The bullet scraped and traipsed its way over in through around the calcified wreckage, swerving and

curving as if guided by some invisible hand, gentle in its touch and seeming to grow in size and stature by the second; slowly, slower and slower yet still. Then there is me, eagerly anticipating the day full of duties ahead, gathering up my things, my weapons, ammunition, snacks and bounding around the corner to join my brothers in arms in this, our daily struggle for survival. Then, almost cartoon like, a bullet the size of a massive missile comes to a screeching halt, right in front of my face; Sparked his mind, seesawed unwind, take your time it's free to climb, corporal ladders wonton mad hatters, crystal stairs farmers and latters, sing your song breathe in out wrong, what I sees a needy throng, testimony of the torture life imbues like wet rags wrung. According to some I was the less smart one; an unfortunate bend in the family tree. You see, it was all measured in test scores, and as you can probably guess from my proclivity for writing, lets just say it was not my forte. And by less smart it is to say as in comparison to your Aunt, my sister and as of possessing a luster which was a set of more cloudy, gray, dull skies to her bright, shining, crystal clear, cloudless mind. You cannot prove or dispute anything and everything at all times you see; it is an unfortunate societal embodiment which forces us as if by guile and a seemingly unending canister of wit to do so. Nevertheless, such was my station in life. Writing was my escape from the curtains of life drawing in closer and closer around me, day by day, minute by hellacious minute. You know those days when you realize that

not even in your worst nightmares could you have imagined what it is that is happening to you? When your life appeared to have sprung a leak, and you are left there alone, far out at sea, to bail and bail, knowing full well that it was your destiny to sink? That was when my writing rose up and sent me soaring, over and above all of my problems, alleviating all of my stresses, placing my spirit on a pedestal, somewhat above it all. There were notebooks full of my stuff, poetry, whimsical, fruitful, lofty, loving, deleterious, mysterious, pompous and spontaneous poetry, carefully crafted, written, and rarely reread, until one day I decided to organize everything, a couple of years worth of bleeding, heartfelt emotion spread out on page after solemn, intransient page. You see, creativity craves a certain sense of freedom; to dive deep into the ocean of pain and heartache and into the black hole of vanquished hope; and fight and claw your way back, holding something, a beacon of light, something to spread joy in and among your fellow creatures of humanity. So I organized everything and got so psyched, I felt as if I was being propelled by a supernatural force; and in the meantime I was still writing, and the writing itself started to become something transformative in nature; I began writing songs. A journey fueled by hope, undying, passion-lit, overzealous, undying hope can take you many places. You see, I have failed so many times I had given up counting, and that is only because of the fact, fact, fact among facts that every single time it happened, everytime I have run into a brick wall where I thought an open meadow would be, it has added something to my spiritual fire to keep on going, evolving into something new, something stronger and better. It has provided me with fuel in the form of the special peoples wishes I have collected, not neglected along the way. What I am trying to say is, I wrote a song, I wrote a couple songs, and then I wrote a few more.

Yet there he was, on this fitful fancy fuzz, torn born warn asunder, while on the stairs they pulled the rug without from under his dreams became obscene a false look no less a glean in his hands off zealous eye crystal glares to petite stares, ample needs whose wants need wear, to the tortured and dogmatic ridiculed jobs son he dares to glare back and stare with verve, simple feelings turned absurd, till words flocked and flew like birds or less rocks more meteors, crystallized this simple habit my minds eye see something grab it, build off it and then what's more take what's yours and make ownership widespread, they can't ignore what's spelled backwards reads the truth to turn tables over and onto you, like the lizards tongue, the gators zoo, but taste baste and make some cake from thin air your dialed in heir like the tortured walrus has got you climbing from the seashore like the sea lion, I'll breed and make believe I climb trees among the bees honey hives instead nine lives can overtake me, no ones hate can still deflate me or debase my despondency, lifes an atom on a cherry tree falling from the sky amidst turmoil suspecting danger leads to foundations of real surreal tough guys, where the torture is the test to live through thrive and derive from ample mess, my tongues tasted sense of humor and been hounded by the ghost, some say maybe I say for sure the ones tortured are loved the most. From twenty five to twenty nine in a flash, pick up sticks pile high time to the sky red rosey sassafras and mince meat sell dwell lost cash bereft theft run outta gas get stuck brakes and pray for crash still I ride hide and deride myself dream I can't deny myself people hate trashed up new gate tear my ass fresh broken plate and deflate my iron tongue lungs breathe in out coinflate to the torture pass the test rhythmic rhymes filet my

chest to a pressure cooked uncovered book ancillary clad injunction, a terroristic threat down my neck kidneys malfunction, and destroy my little boy be he hero or wind up toy, caught off guard fall fast and hard to the tungsten self taught bard, lifes experiences teach us to be loss is wisdoms wild card, gummed up summary slow flow tantamount internal glow where your ways an uneven particularly ungrateful cataclysmic stow away lost forlorn and ironclad, rarely thought of pivotal and sad state of mind, unkind unwind where sea turtles roam no man may find, his intestines weave and wind, slow games played true spirits find testaments to natures wand estuaries trees and ponds I'm done hope you had some fun. I'm broken my zones in undertones and mismatched and misdirected, left alone and disrespected by the drones I've always known but the new ones who couldve known? a not me, a hehehe like the bird whose homes a tree, I've climbed up am now back down and this worlds all turned around, lifes a happy tragedy, times are tough men hang from trees silver tongued which games I've won stand alone I'm in the zone and which one already told ya come again? you're notta friend of this guy don't even try or I'll fry you then tweeze your eyes out and then climb the tallest ladder I can find and send em flying, time to ride hide and deride myself dream I can't deny myself find the highest corporate ladder and come screaming till I find myself hancuffed stuffed and blind in a cell dreaming that I could rewind myself hmm, times a ticking time bomb, don't distress, all lives are one big mess, I'm one man whose not defined by stress, meaningless strains of time digress, hammered like a nail toothless tiger pull his tail, I'm surrounded I surrender my own knife I'll lie and plunder till I'm gone you're left to wonder go ahead I'm six feet under burn a lamp upon a woodshed take your time I bet you he said stones in trees and fields of thunder
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frosted grass beneath my feet children laugh and lions eat last and loved the rarest treat men are something they are not sweet. The Muses use torture, finest mold in creation. Hence, I have failed them now. Now there is nothing. No one, no thing, no money melt down or catastrophe on the horizon. One must have the greatest heart to undertake this occupation. To understand all, in order that it, pain, may happen, and at which point they are free to do their best work, and perform to the highest heights of what their higher calling requires with refinement and precision. It becomes in the name of a greater good to perform these acts of good disguised as they are in the minds of men as unutterable acts of consequential evil. So a lack of understanding in some can and should lead to anger in others, and what have you. Tomorrow? I may not unearth this again so I thought, Write it down now. Work dispels words. Now they too have become intransient, a tripledreamed ensemble brought back around to complete this, my ever evolving, cascading, infinite, flowing glowing elliptical circumfri. Its over. Wow. Perhaps even I am hard to live with. I detect the mundane; I worship free time as if each second could be my last. I love the moon, the earth, the sun and the stars, and people, though they irritate me, perturb me, refuse, use and confuse me, they are here with me, and therefore my pen is partly theirs, here for one and all to see, part prophecy part lunacy part mimicry part mockery, but it is part of the part of the part of what is left when there is nothing left but art. Where I had used to be an open book, I was now shutting myself off, I knew that; it was a conscious decision. I had to push her away from me to get in touch with my true self. Life was not meant to be easy, but I believed it was meant to reward those who kept

the faith, through thick and thin, through it all, around the sun and back again. The chief connections I have always desired in life have been emotional rather than physical. I needed someone to get me, to feel me, to know me; and that is what led me up that steep rocky path, to the edge and down over the proverbial cliff, kicking and flailing my arms and legs, laughing, dancing, singing my way down to the unforgiving, calm, even ground, where I landed, hard, sending up a plume of dust high into the air; and at which point I got up, shook myself off, and continued on my way. Where have I gone wrong? I guess I never really thought that way. Sure I have worried, but by the time you are done worrying you have forgotten what you started to worry about in the first place. Unfortunately it does not bode well with other people; results count, little else. What you must learn though is everything else counts too; values are a byproduct of mankinds desire of success, and the desire to be better than others; you will find out too that no one is better they are but different, with different strengths and weaknesses, (and many of which serve to bring about the opposite effect than for that which it was originally intended!) only in their composite comprising of an entire human race. Let me take back the central statement of the previous paragraph, some people are better than others, at adapting; and that is all that matters! Too much work is a bit of a bummer. That is why you need a driver and a planner along for the ride to accomplish your one off dream of traveling, throwing society by the wayside and living but to experience things. It is a bit of a hike crossing this country of ours, but a man of imagination is capable of
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nearly anything, so, under that guise and in that gaze, California seemed but a hop, skip and a jump from PA. Would I go tomorrow or the next day after that? Maybe not. My role at the time was to continue what I had been doing, to elucidate my elocution, tear things up until I got somewhere and shocked the world, rendering the rest of it less unexplored. It takes a man of means and a man with a special set of skills to tame the fickle beast of ambition. Still, dreams are dreams and a man with a pen in his hand often finds them at his side, relentless in their enumeration; until next time we meet, my feathered fairy friend. The mind always seemed interesting to me mainly because I have one, and I devoted a great deal of attention to it. The old part of myself is a bit confused by this new part which has only recently emerged and seems interested only in tearing down preconceptions it had taken years to develop, and creating new extrapolations the likes of which have not been seen since The Praise of Folly by Erasmus, or A Man For All Seasons, the story of Sir Thomas More. Theirs is not my calling in life, but each of us that lives even a single second on this earth owes them a debt of gratitude; for their suffering and for their rising up to meet the calling that was facing them in their time, and thus granting us their company in this, our time, here and now. To me I had to work because with art as my foremost pursuit, it acted as a stimulant in a way, work that is. Little things you never would have seen from the shelter of your own home, little things people said, they all contributed to the whole of what I was trying to create. You never knew when inspiration would strike, but one thing I did learn was that the ephemeral swirl of action and the intermingling of so many people with so many different backgrounds was as fertile a ground as I had come across in all my years on this twirling ball of fire. It was

a struggle, a slow, long, drawn out race; and I felt like a ship adrift at sea at times, just hoping, praying for the day I would again see land on the horizon, my promise land. What words are these that travel from far to near with the swiftest gait? Cancelled atoms moved asunder thoughts still, bend, fly, eclipse, encapsulate, until the earth is under the giants foot, winged angel's bath is treasured simply falling fast or living by the sea at last, your thoughts may reach me my time to unwind teach me meanwhile life goes on upon an ancient craft. A how long? how long can you stay at the peak? Words and doubts fresh false absurd spray and sprout and drain from spouts Till I washed my hide and calcified cleaning bricks and slimed out grouts. Who am I? Fresh handsome fly decried leader to the fountain of youth seeking crowds, burning yoohoos fresh gotten worn out souled shoes, singing hippies with the blues, fresh outta clues and no news forgotten broken imbued, by fresh begotten minced milk, disturbed climes upon stilts, rewritten rhymes and windmills, tunneled sand times and distills, porsches wines carousels, Rasputin time stills and spills, the pickled mime with grape gills, curvaceous signs and wet twills. My childhood was all games and silliness and banter, and brought along with it the self assurance that comes from living on an army base in the greatest country the world has ever known. Squadrons of tanks didnt match the strength of the network of kind hearted, loving mothers however, who stood ready to swoop in anytime an emergency arose concerning us little tikes and sweep us up into their gentle, soft, warm breathing breasts. For me it was all creeks, awe inspiring, thunder clapping,
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water dousing, body drenching, flash flood powered, cliff cratering, heaven rattling storms and playing out in among them. I'm not trying to tell you everything was perfect, because it nearly was, but not quite. The good must be punctuated by the bad, you don't know that as a child, so you must learn it; to go from experiencing the highest titillation to drowning in your own torrential downpours, your own earth shattering, world rattling, thunder and lightning bolt dancing with buckets of rain pouring down over rooftops, cities and androgynous seas all the same, until the world seems a pittance; to have lost all you have gained; for me it was Georgia, Fort Benning Georgia. Games were it for me; as far as girls were concerned, complete domination of any game I played was my foremost pursuit in terms of producing any abject affectation that the proper form of flirtation should engender. However, being named to the whiffle ball hall of fame on the 3400 block of Tudor street had its limitation in terms of its draw on admirers. There were none! Well maybe some, but there is something else of infinitely greater importance to a person at that age, and it is spelled out i-m-a-g-i-n-a-t-i-o-n. It is sort of like sitting on the outward extremities of the highest leaved branch you can imagine, alone, and looking outward over a land so vast, you are soon tempted to abandon it to go exploring; and though you do, you may return to that perch in the years that follow, with that infernal, mental element known as human memory; all the while finding important new perches of internal emblazonment and visceral rectitude along the way. When you're a child you don't understand what you're supposed to do, just that it is something, and usually something related to what it is your parents say. Through fear you are at times propelled and at times paralyzed. Somehow you pull

through, emerging unscathed. God made you fast as a young man so no one could really catch you if they wanted to hit you, and your instinctive mind was made even quicker so as to protect you from dangers you could never even imagine. However no danger, be it perceived or an arc of actuality or both, matched a persistent dream you experienced as a little boy, hiding from an army of tanks, and helicopters with search lights and an infinite array of uniformed men marching right up the street toward your house where you would play everyday, and you there terrified, alone, even your dog is gone or perhaps sometimes he is there with you on your scarier nights, but they are coming, what can you do? You hide, behind a wall, and they go by you unsuspecting, for now. I remember my last big solo journey during college; I drove straight across the country, although zig zagged might more aptly describe it; sleeping in the car, daydreaming, spinning fanciful yarns in my mind, and mapping out my route along the way using a gargantuan Atlas of the World, it was cool. From the startling glare of the rising sun as it eclipsed the endless horizon and shed its grandeur upon the blue grass state, waking me up from a long night of driving in the process, to the mighty Mississippi and the magnificent arch that meets you at the midpoint of this colossal nation, to the seeming endless repetition in similarities among people unencumbered by their station in life, at least appearing so on the mindless surface. Suffice it to say I was happy at the time, on my adventure, away from it all. You might say that I made it somewhere, to a beach, an ocean, a regular modern day Magellan I was, and after I collected what few thoughts I had left at that point and meandered back over to the space where I had left my little baby black convertible, I looked down and there it was; a California long board. It was the wheeled variety, underneath my car, a gift from the universe. You see, not everything is done in vain.
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There's people broke left in a lurch out of gas and low on hope, times get hard man they turn into a slaughter people running out of funds simple needs for shoeloess daughters, sun shines man on these times rich mens mental lapses brought on these crimes, many men women and children sinking slowly in the sand, shout out loud breathe in out proud lay your plight upon the plate of the gods dwelling in the clouds, take your mind make it your armor a poor man can be a farmer building sustenance from seeds how man lives is how he bleeds, share your dwellings bring them in smelled up house less steeped in sin, to begin to fare less poor having less is giving where less is more, plates abandoned rationed evenly many men and many grins until the lions den is smitten by the will of man to win, and break bread build from within creature habits stymied ghosts turn the table to hopeful toasts pantomimes and creatures climb from black holes to gleeful posts, pass the word and feed the herd immigrations less absurd to the man who feeds his family of priority this is first. Sorry I wrote, sorry I choked, climbed up upon a ladder fell down and ten rungs broke, a cloaked out captain industrious stoked bloke, perfluous hyperactive perfluent and hyperfluent testify lie pantomime steril eyes belies a prize truant clown well told false lies been denied tried calcified paralyzed a pair of eyes where you lives not where I breathe see steal sleep and then reside by the by and by the way words are letters in dismay and I'm wondering not wandering proud broken down indeed detained but I'm purchasing a prayer I'm not worshiping your hide by the by behind the bride where I stand say come what may.

A blessing, a curse, empty wallet inside an empty purse, collecting dust this tongue lit hurst, by the campfire divine unwind and listen to him plead the first, conjured up my selfsame mind, what is written can't be rewind, tortured pleasure stunk stained enshrined by my maker made divine give and taker soul respite and soul remaker till I'm done I'm undone this words a faker fresh pressed an undertaker stealing breath a frail inhaler lamp lit ghosts and bee stung bakers gifts rewrap appeal to nature world undone this song unfavored resurrected with some flavor tongues to bees to open seas pleasured gaits to rabbits tongue defined mind and like behavior treasured fancy flip flops a faker by the tides taken by mavens across towns and misbehavin one two threes conductors cravin to be heard seen and unshaven teradactles flew to heaven by the bedside of a boy with two toys a hundred heroes and a pension for the ways of manmean thoughtful serene emptied room and never clean but unseemingly befittingly crystles gleaming from his eye, tortured held down strong small fry like his battle seldom shy but kept in Promethei canceled earth this worm might die to be next to you and I taught alone bought books read and learned all on his lonesome to be tied, earned fair shares of nicknames by the wayside, sampled bricks in his bedside entranced not by he said she said but by deeper sheeper thoughts, perhaps and instead. Myths which strangle reality are false but to personify remains still sane. That which occurs does so within the confines of our unkempt humane still human brain. And occurences which occur occur as much as more or less as to the troops falling like raindrops weaving gently through the sky escaping plainly falling from an overhead caraplaning bombadier descending train; To the ground so far beunder beneath the sandwich in the sky call it cloud lightning and thunder hold the rain prefer it dry; Until it reaches to your hand your ilk your star woven asunder; making men of womens circumstancials while less is free mores
6

prone to plunder. Punctuated by a woman lovely and all, standing at a bus stop and wearing the most awesome colorful swamp boots I have ever seen to go along with her gorgeous dress on a beautiful sunny day, and the history of the future I was now experiencing in reverse in my chests heart and pit of my stomach, I came circling around until I landed somewhere; somewhere far far away from where I was just four months ago. Taking the roundabout way, I landed like a meteor on the moon, with a crash, and ready to extrapolate, on anything, basically. It was much more complicated than that, but I didn't care to get into all of those details. All I know is she was still there, at the end of this mini-holistic mental journey through a certain time-space vortex of profundity, she was there, waiting for me, but only after I had completed all the rest. Visions, dreams, a mercenarys mean, fighting fire with an anseled out working slurping turpentine, crystle fever fire breather take a breath at a time, like fine wine purple slime I can't read what I rhyme, still moving forward against the perpetrators cancelled out climb, up and down days turned around days son you're doing just fine forget fine you're doing great just wait you'll eat off a crystle plate, forget the past have a blast half full half empty torturous topped out sassafras glass, First second second behavior begets the first, namesake burial stake hefty heaving breathing sin, corruptified bounteous mind petrified by thoughts within, counting backwards counting time all I knows a crimes a crime and I've lived my life out loud people jealous people proud conscience clean as a latrine death defying thought out whim words are curves are birds are swords like the fallen apples twin, when I'm gone and heaped in doubt cloudless skies like thoughts within rectify wonton demeanors

into calculated whim and I'm talking ones and twos my boy I'm talking to my twin pleasures treasures tantalize steal you drive you from within until your thoughts beget your actions begetting lies and cries of fair false wind am I lying, you surmise, am I dying to begin, yes you may surprise yourself for beguiling wily whim! End of century, End of the millennium, Success an elusive fruit. Two hundred fifty times four I've run hour upon yesteryear, Building up my robocup until it fills up to where I'm jeered, Life is life is life is life fear not your roundabout, For though alone you may yet roam falls come swift and short when you do slip up. Tomorrow comes and comes again and thrashes all defiers, Though not the smartest nor the stoutest you will move earth; quench fires. Naysayers, doubters, fleecers flock and mock and tar and feather, The building blocks like molten rock your heart it hunts and gathers. Let time unravel before your eyes, expectations hover and unwind, The road ahead like graves littered with dead, to change; to be divine! The woman of my dreams was born inside me, my very first imaginative creation. She was nameless, faceless and a rough outline only but I knew that one day it would be filled in by just the right one; the perfect creature. No one will tell you these things, and you must learn them one great, big, slippery, wet stepping stone at a time. Meanwhile the water is rushing by you, ice cold, and the angels will all be looking at you, laughing
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when you do fall in, as inevitably happens from time to embarrassing time. However it will serve you right, awakening you from your slumbers, invigorating you to work harder than before. It seems to me that, from where I now stand, each of us is given a unique path to travel, and for which we should be ever grateful and take everything we can from it so that one day, when we realize that we must give it all back, it will actually be a gift worth giving. There are so many tests one must pass in order to enter into the euphoric state of life in the good graces of that special someone; looks, personality, sense of style, sense of hygiene, overall skill and ability, adaptability, likability, the entertainment factor, taste in music, sensibility when it comes to leisure time and the handlings of personal matters of business; an ability to shoot from the hip with pinpoint accuracy; the little nooks and crannies in your mind and whether they actually possess something virtuous and of value; your communicative proclivities, habits and tendencies and whether they work in such a way as to complement and buffer one another or if they simply give cause to curtain your mind, shutting down, losing all and everything in the process. What's the threshold for pain, where it begins and it ends and then begins subterranean emblematic emphatic territorial terrestrial pointed chin kin? like going down scraping the bottom keeping heads and hands razor thin, above the subterrary gilded ensconcement slapstick empty shopping cart chagrin, unhopeful future angry present testimony to lost wind, unfettered furled up furry fecund corollary croscind. Every moment, second, miniscule sliver of passing time is an endless enigma, the key variant in the augmentation process of life and not the given, for the human element is a utopial one,

transient in nature, filopic at best, and therefore death is not an action designed for purposes of an emotive response, but a necessary procedure geared toward ensuring that the genius of mankind does not placate and instills dose upon dose of a proper sense of urgency to use what you have gained in your elopement with the world to better the processes of life, action and most importantly, thought; for thought should be thought of as impetus to all. A writers task is a thankless one; imagine doing it, then, in front of a coliseum full of ravishing spectators, chomping on turkey legs and splashing all sorts of sloppy, wet slosh down into their guts; now imagine yourself there, seated in the arena, writing to a teleprompter above marking down your every slash across the page for all to see and to the ravenous cheers and jeers and oohs and ahhs of all hundred thousand of their glorious tempers. A fury takes over you in spirit and your hands begin to work hard to keep up with the effervescent flow of curvaceous literature as it spills outward from your mind, seeping out of your pen onto the page; there, a master of his craft performing in his full glory in front of a loquacious, jubilant, dubious, staid citizenry. And you write and write and they laugh and scream from the uppermost banister and it forces you along, drawn by the thing you can never quite reach, the forbidden fruit of perfection. Still you thrive, an imperfect ease your only guide in, over along through your mental highway. All of the sudden there is an explosion directly in front of you, a fiery meteor slamming down from straight out of the sky, you veer off of the road crashing into a ditch; your thoughts become scattered and vanish into the ether. Emerging unscathed there is a blinding light followed by an effervescent glow and billowing plumes of
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smoke; and you wait, only to see the emerging form of a human being, a woman. You stare, feeling uncertain and unsure for the first time in years about what is going on. Sweat pours outward from your chest due to your hearts relentless thumping. It is her, the woman, sent from heaven as if for the singular purpose to change your entire way of being. No life is forever; and that is why I choose to avoid that phraseology. I figured out something too about journeys, and how they lead you somewhere regardless of whether or not it is where you had set out to go. Dreams converge, make miscellaneous misguided adventures cancelled contracts mincemeat and misdirected, simple twinkle toes and recalcitrant miscreant pleasured lairs, breathe in out air meet in subways and lamp lit streets walk alone or walk in pairs, kiss my feet don't bend right over stand for something no less than nothing meet your loved ones tortoise hairs beneath a sacred lamped upon crystal stair feel her lips rentiate bliss sandwich shops dulating cliffs, stand for something less than nothing and then seal it with a kiss, bedside wrinkled clothes, from what he says to what he knows, lifes a forlorn flower bereft of mistletoes. It is sort of why things seemed to take so long in working themselves out and you were meant to take it all in adapting on the fly reflecting in retrospect and transforming your end goal, wringing out the rag containing each and every last morsel of sweat and tears that transpired along the way; until you finally get somewhere, somewhere great, and the place you were finally meant to be all along.

There were times when life became clear to me, like I was a part of some master plan, and that is why I worked, worked and then worked some more; it was for those moments, and because it made my mind retain the glean it would need when the time came to add everything up; and it was coming on fast now, faster each day. Its on us to do what we gotta do, to survive, -Tupac. Wu-Tang, Tupac, Biggie; they all had transformative purposes in life, and so I set out to be like them. Though our experiences would always differ, the ability to use but a few words to convey a gargantuan message would link us inexorably together. Tupac in particular seemed to flow between different styles and techniques with fluidity, such that rather than being confined to a singular talent, he sought to spread his abilities over as wide a range of the field we call art as possible; and just like it seemed that he never let it down, the same can be said of it and him. Life is a two way street for those who agree to meet it head on rather than shy away from it. Everything, all of the experience that he soaked up seemed to transform within him into some spiritual concoction; and out of his own glowing internal crystal ball spewed the magic that we all now have in our possession. Remember that; out of pain and hardship springs eternal beauty, and that is a message of hope for struggling youth everywhere. Like Tupac might have said, I suppose, the last thing I wanted was to be treated like a god, at best I wanted to have fun, do what I love and earn peoples respect, love and adoration. Was that too much to ask? How does one go about feeding the poor? Ask yourself that question, then go about doing it. Somehow my minds preserved by nature histrionics and nomenclature, birds to bees time passes by from fair to foul still winds howl by and force us to embue the stature of who we are
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and what we've gathered to this tell tale tall tried procedure wither fortune search and seizure so to this day footsteps fall where they may to blacking out and writers drought I've passed a threshold bided time and who I once was again am I tomorrow too may spring anew like jagged icicles in a self taught ambient lit pew I've lived, and so much we can say, I've lived and learned to love brute been burned with hugs thoughts melt touch. There must be a special anointment in heaven for the people who take care of the dead, mustnt there? For all that they do and have to go through? The torture of happening upon someone in that state? Dead? After having loved them for your whole life? Grieving and washing them, crying all the while attempting to make arrangements? The sheer torture of it all, and the dreams that follow? And the memories? You must certainly feel pounced upon from every direction, and perhaps from that ire, that anger at the relentlessness of it all, there rises and wells up a certain fortitude that knows no greater strength on earth or in man. It comes from dealing with the death of a loved one, living through it and everything it is surrounded by, and deriving strength from exhaustion, when the wells have been replenished, and begin overflowing with a lack of concern for whatever may befall you, for you have dealt with death, and dealt it a feverish blow. We all move forward through time together, holding a piece of string which leads back to everything. When you do go back, and each moment is clogged up, loaded to the brim to the point of a perpetual overflow, each step in the right direction becomes an algorithm, connected to some earlier form, or a brand new creation in and of itself, a guess and a second guess. Advice takes on the form of deceit, and laughter? A guide through it all. Conversations become a cluster of meaningless banter interlaced with some goodness, some momentary blessed

distraction from the endless monotony of your own thoughts; and great speakers, a gift as if by the grace of God, and the strings attached to the ropes and pulleys that lure and attract men of ripe ability to go in their proper direction should be worshiped above all, as achieving their most meaningful aim. I love poetry; the feeling it engenders properly done; but mostly it is it that I love, it. Perspective must be nurtured. A key every man must aspire to collect, is whereupon to venture upon having acquired their hard earned castle? Life begins on a gentle slope, at an easy pace, the greatest stretches of which we take in walking slowly, alone or together, with only one of the gentlest breezes against our faces. Nature reveals to us the enshrouded mysteries as they are meant to be perceived, externally, before inevitably taking an inward turn. It reveals to us the depth of the human spirit, the power of unfledged effort, whatever that means; the unceasing goodness of the seasons as well as the dangers held therein. I had a dream that one day everything would be great, and easy; yes, above all this! But what I have found has been far different. Life gets harder and harder, yet our minds, smarter, as if to counteract that fact. So, while burdened we become simultaneously emboldened by newfound strengths, energies, and dare I say it? Abilities. This last of which should be the most revered, for what are they beside the composite result that ALL our experience engenders? What if not everything and more? And so, they must be held up, your own beacons of light, your gift for the world that nourished you and cared for you and allowed you to be in this perhaps its last final great heyday; your gift for one and all to see.

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