The Scars That I Earned
There’s nothing I would change
In the mistakes that I’ve made
’Cuz they made me the human I am
You can’t pick and choose
The battles you lose
You just get up and fight ’em again
Add all of the battles
And all of the scars
They’re the sum of the wisdom I’ve learned
I’m bruised and I’m battered
But I thank lucky stars
For all of the scars that I earned
The Commonplace is Sacred
To write about something well is to write about something that is specific. This is to write about something with which you have spent a considerable about of time; not only something that has kept you quiet and solemn company on rainy nights, but that you have talked with, grappled with, something that can make you laugh or clench your teeth. To tell the truth is to tell of what you know and understand.
You cannot understand what you have not sat beside on the front step under the dim yellow porch light while swatting flies away.
You cannot understand what has not held your hand in the car on the way to the ER.
You cannot understand what you have not wrapped up in a soft towel and buried in the frozen earth on Christmas day.
You most certainly cannot understand what you haven’t shared a frozen pizza with at a table cluttered with bills and crusty dishes and cups with milk rings in the bottom.
Come sit beside me, child, and let me tell you again that the commonplace is sacred. And then you can tell me about the places and the people you sit with most often.
Abandoned In A Deserted Town
Sunlight filters through white fluffy clouds, beams reaching for dew-kissed blades of grass between an abandoned swing set and a faded jungle gym, sparking from chain links as swings sway, chased by a fugitive breeze. A carousel spins, the mournful whine of dry bearings singing a song of loneliness and neglect. The echoes of delighted screams and childish laughter swells and fades with the leaves scattered on the arms of the wind.
Waves curled with foam climb higher and higher on deserted beaches, wetting and drying, wetting and drying, bubbles popping up from buried clams. A broken umbrella tumbles along, scattering sand into the gusts. The edge of an abandoned towel flips up and down, up and down before it disappears into the grains it once rested upon. The ghosts of the uncounted drift over evaporating footprints.
Merchandise gathers dust inside stores closed tight, windows papered over with cobwebs as deserted mannequins stare, fading slowly into expressionless shapes, frozen in the act of meaningless gestures. Long lines of useless carts sink into once shining tiles now crumbling to powder. Sidewalks outside with weeds leisurely filling the seams once avoided in an effort to not break backs. Rows of tables with overturned chairs gathering the blowing dirt from planters of long-dead flowers and trees, penned inside railings on disintegrating decks and patios. Windows reflecting sun stars outside bars, stools stacked neatly, grills and countertops left clean, dishes and silverware ready for meals never made. Rows of bottles still shiny, still full, waiting to be poured into glasses filling with drifting motes and the bodies of insects trapped inside.
Streets and buildings are cracking, the gaps filling with soil seeded with wildflowers blown from fields high with standing grass, fading into them as time creeps, turning days into months, into years. Gas pumps sink into crumbled concrete, rusty nozzles propped in a useless parody of readiness. Signs proclaiming goods no longer offered, sit in windows unseen, letters vanishing into illegibility.
Shuttered Houses appear blinded, their eyes blank and staring, waist-high lawns and tangled flowerbeds are strewn with the abandoned debris of everyday life. Desiccated hoses coiled or stretched to dehydrated sprinklers, overturned chairs dripping threads and stuffing. Bicycles and skateboards rusting into immobility, kiddy pools choked with weeds, plastic toys unrecognizable chunks of suggested color.
Is this a vision of a world waiting to be reclaimed? Will it be us or will nature erase the mark we once stamped into the earth? Will future generations emerge and dig into the dirt in search of what once was? Will they know or only guess how we buried ourselves and waited to be told when we would be allowed to live again?
Wednesday’s song
On a rainy Wednesday, I decide to go for a walk. I grab my umbrella and don my headphones, considering them an essential outdoor accessory. I float through the quiet residential town, barely acknowledging the houses and storefronts and fully committing my consciousness to the ebb and flow of my music.
However, in the limbo between one song’s end and another’s beginning, I notice the timid sound of raindrops knocking on the borders of my mind. Intrigued, I remove my headphones and listen.
Children’s unbothered laughter weaves through the droplets. A hurried cyclist rushes past me, and the gentle whoosh of her bike tires enters the chorus. An elderly man trudges by, and my brows furrow at the squelching of his rain-sodden shoes. I cannot help but smile as my own breath joins the afternoon’s symphony.
Upon returning home, the song does not end. Instead, it shifts to a cozy melody, interlaced with whistling teapots, rooftop-tappings, and soothing silence. I close my eyes and invite the moment’s dynamic composition into my heart. With a content sigh, I realize, I should listen to the day’s song more often.
Spark
I pass by the legion of rain slick windows on my way to my destination. The sounds of the crowd, the smell of rain and smog mixed with various decaying wares from the nearby market creates a miasma that I find oddly comforting. I look at all of the people that walk about their day. Living their lives, stuck in a fog of their own. I want to show them the truth but is it really my place to do so? Would I really force that on anyone?
The various holo-ads call out and seduce those looking for even a moments respite from reality, offering a myriad of distractions. I keep walking and let them congeal into an unintelligible stew of false promises. I don’t need their distractions. I have my own.
I’m only a block away when I notice the first of them. A misstep on their part, the simplest thing. He kept eye contact for just a split second too long as I passed him. “Reality” expands before me on instinct, and I feel the others as well. Fucking traitors. I keep walking but they feel me just as I feel them and before I know it, I’ve broken into a full-bore sprint.
No more use for subtlety, I let my mind reach out to the system and cross the street in a single step. One of them in a black raincoat and eerie WW2 gas mask steps out of a nearby alley right in front of me. I waste no time, I shoot forward like lightning and aim a fist right at his head. I move right through him. Fuck. They brought in the Wraith. I don’t stop or turn around. I just keep running.
I know I’m close when I feel that telltale feeling. Like an electrical field passing through me then pulling me towards it like a vortex as it passes through me once more. I knew they would use me to find it, but I didn’t think they would be this fast. I should have known better. But at least I’m close now.
As I turn a corner, I find myself flung through the window of a nearby coffee shop. I hear the screams of the people within, as my attacker charges through what was left of the window, tearing the wall down with it. Not for the first time I find myself wondering what the Sleepers see this time. An escaped rhino from the zoo perhaps. Maybe a runaway taxi. I don’t have much more time to devote to that line of thought before I’m picked up by the throat and held at arm’s length by something that maybe could have been human once. The voice is one of the first things to tell me otherwise.
“Give. Us. The spark, Cross.” It says with an eerie, broken cadence. Its voice sounds like electrically charged gravel. It looks like what an alien might think a human should look like, except in partial wireframe. Like those old 90’s hacker movies from over a century ago. I do the only thing that comes to mind. I smile, raise my middle finger to the sky, and give my answer.
“Get bent, Hawking.”
I step through the holes in the system again, escaping the monsters’ grasp like water through a sieve. Jumping from line to line as I make my way towards the siren’s call dancing across my mind. I flit in and out, trying not to lose myself to the currents of code which endlessly die and give way to new lines. Crossing through the immune system of the simulation. I laugh at the pun that is my moniker.
Finally, I see it. The exit. A single rift in the side of a half-constructed skyscraper, right between the 11th and 12th floors. If they were finished yet, that is. I sigh. Of course. I step out of my little digital transit and onto the rooftop of a towering pharmaceutical building across the street. Nowhere to go but up. I feel a death grip on my ankle and almost tumble right off the roof.
I look down at the semitranslucent hand phasing through the roof and curse. The Wraith found me. I try to jump away, dive below the ocean of code and surface closer to the construction site, but it pulls me back.
“Then hold on tight, you bastard!” I yell, before I send myself hurtling 100 stories below. He doesn’t seem to expect that and finds himself ripped the rest of the way through the roof and sent hurtling down with me. I laugh like a madman because what else is there to do in this situation. I’m more than willing to die awake rather than asleep like the rest of them. The feeling of plummeting through falling rain at terminal velocity is…freeing. Just as we approach the ground the Wraith finally lets go. With a split-second thought, I disappear into the dark, frigid depths of the system once more.
I jump from place to place, wherever gets me closer to my destination. Finally, I’m across from the rift with no ground left between me and it. Just unfinished terrain.
“Cross?!” I hear from behind me. I turn and come face to mask with the Wraith. He takes off the mask and lets long, stringy ginger locks cascade down his pale face. I gasp. I thought he was dead. Hoped he was, rather than the alternative.
“I’m not giving it up Connor! I’ve fought too hard to lose this war now and so have you.” I scream over the heightening storm.
“They’re not ready Cross, not by a longshot. You do this, tear them kicking and screaming from their dream and into the twisted state of reality, they may not survive it. Just give us the spark. They’ve watched over us, shepherded us for so long now. Why would you ruin that?!”
I try to contain the storm raging inside myself. This isn’t him anymore, not really. “You used to understand why. This is for you and all the others those bastards have taken.”
I turn and leap as far as I can towards the rift. A flash of lightning and an inhuman mechanical scream are all that fills my senses for a moment. Time slows as I start to realize that I won’t make it. I begin to drop before I can land inside. I reach out and try to grasp the edge of it like a ledge. In that moment I know that won’t work, but as I touch what would have been my only salvation, I let the spark flow through me and into the rift.
The system screams and contorts as it feels the unexpected shock. I continue falling. I smile though because I know the others can win now. And I get to die free after all. My smile deepens when I see the words I had waited my entire life to see, even if I didn’t always know it. I don’t even feel it when I hit the ground.
System File: “Spark of Revolution” Upload Complete
The Nuisance fly
There is a fly that keeps buzzing by my ears
It's always there every month, every year
I want to slap it so hard
but am afraid of the accuracy of my hand
I might miss the target and land my palm on my bald
If I spray on it, I might inhale the insecticide
And die by the fly's side
But inside, I feel am not supposed to be pissed
Am supposed to be at peace
I think I will not kill the fly
Instead I will fly
The flight to the sky
The sky where the crowds await me on the cloud
Where the fly can't reach
Not even the witch!
The crowd in the cloud await my writings.
As I write these right things for the crowd,
My peace will be found
And my shilling will be pound
Justice
Stogie and a hoagie
in a velvet track suit
Smoky air and chest hair
like a 70's reboot
Gold chains and nicknames
with dark sun glasses
Cards dealt on off-green felt
littered with cocktails and ashes
A basement scene that Im meant to clean
and tie up all the loose ends
I waltz through the door cuz they've seen me before
some of these guys are old friends
I set right to work on the greasy old jerk
who sits at the head of the table
A flash and a bang sorry gang-gang
I'm calling an end to your fable
On the warpath unleashing wrath
previewing the hell that they're sent to
I have a penchant for raining down vengeance
upon the evil that men do
Colorless
Every time you close your eyes you see it
the color of your shadow when you choose to free it
the color of a starless sky
the color of an evil eye
the color of the darkest storm when you're forced to flee it
The dark dark hue of a pirate's sheet
dark like the souls of the corporate sheep
dark like the coal
in the miner's sole
dark like the power that politics keep
Dark like the depths of an ocean drop
dark like the skies from the mountain top
the color of the lies
that the demons disguise
in the colors of the nightmares that you can't stop
My favorite color is a colorless void
a color a lot of you seem to avoid
a color I project
'cuz it helps to protect
against the projection that you've all deployed