These Teeth Of Mine, That I Press My Tongue Against, Will Outlast My Soul. I Taste Death, How When I

I see her far from me. My mother is cool and white and floats like a sun in my mind. But she is a dying star. Her past self pervades my memory but her realness, her fullness in the present is nothing but black space where a blip of sunshine used to be. I cannot reconcile what I reminisce in my mind and what truly exists. I see her far from me. My mother is cool and white and explodes in my mind. The old light she used to shine will keep going long after she stops. And one day, even that false hope will fade. And there will be nothing left for me to peer at from a distance, but a stretch of sky I once called my mother.

Oh, I was happy. I was so happy, until I looked down at my reflection and saw I wasn’t me at all.

Even in its darkest hour, the world carries good people on it. And we must fight for them. Love is sustainable, a replenishing and revitalizing energy. Hatred ravages the wielder just as much as those it is wielded against. It can propel you, surely, but for how long? How long can you hold the fire before you, too, are turned to ash?

Why do you paint?

To make moments longer.

Hope lives in the eyes of children. I can see that now that it has left mine.

We could have heaven on earth, if there were no other people here but you and I. We would be shepards of animals, bearers of seeds. We would take the river home, and let it sweep us with its long cold body to our doorstep.

My skin prickles with heat,

Dropping doves on laundry lines

My heart leaps hard against my ribs,

Shelving sonograms in my mind,

Oh dear. I am in love.

I feel the grating fingernails of progress on my tender skin, and wonder how it lead us here. To desolation, destruction. We were supposed to be better, stronger, kinder. But instead we are are weaker, crueler and so poignantly and horribly worse.

How disappointing that evolution does not promise improvement, only difference.

The philosopher in my life, who speaks in thoughts and sits in inaction which he poses as an intellectual buffer. It is far easier to sit in living rooms and bore holes in the minds of grandparents with perpetual conversations than enact a plan. Set the bird free from the cage, and see if it flies, I say. But no, he sits and prunes the feathers of his ideas, endlessly and all the days on. For if he never sets his pondering in motion, he will never have to face that his bird is not living, and that which never lives never flies.

What sort of torture is it to know what one has done wrong and know deeper so that it can never be fixed? Must ever inadequacy be magnified, extracted, and plastered in the infant space beneath my eyelids?