that we've all reached
A common language of etiquette and decency we've all understood to be necessary for societies as large as ours to survive
And yet deep inside each of us, there is a yearning to break away
To want to truly express your primal needs, as simple or outrageous as they may be
But we keep them all boarded up with nice intricate cast iron shutters over our souls.

And then we make pretend the beast that emerges when we're drunk, that THAT'S not who we really are.

Sunday afternoon driving

The best kinds of drives are the kind with no real destination
Where I have no where to be
And no where to go
The kind of drive where the clouds hang low on the sky
Ready to plunge the world into fog
And the trees crowd in close on either side
And it feels like the whole world is nothing but a single direction
Black to both sides
Gray up and down
And forward is just pure white
I pretend you're standing there at the end of it all
Waving at me
In no particular rush for me to get there
And I'm in no rush to get there
Because we both know
I'll get there eventually




Just a time and place I am trying to recapture

I watch you from afar

I read the words on the page
And I imagine it's my pen putting them onto paper
I can even imagine where I was when I wrote them
Who I was thinking of
And I wonder how different we must be after all
Because the words I see on this page
Are all the words I wish would come together in my own head
And not in yours

Reusing Canvas

I wrote on this piece of paper about nine times
The page is now dark grey from all the eraser marks
(I use pencil because I always make mistakes)
I tried to write every happy thought I could muster
And I came up with four lines
Two of them were depressing
And one was just a food I happen to like
I erased that and tried again
I wrote a tagline from a movie I realized I didn't really like
I tried seven more times and just wrote "I am a happy person and I love myself because..." and couldn't finish the sentence
Now I'm just staring at this piece of paper
Dark grey from all the eraser marks
And thinking, this is as happy as it gets for me

A staged reality

They say a picture is worth a thousand words
What they don't tell you is that they aren't describing things in the world
It's a thousand words describing yourself

Every direction leads back here, Eventually

You only meet a few different kinds of people in your life
They come in different sizes, shapes, colours, and ages
But they're essentially mostly the same
Kind of like assorted cheese
You'll find yourself seeing old friends and enemies in new faces
Reliving past victories and defeats in battles you're fighting all over again
And it will all never change
And you'll still fall in love with the same wrong people
And you'll still hate that person for all the wrong reasons
And you'll still find yourself hanging out in the same stupid bar
Telling the same stupid poems
Hoping that same stupid girl will show up again
And maybe this time she'll realize how deep you really are
And maybe this time it will be different
And maybe this time it will work out
But it won't
Until you realize the thing that makes them all the same
Each and every time, in each and every way
Is you

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

There's a lot of frightening things in the world
Fear of death
Of heights and spiders
Speaking in public
Fear of open spaces
And fear of closed spaces
(I wonder what would happen if those two fell in love)
There's even a fear of long words
(The word describing it is gigantic, you can look it up)
I'm not afraid of the normal things
I'm not afraid of a zombie apocalypse or vaccines
I'm not afraid thunder or lightning
Of falling or flying
I'm afraid that one day I'll wake up
Run my hands through your hair
And realize it was all a mistake
I'm not afraid of my parents dying
But I'm petrified of my kids living in a world without me in it
I'm afraid one day you'll all hate me because of how cautious I've been
I'm scared the world will wake up one day
And the rest of us won't