Man On a Mission to Kill a Soul

New paintings on a fabled canvas,

Watercolours blend against pasty portraits,

Washed paint obstinately merging,

Tempting beauty in the lies of an artist,

The fabric to another her of opportunity

 

The eyes on a sketch, caged in oblivion,

Details of feeble faith on a disarray of silhouettes,

Looking deeper upon soulless masquerades,

Smoky-thick truths behind faultless artistry,

The texture to another her of sorrow

Framed in cunning credibility, static-still,

No words to fuse unto acrylic vigilance,

Reality immerses amongst dried glaze,

The veneer to another her of obscurity

Beauty mustn’t then be in the eye of the beholder

You killed me so sweetly.

I Can't

“I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from a suicide wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild.''

“That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.” 

Petite criss

Je suis là à me submerger de souvenirs, comme mes faux espoirs figés au fond du bain. Avec les restes de nos soupirs saccagés qui portaient un sens pourtant enfoui, je me laisse couler. J’ai les lèvres tachées de rouge, la face crasse avec les désirs de hier affichés dessus. Je ne peux pas caser mon amour pour toi dans une boîte, parce que c’était clair qu’elle n’aurait pas eu assez de place pour parcourir tous mes ressentis. Pendant que ma boîte prenait de l’ampleur, la tienne, elle craquait. Les morceaux de nous s’écoulaient un peu partout et s’évadaient dans les airs. Moi ma boîte, elle n’a pas fini de vouloir te connaître, d’emprunter un peu de toutes mes faiblesses pour me renforcer. T'aimer aura été la lourdeur la plus ensevelissante et la plus trompeuse que je puisse imaginer laisser peser sur tout mon moi.

The Universal Closeted Self

Ash Beckham is probably the most influential motivational speaker with whom I crossed cyber-paths with this year. This speech pulled my spirits out of the pits when in the midst of struggling my way out of some of my own ''closets''.

Highlights of Ash's speech (and other tidbits):

Your closet may be telling someone you love her for the first time [...] or telling someone you have cancer, or any of the other hard conversations we have throughout our lives. All a closet is is a hard conversation, and although our topics may vary tremendously, the experience of being in and coming out of the closet is universal. It is scary, and we hate it, and it needs to be done. 

-Stress is rooted in basic survival instincts known as the "fight or flight" response, which triggers chemicals in the brain and body designed to help us manage a threatening situation. Familiarities of stress: racing heart, sweaty palms, butterfly-filled belly. It is also possible to experience low-grade, ongoing stress without those immediate symptoms. The chemicals that the body produces are the same, however, and negatively affect the body at the cellular level. (Brain stress) 

Hard is not relative. Hard is hard. Who can tell me that explaining to someone you've just declared bankruptcy is harder than telling someone you just cheated on them? [...] There is no harder, there is just hard. We need to stop ranking our hard against everyone else's hard to make us feel better or worse about our closets and just commiserate on the fact that we all have hard. At some point in our lives, we all live in closets, and they may feel safe, or at least safer than what lies on the other side of that door. [...] No matter what your walls are made of, a closet is no place for a person to live. 

''I had spent my entire life trying to not disappoint these people, and now I was turning the world upside down on purpose. I was burning the pages of the script we had all followed for so long, but if you do not throw that grenade, it will kill you.''  

-EXPLODE INTO A ONENESS THAT IS YOUR TRUEST AND MOST AUTHENTIC SELF-

THREE STEPS TO THAT SELF-APPROPRIATED FULL-HEARTED EXPLOSION:

- Take the armor off. Be yourself. If you want someone to be real with you, they need to know that you bleed too.
-Number two: Be direct. Just say it. Rip the Band-Aid off.   (Be AUTHENTIC!)

- ''Be unapologetic. You are speaking your truth. Never apologize for that. And some folks may have gotten hurt along the way, so sure, apologize for what you've done, but never apologize for who you are. And yeah, some folks may be disappointed, but that is on them, not on you. Those are their expectations of who you are, not yours. That is their story, not yours. The only story that matters is the one that you want to write.''  

Watch Ash rock the world a bit

Free and Falling

So mamma, if I leap,

If I leap mamma, 

I'll be free-falling.

If I jump into this life, I will be falling,

Falling into the arms of my own truth, mamma,

those fears mamma, they're your own.

So mamma, if I leap,

If I leap mamma, 

I'll be free-falling.

I am not asking you to follow me mamma,

I wanted you to throw me off,

I wanted you to shove me off that mountain of dread,

with those arms,

those arms full of despair mamma, 

even if that dread,  it is and was your own,

so just sail me off my sea of protest,

love me to shore,

mamma, love me to that shore,

where my freedom is waiting,

where I can choose my own fears.

So mamma, if I leap,

if I leap mamma, 

I'm free-falling,

falling into the arms of nothing but my truth.

We're All the Same

How can I explain this?

End of explanation.

Dirty Mirrors With a Glass Mind

Your mind of glass, as fragile as it is unspoken. Unquiet wiring, as loud as it is fierce. Through collisions of insensible trajectory, bursting into a splattered mist of words are your rioting thoughts. The sculpture of tranquil exactitude lies upon your face, misleading the world of the burdened and tender self, blossoming. I felt it. Your wounded rawness is fanning itself to the rhythm of the enslaved wondrous you. Deafened soldiers live on your insides. They shoot at one another without hearing mutual cries. You smile at their nonsense, ever hurting. Gasping for something other than fury, ''Soon she will let go, SOON!'' Your entity, a secretive garden that shed everlasting light. You are a contradiction. Bloodshed inwardly, yet mirroring the joys of the smiles you wish were your own. I feel you, as if I were the journal in which you breathed your truth. You have touched my mind, reaching out for common grounds. Your battlefield, your war, your ending: a mended reality. Your sewn up story, now lost.

The first time I had witnessed pain—not the kind of dried-up scab-like pain, the blood-gushing-heavily-fragmented-broken soul pain—was while envisioning you battle whatever was plaguing a luminous soul. You sat there as if your body had become cement; heavy and sunken into the depths of the floor. Your lips had beaded sweat around the corners of your mouth and your eyes were swollen from the heavy tears that had been unshackled. There were endless broken bottles shattered on the wooden floor; the freed wine was bathing within the cracks. I would later read your kind of pain through the pages you had daringly written, unleashing the hungry wolves. Quarrelled brain activity. I remember you equally intense, yet differently. Lightness of the mind, you were at times a replica of a smile. I sit here, heavily ringed around the eyes, wondering about the stranger who lived within me; the perception of who I thought you were and whom I loved ever so deeply. Who were you while I saw your lips tint happy shades, sharing meaningful glares. I sit here like a piece of a shipwreck wanting to hold that burning sadness, cajoling it. I read your writings as if I had given birth to them. Your candle burned out before it was lit. What went ever so wrong with the song that was your life?

Remnants of you. That's all. The remnants, so bittersweet.