blue blot
and watercolor ridge i could stand forever under the great arch of chalk line clouds wake up under a releasing storm find our way back to the road how many sets of lights are trying to avoid going home follow me farther north until the great compass of heartbeat spins sporadic cardiac confessions it is all here for you to read Black ink
On the folds of paper leaves Like mud on the white trees So many references to leaving I am certain there was a transition Between flightless and free fall When you rose up above the collapsible city I-beams and scraped knees laid out on the blocks of blocking concrete And suddenly Squares erased face and marked back to one Marched back through a honeycomb of tightly gathered memories Bordered on sickly nostalgic A flicker of lighthouse still refusing to stop in its spinning becon Good things come in threes Or pairs Or every blue moon It all depends on whose leg you rested your head upon as a child In some ways - we are oceans In some ways - we are still callow Go back through your catalog of collapsible structures And see where you are on the list See where I am on your list i threw myself into the twister,
storm on the back porch, it poured and poured into the buckets of plastic wishing wells i left out to collect those godly tears, cry and cry old climber, the mountain's slope never got easier, but we all thought it was gonna get easier and we can now open our eyes into the room that was lit the whole time, we were not tricked by our perceptions, only unaware of our perspective, while we sat twiddling our thumbs in the cobweb corner the dirt and dust
and fear in my eyes, climbed and climbed, we have stood on the ledge of a hundred bridges, and i always hinted smoke tall concrete pillars that held my bones together, i apologize if i have not utilized you properly, but i hope to make you proud i always loved how it looked when the sun went down miniature plastic canteens,
rumble in the trunk space, i had filled these with the run off from northern glaciers, now sitting in a dust storm, thirsty like hell with my desert throat, i think about home, or about how this highway is such an easy thing to coast, for someone with a head so stop and go, sometimes, seized up from the stalled out clutch, push and pull a gear box, so back and forth, sometimes the autumn comes, and heaven drops all its leaves down on us, smells just like home, but i'm always on the ready, for the next train out of here. the world looks so dark and dirty at the corners,
but when you counted off paces toward the middle, drew guns to duel with the death you thought would be waiting to take your soul, it was nothing but sun glowing in gentle rays off the distant desert, it all looked like water for the thirsty surface, while you stood there trembling like the little kid who discovered something that was always there, but fresh and new in your heart's vision rippling the puddle your certainty melted into, this whole globe keeps you unbalanced and gasping for the breath that got knocked out by the thunder punch rain storm, the beauty you try to take in, from every fold of plate tectonics, we're standing in the middle of everything now, trembling like willow bark, making new names for the things we see at the end of your long rope,
reminders of all the pushing and pulling, frayed ends, carving scar tissue reasons on your taut skin there are a hundred little voices that go on babbling all the ideas, the justifications, the great evasions, when you circumnavigated your own breathing process and found your words completely divorced from the ways your hands moved on the night before the night you left, i blindfolded myself and let the bell jar descend over my speech, everything echoing back at me, until it was nothing but reflections ricocheting off the glass, and my new found monastery of a silent mouth, the sun refracting through the cloudy globe, my big dawn of hopeful tomorrows, questions in equations that never added up you walked into the water, multiplied the void between you and this reality, while we stood and read streaming scripture in the red and blue fireworks, the lazy celebratory act of pride in a country we now curse you walked into the oceanic waveforms, just to pour salt in your broken wounds, come back riddled and remorseful, wrinkling your face into new ways of wondering - 'what if' you, walked into the flood i, just watched you jump dusty new york city smog scape,
little corners of aged faces like semi-cracked mortar crumbling onto the fully fractured sidewalk concrete, most of us just hang in dreams, hopelessly romanticizing all the big lights and pretty eyes in our surroundings, i am learning the art of hesitation, and the art of leading in full swing with my pressurized engine following suit, running through motionless four o'clock morning, you are marathoning through my head - giving motion to my four o'clock morning, while i'm still learning how to breathe don't go breaking yourself for no reason,
it looks like a hell storm coming, it looks like wishful thinking exist in the big exhale of release, when it all came unplugged with the world, no more digital reflections, just a collection of polished words i could keep hiding, you could keep lying, and the whole circle could run itself into its infinite delirium, without a second thought marked alleyway,
squeeze the exiting shade, the hexagonal leaky light that comes in waves, comes in particle pieces, sometimes the high dive is the best place for a non swimmer like me, them dense bones that go crashing into the plastic rubber water plane, shattering the fear of drowning one bodacious leap at a time high water marked the prayer lines that used to be at my knees, dented knees from folding myself into the napkin flower that cleaned up all the spilt forgiveness you couldn't drink up, so we went on hunting for something else to fill your cup, while i walked around with sailors' knots in my gut at 26 years old - i'm too tired to be bitter anymore, also lack the sympathy to really dig into your roots of sadness full fledged, and now is the time for endless work, like i wasn't working endlessly before this whole whirlwind of double shift weekends, and stacking jobs atop each other just to pay for the work i already did and all my friends just want to be laughing kids i sat still in the dullness of my cloudy city,
and thought about gears motioning the uplift, the downwind, i can smell the bitterness of inertia that kept everything stagnant while i just thought of motion on the days i forget to breath,
don't forget to forgive me, that linear congregation, the nave full of trees, pointing directly into a one-point singular perspective, we are all some sort of singular perspective don't carry kicked up dust in your back pocket, and don't go tying guilt to your gunnysack of wandering aspirations, on the days i forget to breath, don't mimic me nor abandon my senseless stream spinning cycle, i'm staring into the sky to show you i can be helpless at times, i can be so startlingly human that my tunnel vision kicks back full force, writing poems on the underside of my scar tissue to hide behind old wounds i kept picking at in attempts to never let them properly heal, just so i could have a story to tell later on we are all some sort of story on the days i forget to breath, when i'm scribbling letters on the starchy parchment, a thousand jotting pencil strokes per heartbeat, remind me why it's time to slow down and not feel so spring tensioned this life is nothing short of a wayfarer's paradise, bumping along the sometimes rigid tangent lines of an egg that probably wishes it were a perfect sphere, but our magnetic poles pull at both ends, stretch us out so wearily thin, sometimes so on the days i forget to breath, please pull me in overbearing endless oak tree,
come flood with me that lake of glacial run off, shot back the blue hue sky, and when i closed the arguing voices in my head, the image of you had carved itself into most of my daily routine some days i dream just to dream, just to remember that i can and i can paint myself naked with words, or shroud myself with vague coverings spun from those same letters, open up to that expensive empty sky, or hatch my inward energy toward you i'm here, and that's what i know i'm not perfection, and i won't pretend to be you could fold me inside out,
partition all my fleeting blips of mental radar, and tuck me carefully into your back pocket take me with you, or leave me lonely, hiding on the mountain with the god who hides on the mountain, contorted into solitude, wading in the scenic overlook of a thousand people desperate to find something to cling on to i fell into my foolishness and let my daydreams go running, put all my carts ahead of my horses, and laughed myself to sleep with a single chuckle of "oh what the hell", so simplified this life, never so simple as you wish it to be desperate days of longitude,
you kept on puffing out smoke signals in little ringlets, disguising yourself as a beautiful horizon of halos, i dug my head so deep in the sand in attempts to stop hearing, and stop seeing, all the broken waves unfolding from your breastplate, and the tired sighs that hid under the silence i rolled in with the whisking wind,
my feral hair blown over my jaded eyes, dusty desert, crumble mud, the city that's been standing a thousand back and forth years, and still just waiting on another flood, another rising sun the scenery,
the olive trees, hundred year old eyes that have seen the scuffling and just sigh their long sighs of when will this all be over, we bud ourselves into new creatures of habit, this being the new face i am donning for the future, shoot the dice on everything, come spades or come shine, i'm rolling through it all with my chin up there are instances and prolonged periods,
when i am spellbound into the hurry, hopped up on two feet walking too fast, trying to conquer instead of simply interact, i am red handed, red face flushed with the guilty blood, i have been called aloof, apathetic, and a failure, i have closed my own doors of opportunity just being too stubborn to see, walking too fast to notice, and if we all aren't trying to get better, then what are we really doing, what exactly are we doing, i am trying to give new words to the axioms of our living navigation of the deviating fog,
when the ground molds into the smudgy sky, and the perspectives of hopeful living get flipped inside out, the sweat that runs off my nervous forehead, when i start thinking about what's really happening, my anxious clapping murmurs, punchy cardiac, flailing stutter attack, the words that won't form into the waves of sound making, but the letters across my chest read: "Still Trying" |
Open blog writings and photos by Conrad Flowers - unless otherwise noted.
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