This place again. How did I make it the last time? I'm so tired... so. very. tired. My life; a precarious tower of wooden blocks, so easily toppled.  I feel so deep, it takes every ounce of my being to not become completely overwhelmed. Is this really where we are?

I want to run away. Someone, please save me.

Everything, everywhere carries me to you. I cannot escape your phantom existence; the ghost I chase in my dreams. The unreal you from a world I've never known. The you I have never known. When I imagine my escape, you're always there. Faceless. Identity-less, urging me to run away with you.

The years pass, while life and experience accumulate, and we ultimately gain benefit from the torturously poor decisions we once made by having a deeper understanding of the human condition, of what it means to fight the battle of being alive.

Love.
What is it?
What does it do?
Where does it come from?
Why do we need it so badly?
Do we need it?

There is only one question, really. And that is: Who knows how to make it stay?

Like an outlaw moon, eventually captured by the mass and magnetism of that which it orbits, Love is drawn to the place where it belongs.

Regardless

The nights you fight best
are
when all the weapons are
pointed at you,
when all the voices
hurl their insults
while the dream is being
strangled.

The nights you fight best
are
when reason gets
kicked in the
gut,
when the chariots of
gloom
encircle
you.

The nights you fight best
are
when the laughter
of fools
fills
the air,
when the kiss of death is
mistaken for
love.

The nights you fight best
are
when the game is fixed,
when the crowd
screams
for your
blood.

The nights you fight best
are
on a night like
this
as you chase
a thousand dark rats
from your brain,
as you rise up
against the
impossible,
as you become a brother
to the tender sister
of joy and

move on

regardless.

-- Charles Bukowski

Places in Time

I want to tell you I'm disappointed, as if somehow that will magically make any difference at all. The more honest we are, the further we're driven away. What most people want is their untainted fantasies, not reality, not truth stained in sincerity. The cycle of distrust has become the way of life. The truth no longer sets us free, it now just terrifies and overwhelms us. A revolving trap that momentarily allows us to feel the warmth of freedom, shining on our faces, but lasts only as long as we remain in the illusion... the delusion. Deluded we are. Deluded we want.

Boxes of thoughts and bundles of words I would like to say. I'll hold them close and tuck you away into the darkest corner of my mind. You are never to be said nor seen nor heard by anyone that would care. Moments of time that will not survive the night. You come to me so strong, preying on vulnerability, but you are nothing more than a siren of feeling. You lure me in, and yet I know if I follow then I will only meet a more despondent state than I experience in this moment. We've been here before, you and I, but you know? We're all each other has. In the end we are alone, fighting the ghosts of what appear momentarily so important.

No one cares. We don't even care. We just think we do. It will soon pass and we will return to that much more common human state of indifference.

Places in Me

How can you know, where the real ends and the imagined begins. The lines are so blurry and the real... well, it always seems to startle me with a slap to the face. I'm reminded of my out-of-touchness so harshly, which makes the real seem bitter and cold. What I want and what I think I should want are so out of sync. What I think other's want... such a mystery. I have absolutely no idea anymore. As if I once knew?

How to fix this this brokenness, this out of sync....ness. I feed off of feelings, off of my response to your being against mine. I want the intensity of feeling that can happen only with another like me, perhaps at the cost of inventing a story to create that someone who is flesh, who is me, but is not me. Someone as close to me as my mind will let me dream up.

I'm absolutely terrified that in the end, everyone leaves. Dreams won't.