We exist in ennui
Lost in formulaic riddles and obstructed prose
The mind becomes a moonless night
So many thoughts and none that shine
Reflections of deflections
Loathing and Loving
And somewhere in between
Complex simplicity
We’re always wrong but we never see
We exist in ennui
Lost in formulaic riddles and obstructed prose
The mind becomes a moonless night
So many thoughts and none that shine
Filtered out and filtered new
On the outside, you can be pretty too
Stagnant and free from form
Endless trees that bear no fruit
So, you fought, so you won
But here we are again and again
Aimless and listless
Just around the corner’s edge
To the cornea's path
Blind to the smiles
That cover blind arrogance
Blind to the self-induced madness
Suffocating on the illusion of bliss
We’re always wrong but we'll never see
Hanging low, diseased and rotting
Endless shifts of celebrated nullity
We are the saviors of nothing
"It's a slow death without reason
Prolonged by human weakness"
I don't remember when
We were not divided by incompetance
So much beauty in this world destroyed
Abused, forgotten and left by the wayside
I've had hope that the future is brighter
But hope is my cognitive death
If religion and philosophy can't heal
Is there anything left?
We are grasping for a tranquility that rides the cusp of a failing species
In the mind's eye we see ourselves as heavenly, but in reality we are cosmological fiends
Burn it all down
Burn it all away
and like Rome we will fall
and like Rome we will stay
Against Hidden Poems
We then Sojourned
to that paradise
in your mind.
Somebody said,
"It is earthly."
We then mourned
these bleak eyes
in my mind.
Somebody has said,
"Who's that somebody?"
We join the Excursion
so we fantasize
but never to find
this mystical point
of view, "Have we?"
Reality is really
Terrifyingly incredible
To exist as a
Conscious Being
And to be
Self-Aware
Is a weird phenomenon
An emergent property
Of Chance and Possibility
When it dawns on you
That you exist
As part of a whole
It’s almost haunting
Knowing you are Matter
With its own Will
And Self-awarenes
Is truly Mind boggling
The scale of the Micro
And of the Cosmos
Questions about
How it all works
Of what came before
You were Awake
And what will happen
After you go to Sleep
All this
Combines
To just
Astonish Me
The ancients declared that all is meaningless
A chasing after the wind
The modernists claim that nothing is real
A consuming, constant dream
So what shall we say on our mortality;
What should we surmise of our souls?
We've all been screaming what we want to hear
And yet the truth quietly whispers, drowning our voices
We pay our very souls to safely cross the river Styx
Only to find that we can't leave Charon without them
We give our all to gain what our hearts desire,
And realize that we have lost everything to gain nothing
What man can bring back one second of his life;
Yet time seems worthless without entertainment
We campaign to save our fellow man,
By placing funds in already full pockets
Humans are dimensional amphibians, living both spirit and body,
The ghost in the machine
How light a heart in love!
How heavy a heart in sorrow
The weight of a soul drags me down
But hope can keep me alight
We strive for goodness through deeds and laws,
But laws are not for good deeds, or good people
We cannot live long alone, and yet push others away,
Until we are left with only our “selves”
We push and strive to become better than ourselves
Yet we can only grow inside our own nature
At what point in our quest to become God
Did we convert into the devil instead?
With night comes thoughts into my mind
Philosophically broad and deep
Why do I sit here counting fireflies
When I should be fast asleep?
What if Atlas shrugged
And Prometheus lied?
Enkidu lived
And Gilgamesh died?
Horus instead had been fried?
Anubis a coward who'd always hide?
What if we're all dead inside
And stay that way because of pride?
What is the difference between apples and oranges?
Why are patients so afraid of syringes?
Why must something go up, and then down
Why do the wealthy always seem to frown?
What I'm trying to say
I must protest
Whilst I stutter
And give it my best
That life is all-in-all a test
To live or die beyond our rest
Rest, rest, I wish I could
And if I could, I surely would
Some peace and quiet, I must confess
Would surely give this brain a rest
I have decided recently that you can fairly judge someone by whatever it is they think they are responsible for.
For instance, a man, the lone survivor of a plane crash, emerges from the wreckage. He will have one of two thoughts: he will think that he is fortunate to have survived, or that he is not.
This is important, because it shows one of two schools of thought: the unfortunate man will blame himself for the events which have transpired, and will make it some kind of goal to live a life worthy of his fellow victims. Or he will succumb to the grief of it all.
The other school of thought belongs to the fortunate man: he will believe that it is not his fault that the plane has been downed, and that it is not his fault that he has survived. He is only relieved that he has made it out alive. The fortunate man will turn to God with praise, invariably, though perhaps it is more honest to say he will experience some sort of euphoric release.
The unfortunate man is factually wrong: he did not cause the swarm of birds to fly into the Number 3 engine, nor did he intend for the pilot to be suffer a massive heart attack at the moment the plane was out of control, nor did he arrange the series of random factors (the iron density in the seat in front of him, his slightly larger-than-average brain cavity that allowed for more dynamic cortex movement, etc.) that contributed to his salvation, but salvaged he is and now what?
The fortunate man is technically correct: he is innocent of any wrongdoing in the plane's malfunction and of the deaths of his fellow passengers.
But the fortunate man will never take responsibility for the lives which were lost around him: you see, to believe that you are fortunate to have survived a plane crash, you must believe you were meant to have survived the plane crash, which implies that there is meaning to your life, and logically from there, all life. What is that meaning? You decided long before you boarded the fateful flight. Someone else, or something else, is in charge, and that someone orchestrated life (perhaps God?) and has not only given it wings and heartbeats and blood, but imbued living with meaning. The important thing is this: someone else gave life meaning, and by that token, your life is saved to preserve that meaning.
The unfortunate man, however, even in succumbing to his emotions of grief and shock and rage, realizes that he must create meaning for his life, or at least, that there is no inherent meaning to his survival; that it is an accident, the same kind of accident which downed a plane. He will not believe himself to be part of a plan. He will see the lack of a plan clearly, in the moment the plane goes down, when the mother clutching her infant screams, when the flight attendants frantically draw their seatbelts around them, when the old man gazes calmly, but sadly, into the great twilit sky, he will know that there is no plan. And he will know, after he survives, that his survival was not meant to be, his survival is an outlier in an unforgiving universe, and he will seek until his last heartbeat to bring forgiveness into that universe the way a lifeguard will seek to bring breath into a drowned man's lips.
I think the important thing here to remember is this: do not trust a man who says he is of God, for such a man intends to return to God and there is no room in Heaven for the humans of earth.
Sometimes I hear the ghosts of my past
Often they whisper in my ear
Just out of consciousness
Barely audible, but present
Memories of those gone by
Now immortal in my mind
Forever they'll exist in me
Or at least as long as I live
For we are scars on the membrane of time
Carving our existence deep into it's flesh
Dying to gain immortality
Our existence tantamount to the memories of others
Kierkegaard famously once said that "Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward"
So as I continue to wander blindly forward into the unknown with the faint hope that I will understand it all in the end, I feel the need to take a sobering moment to pause and reflect on my footprints in the sand.
'Einen Augenblick' was all that I needed to notice that the moment of clarity I had whilst lying in rehab has all but lost its polish.
The signposts removed, my compass caught in a strong magnetic field, my coordinates intelligible.
That profound clarity I once had now lost as I once again face life blind, stumbling amongst the mess, the fuss and the chaos, on my hands and knees searching for the crumbs..
Or, of course it could just be the PTSD talking...