Ode To A Piece of Shit

You are a disgusting excuse for a human being. You are the kind of human who wallows in their mediocrity, dangling false ambitions of grandeur in front of your eyes just to paint the illusion you will or can someday excel beyond the stagnant pool of waste that is your existence. Your kind is not unfamiliar but an epidemic among youth who waste away their age and minds on frivolous, debilitating distractions that keep you all rooted in the sty that is the world around you in which you have created. You live, eat, breath and fuck in mounds of shit piled so high that all you’ve ever known is shit. You were born amongst shit and you will most likely die a meaningless existence in the same shit and that makes you nothing more but a piece of shit.

But it is not good enough that most of the world you live in is shit, you have to spend your life dragging others down into the shit with you. In your jealousy, in your subconscious envy you live an incomplete life and therefore will cling onto any small glittering object that shows the smallest signs of promise and deceive yourself enough to believe that one anomaly will save you from your insignificance. But in the obesity of your squalor you draw that beauty down into the mire and destroy something so pure, so rare that in your vanity you make excuses for your actions just to avoid the otherwise fiery guilt suffered by such fools.

Fuck you. As kind and gentle as I was for so long, you fed me nothing but shit. But now I think I'll vomit a year's worth of shit right back on top of you and see how you like it when the one you loved the most exercises their power to mutilate your existence.

I have forgiven you for abuses inflicted on me even though the reverberations will be felt years from now. You have left scars, brand marks of your handy work in many different ways, though I will not give you the satisfaction of leaving those scars visible. I forgave you for the infidelity, for the lies and for the foolish games. I forgave you for the eight months of my life you wasted. But if there is one thing I will not forgive you for, it is for the continuous effort to hurt not just me but the people in my life. In your insecurities and also your vanity, you conjured excuses to suit the fancy of your conclusions to destroy that which was beautiful. You do not know of what beauty is, you do not know the privilege of being alive. You do not know how to appreciate the excellence bestowed upon you. You do not know how to love. You will never know how to love. You think love is a commodity that can be bought and paid for. In your youthful ignorance, you will never understand true love – unconditional, forgiving, nonjudgmental, selfless, and pure. And so you will lead a miserable life, pretending you know what love is to lure others into a false sense of security. You take life for granted and everything in it, always being unsatisfied with your life even though so many in the world are worse off than you.

To me, you never existed. I fell in love with a lie. I thought that lie was the real person and that the miserable, selfish, destructive villain before me was just temporary. Now I know I was deceived. Now I can finally say I am thankful my life turned out this way and you are not in it. I am thankful he came into my life as one hour with him was worth more to me than this entire year of your emotional cruelty. I am thankful for the companions I found who helped me as long as they could before you burnt everything to the ground with your narcissism. The embarrassment, the loss of friendship and the destruction of beauty is my burden to bear now and I will never make the same mistake again of lowering my standards to accommodate a wreckage of a human being.

Congratulations you son of a bitch.

I hope you rot in the hell you so strongly believe in.

That way maybe your environment would reflect your misery as the shit you live in is only the shit you create and you are and never will be anything better than an apprehensive misogynist, fatefully mediocre and covered to the top with shit.

Displacement of the Self

An old woman sits beside the window in her small white room, overlooking the city below from the ninth floor of her assisted living residence. Her life is near its end and yet she is filled with emptiness as if it never began at all. A widow, mother of three children, retired church secretary: all these aspects of her life have faded away with the color of her hair, the softness of her skin and her mind’s agility and vigor . Having centered her identity around all these external factors in life, her sense of emptiness arises from their loss. Nonpermanent realities replace the constant of our identities. As those realities, our physical body, loved ones, careers, maternal roles, all come to end at some point before we die, those who define their existence through nonpermanent entities, will eventually lose themselves, their sanity, their identity, after those others are gone.

Never mistaken, it is easier to define yourself through those realities in which your soul exists yet it is easier to lose yourself once you’ve lost those realities. While paradox never fails to clarify life, just the opposite, it is difficult to not attach yourself and identity onto those people around you and the external factors that provide meaning to your existence. Most of the time this happens unknowingly and before you even realize, you adapt illusions of companionship to being essential to your existence. Your career, the monotonous daily routine of your everyday becomes too familiar to ever imagine parting from it. Your physical body, the stunning image of familiarity reflected in the mirror each day, loses its endurance, aesthetic appeal and usefulness. Those other beings around you who you spend your whole life caring for, providing for will eventually fail to need you. Those who you love will die or worse, betray your love and rip themselves from the identity you established together, leaving you with a emptiness in your heart so grand, there isn’t enough left of yourself to continue on as a living being. You become half alive. You are like a child again, only left out in the street to reconfigure how to survive, to communicate, learning how to walk, learn and breath. Loneliness becomes unbearable and conversation becomes a memory. The accumulation of suffering felt by this loss is only mounted by knowing the part of your life who you defined yourself through, who defined themselves through you, has failed to exhibit the same agony your soul is undergoing. While you wander alone at night, sleepless and mostly dead, they have already replaced you with another, as if you didn’t mean anything.

Yet to remain centered and secure in a sense of yourself, free from external beings, realities, definitions, sublevel words used to describe the world around us as language deduces everything we verbalize to subject of our limitations as humans is to immortalize your soul. Whatever may enter or exit your life, there is still one constant. While everything in the world has or will prove its impermanence, that sense of self has withstood the credence of time and persevered while the world crumbled around you.

It is time for a new declaration.

After losing what I believed to be the counterpart to my existence, I have realized that I never truly lost the part of myself I associated with him. It’s been here all along and after mistaking it for so long it didn’t reappear for some time. There are those in life who will affect your identity through different roles. Those who make you doubt yourself, those who penetrate and destroy you from the inside out, and those who will try to make you lose yourself.
Yet there are those who will see you and fall in love with everything you are, the way you are, perfect as a whole, steadfast independent being. They will encourage and celebrate your abilities and refrain from destroying who you are.

In the end, it is not only dangerous to displace the self on those impermanent figures in your life, but to allow those figures to dampen, injure and destroy your sense of identity. They will find enjoyment in your destruction and draw the breath of life from your chest until you can do nothing more but beg them for mercy.

Exponentially, life increases through positives. Therefore it can only grow through those positives. Remaining among those negative factors will ultimately lead to the end.

Freedom is only attainable after everything else is lost.

Life can only flourish in light.

The self should never be displaced in undeserving impermanence.

In the end, you will always have your self.

Nostalgia

Always a deep, melodic flowing voice to accompany those delicately warm days, I play those same messages over and over again in moments of nostalgia. Nostalgia, my drug, my guilty pleasure: subjecting myself intentionally to those painful reminders of those days in which I was well aware of good times with each breath drawn, aware of their delicate beauty, aware of the fragility and the ephemeral moments, an impeding sense of doom in the back of mind that these days would not last forever. My nostalgia for the present – those who can recognize the privilege of being alive will crawl from under the ground to bask in the sun when it does happen to shine.

Art Museums

Paintings stapled to walls
Sculptures suspended from ceilings
Fountains spraying sunshine

We were more inspired by each other.
Alone – together – a sea of strangers
The sun still shone on our love.

Yellow lighting made our colors one
Alone in the elevator, we embraced
The escalator, your kiss made us real.

A thousand faces to witness us
The judgment, scorn or misunderstanding
was saved for the paintings

Among the tallest buildings
we would have lost ourselves
but not for lack of trying

The harmony of our lips
The symmetry of our souls
The elegance of our portrait

My masterpiece I'll find you
one day, waiting in the museum
for our chance to be more

than a work of art.

I Wish I Never Even Heard the Song

The melody of his voice
Covers the wounds of our separation
Sad sonatas and eloquent piano keys
Crescendos of momentary relief
Preserves time in my memory
Hoping one day this symphony
Will lead you back to me.

Taxday

We began on the day we were born.