Discarded Prose

Although it may be clichéd, pretentious and nerdy, I do dabble in writing poetry from time to time.  Here are a few old fragments that aren't good enough to be showed alone.

Do you ever sit back and marvel
At how closed your eyes really are?
Of the incomprehensible vastness of our world
And then of the universe?
With all you think you know and understand
When you can’t even fathom how small a fraction
Of reality you can perceive or imagine
And whatever thought or feeling you have
Billions in history had it already
And everything you live for
All that you see will end
The earth swallowed by then sun
The sun swallowed by the galaxy
The galaxy by the universe
As gravity pulls everything back together
Into ONE: What it once was
What it always has been
And the cycle we are all slaves to
Will not begin again; There are no beginnings or endings
Only continuance
There is no progress; Only change
Steps that carry you forward in time
Lead you everyday back to your doorstep
And how can you dare to believe
You ought to be anywhere else?

Every year I peer back at my footprints
In amazement at how much larger they became
With every step, how much more swollen
My breast with every breath
And I adjust to the light that once blinded
To see clearly for a time
Thinking dawn has come at last
Each time the moon
Peeks a little more over the horizon
And I find it hard to fathom
Any wiser or older a self
While stunned at how many things
And in how many ways
I’ve learned and aged since yesterday
I still find it a struggle
For my heart to know the words my lips profess
And I wait for the sunrise
When the two will see each other illumined
To stumble upon agreement at last

When I touch a pen
I do not feel the might
That dwarfs a sword’s
I do not feel the power
Of words it can form
Or the intent that falls between them
I do not feel my mind
Lifting from itself and concern
In a rapturous revelation
Poured like a flood onto paper
I feel nothing
But a trickle coaxed and forced
To flow the ink from the tip
Of that hollow pen
Each letter a labor
Sweated more for its burden
Than bricks meticulously mortared to a mansion
Until I find
The architect an absent madman
And my careful construction crumbles
Shaken by false foundations

Upon discovering the works of Saul Williams
I find myself inspired in some reaches of my spirit and discouraged in the others.
To speak with an eloquence equivalent to
The rawness of emotion or immediate
Comprehensiveness and holistic constancy of a thought
To cage the bird without
Taming its immortal wild spirit
But can its majesty be grasped
When it is kept from burdenless flight
In empty skies over clean, green landscape
Chasing horizons with no desire to travel
No need to go anywhere but just to see…
To take a look up from the tiny
Machinations of our own hands which
Seem so big
Looking up so close
Every wrinkle a crevasse, every molehill a mountain
Until we climb our mound to find
Sinai, with its unattainable heights
Abandoned now for thousands of years
As aspiring fools are lost in battle
Within its mere foothills
But I see its greatness from a distance
And, reaching out, watch as my hand shrinks beside it
And a tablet of densest stone appears within it
So I search for the Words of God
Etched into its smooth, blank face
Every fiber of me prepared to surrender
Exaltation for the multitude
And find my covenant in the nothing
That appears as a response to my foolish desires
Waiting for the voice of God from without
Without myself, without my mind, without my effort
And I feel the firm weight of a chisel
Coming into existence in my other hand
Whether it just came as a miracle
Or I just became aware of its presence
As something always a part of my stance
I lifted it and resolutely
Placed its tip against the frigid rock
And began my long, tedious toil
To carve love and spark warmth upon it

Who are you? That is a good question.
Who are you, and I’ve a million ways to answer
But until I can’t gather a response
Worthy of the breadth or absolution
That has become identity
I will not be worth knowing
Who are you? An infinitude of differences can be named
But only one person seen in one crowd in one world.
And who are they? I’ve never cared
I’ve no thought out retorts to such questions
That frighten rather than stroke my fragile ego
Which I construct so intently
Like a house of cards, it consumes my focus
Even as a draft from the open window
Scatters all my Kings, Aces, and Jacks
I fret to gather them
Ignoring the view beckoning to me
Calling out in a voice of fresh air from the breeze
To see mountainous houses
Sculpted as God’s temples
How can they be dwarfed
By my synagogue of self
Sealed neatly in a deck of cards?

I recall strolling down sunny avenues
As a young boy full of innocence and hollow ideals
With little or no comprehension of sin
And I suppose I still don’t get it…
But I would walk with my siblings
Down the safe, isolated streets of our town
Not knowing how unreal it would seem
To people in some parts of our country
Or even in our vast and dangerous world
For children to wander unminded down the road
Without a care for their safety,
No concern wasted on thieves, kidnappers, or perverts
And that little Candyland seemed to me
To be the only world there was
I was ignorant, blind to harsh realities
A boy in body, an infant in thought
Whose love of reading surpassed his discretion
For upon stumbling across a piece of graffiti
Not grasping what would inspire an individual
To write it where it was – seeking to understand
The motive behind tracing this word
As yet unfamiliar, unknown to my sheltered mind
I pursed my lips and boldly pronounced it
Driven by curiosity to feel this new word on my tongue
And filled with a joy at learning
And an absence of awareness of the concept of vulgarity
Not in the least expecting the reprimand to come
I pointed to the etchings in the cement and said, “FUCK.”



What if I could freeze the frame
Of the world seen through my eyes
And push over the walls that surround me
Watching them collapse like cheap theatre props
Painted cutouts pretending to resemble reality
What might I see behind what I discarded?
What is there for the insane explorer to discover
In the final frontier of man
In the realm of fact beyond thought
The law beyond form
Incomprehensible forces we try to understand
By giving them names – like love or gravity
But neither words, alone or in the millions
Nor science, expansive theoretical concepts or equations
Come near unto doing justice to what they try containing
The truth that transcends anything physical or visual
That I could see, or feel, in abandoning the shell
In which these laws merely reside
Touching on the holistically spiritual solution
Hiding just behind these walls
Just above the ceiling
Just under my skin
It is dwelling, constantly acting, constantly in use.
Guiding the paths of our minds and feet
As surely as it plots the course of the sun, stars, and planets

To become a hermit of memory and thought
Irreconcilably isolated within the midst of a multitude
Willfully ignorant of my unique presence
And I of their ordinary ones
Squandering none of this precious concern
For that which already absorbs men in the millions
Such affairs are attended to well enough, or not
Without the addition of yet another clueless voice
To the already confusing and deafening cacophony
Let the countless fools
Number their countless worries
As I grow enamored with the singularity of my silence
The divine simplicity of acceptance over struggle
Even as battle wages ceaselessly on all sides
I fight with no man, and no man with me
As I serenely reach to pluck a sunflower from the Ground
Before it is carelessly trampled to lifelessness
Who has not known the sight of a sunflower?
But in seeing I also perceive
And, looking closer, God speaks to me
In the infinite fractal growths of the petals
The beauteous design and function
Inherent in leaf, stem, root, and earth
I forget all but the search
For my own roots
Stretching out with unconscious longing
Sending tendrils to every reach of existence
Waiting to bloom.

What manner of madness is it
Ambitious delusions of grandeur wrapped in obscurity
A foolish convincing of myself
That the voices of the past are reaching to me
Conversations across time from one victim to another
Sympathizing the atrocities committed by God
Upon those too fragile, too vulnerable
To shrug off their suffering and bear it in silence
We are far too weak not to cry
And even as we conceal it from temporary men
We cannot hide the sobs from ourselves, or God
Knowing as our laments fall on deaf ears
They shall be heard in the future
By children as mournful as ourselves
Inspired to their own grand song

So what do I really know
I know myself, and what things I’ve seen
Or rather what things I’ve seen in myself
By seeing the world through myself
And just how much I’ve yet to discover
Inside and out, I cannot guess
And what things I will never learn
I cannot begin to comprehend
Staggered already by what I try to remember
Overwhelmed by the tiny fraction allotted me
As the burden of my awareness and its curious memory
What a funny thing this life is
To seem so great and be so small
All-important in my imagination
All but nonexistent in reality
A world so objective and impersonal
Containing so many subjects and persons
It’s almost laughable, but not at all humorous
And so we hide this ironic futility
From others a little, the most from ourselves

A boulder, precariously perched
Tenaciously teetering on the edge of a cliff
Contemplating the concept of toppling
Falling against the face of immortal stone
To see what can be shaken loose from the unmoving
It savors the second, unbalanced, it sees below
The faults and fissures grown into the rock
The weakness infiltrating its firm front
Dust, pebbles, loose rock and boulders
Slowly separating from the dissolving dogma
Of the singular, unified face of the harsh cliff
At the top, it knows, it feels
They’re longing for a landslide
Speculating the slip that will liberate
Waiting to flow like all of God’s power
From the Mountain to the Valley

Everything is just made the fuck up
Already, get it; surreality
Is the only periscope man has into the real
Details possess the mind, growing like coral
Encompassing the imagination, anchoring it
But they are weightless, fabricated
Infinitely lighter than feathers in truth
Though it drags us into the dust
Have you seen the sun in these long years?
No, son, I’m afraid
I haven’t ventured into the unknown
The void behind this veil of clouds
I see, feel, breathe the dust in
And fathom no purpose in gazing
Past what lies before me
But what of you and such
A Curious question?
But from what else do questions come?
Now, you smartass
Leave me be and speak elsewhere
Of sunshine and semantics
You are blocking my view
You old fool, you study no more than an anthill
The view is just beyond you
I cannot block it from you
Nor pry your eyes to its glory
I will leave you, but where you are
No man will find you, fare well
And good riddance to the gibbering
On and on from you mad types
With your science of fantasies and methods to folly
Speaking so much shit about life,
Death and delusion which are on their doorstep
Farewell to all courters knocking!


Just bullshitting
Pouring out whatever comes to mind
Flowing in then out like stale sewage
Spewing recklessly onto the page
With no care for beauty or art
Just fuck it, I’m alone
And these are meaningless
These symbols, these tears and smiles
Are fake, plastered onto me like cheap makeup
And my eyes are worthless
Seeing only empty space within the frames of a painting
And hearing the echoes of contempt in music
My food tastes entirely of insufficiency
And my life is but a prelude to quiet death
What a goddamn waste of ink and breath
To speak my mind out loud
When no one listens or thinks
What can be related to contemplation
For the clueless, gibbering idiots of society
How can I share experience with those
Whose thoughts are like a black hole
Absorbing and compressing all that comes to it
Never to be seen again
Like whatever the fuck I was thinking
To write this worthless piece of shit
What do I really have to say
Especially to myself? NOTHING

Oh, the bullshitting
The layers upon layers of pretention
The ceaseless acting for no particular audience
In an attempt to prove something
To the nobodies paying attention
Isn’t it such a waste of effort
To be someone insincere and unreal
When truly you are baffled by self-examination
Wanting entirely to be a projection of ideals
Ungrounded in reality, a golem
Of all things cool or acceptable
Pieced together and given unholy life
By your inner alchemist of personality and passion
Faked interest and inauthentic indifference
Who instills within an imitated life form
A sort of capacity for an ersatz existence
But who is real, golem or alchemist?
And which strong enough to knock down the walls of the temple?

Tracing gibbered symbols
Into the pure, white beach sand
Eying the tide with half a smile
Awaiting the liberating purge
The re-sanctification of nature
That is obliviation of statement
A connection forged between fantasies
Known simply as communication
Standing as a solitary colossus
Imitated and attempted but never replicated
The gem of ideality dangles
Just beyond reach, as a rainbow
And tantalizes the naively reaching hand
With its weightless illusion
So we never speak as we would like
Avoid confession and blunt honesty like disease
Hoping to sell lies always
But never succeeding
What a fool am I
Distressing and charading
When life can be lived only in truth
Thus the Object is one with the Subject
And the passing sands of time
Will freeze in perfect moments of myself

So, the illusion of eloquence
A literative elevator to new planes
Both glorious and false
Duplicitous in their elusive appeal
A world of fantasy may have its uses, but
Dreams are no use to the waking
Life and thought are far from familiarity
And some roads never cross one another