Effort is energy, but not always progress
Movement is agitating, and often, we regress
Vibrations that phase in the ways the game plays
It is never obligated to bring about redress

Silence is golden, but not if we’re deaf
Listening is impossible if no tools are left
All the lies for which we prise the tympanic caul
Ripping out until the noise stops and we’re bereft

Anhedonia is not a form of peace
Falling to our death is not a release
A rictus they inflict us is not benedictus
We are naked and alone, but now without fleece

Hung by the Achilles, we’re shaved and then drained
For our lives and time, we are deceived and detained
Give up all you have is how we are trained
To support the parasitic idea they’ve ingrained

Silence is not consent
But it will not protect
When the dragons are hungry
And the pigs are erect

The parasite will never be satisfied
So it must be destroyed
Fire and steel and minds be deployed
Against the idea that meaning is to be employed.

Newly formed and lustrous
becoming a jewel from layers thrown
a broken threshold a flash
The lights in an instant are stole

both sides to the light
to be formed in the dark
to face layers and come out glowing

Destroyed in a moment
of ongoing torment
The running waters want to go not knowing

Another star blooms in tension
when the tether is cut
rising out of the horror we’re facing

the night folds around
and holds out the beauty
so we can see one last love embracing

Will the new growth be cancer
Will it nurture the body electric
Will the cocoon become a chrysalis
and we remain liquid psychometric

Non-Newtonian settled in a groove
Life not impacted enough to solidify
Dehydrate and crust over
evaporate and waiting to die

Vertebrates sell their bones
thinking change is in the air
when the time comes to make the change
Their spines are no longer there.

You’ve forgotten what you are
where you’ve been, how to live
you’ve sold the plot and cried of loss
and the soul you had to give

If god were real
and sober
and caring
She would have aborted you decades long past
your whining
your compromise
bread and circuses
That could have been something so vast

This is what we’ve become
This is our slow quietus
We gave up on looking outward
for walls and artifice

Mocked for accolades they did not request
the children of the house of Me
left on the hook for foolish ancestry
and a world that shouldn’t be

Those places no longer exist. They are miles, kilometers, light-years away. Lost to the motion that is life. Life is not static. The universe, as we currently understand it, is expanding. Our galaxy is moving with the local cluster. Our star orbits the galactic core: our planet, the star. Our bodies are forever dying and rebuilding. Once that process has reached its inevitable end, our component elements return to the motion of succoring other lives.

The limitations we place on ourselves very often manifest as our desire to anchor in a fixed point. We allow our curiosity to calcify and become brittle. This is anathema to our own growth as individuals and a species. We must become fluid. Like Water – Bruce Lee.

To struggle with this is natural. Change and the chaos it brings are very often painful. We are conditioned at our very core to oppose change once we have settled into something we identify as safe and comfortable. A cave to shelter in. A bountiful meadow.

These are traps.

Ideology is the same. Religion, political beliefs, and holding to theories that have solutions to debunk them. The data stack of knowledge we use as a foundation must be forever expanded and solidified so that we may grow higher.

In spite of all of this being true to my knowledge, we must also remain watchful. Curiosity about consequences must accompany curiosity about the new and unknown. This should not become fear. The pain of consequence is just as often a teacher as is success.

This is how to correct many ills

This is the root of my growth.

And then I climb out and the lingering bits crust over and fall away, leaving itching reminders of where they were in my psyche.

But the lingering adhesions where the edges are… remind me that the attachment points are still there. That I am still wired to interface with the morass. The primeval shade of unspecified rage and bile wants to burn the edges.

Cut off at the last moment
a plan in pieces when the picture was near complete
rain on watercolors when the day was bright
and words unspoken brought unrelenting night

One more day
a sunrise away
everything unraveled in confusion
so many words I wanted to say

If there was just one thing you knew
kept inside for the moment to be right
could have been that last handhold
for you to climb into the light

Cold now the hearth and gone the soul
never knowing but maybe wishing
still fallen before truth was told

structure broken
support was decayed too long

sunken into the sea

I was not a siren but should have sang my song

I like to view this in an entirely different way. We are heading towards death. It is the invisible barrier that we will one day encounter on our trip through spacetime. We are like the skydivers that have switched to the flying squirrel suits. We are plummeting at near-terminal velocity with the illusion of control.

We can modify our pathway along the course of gravity, but ultimately that great attraction still wins. There are no parachutes on this ride. You do not get to safely land and try it all again. (Unless reincarnation is true, I suppose…) You meet the filter at terminal velocity and the electricity that runs the sub 60-watt bulb in your skull flickers out. The signals to and from your amygdala and vagus nerve stop and your coprocessors wind down.

Then the mass of symbionts that have been travelling with you start the process of breaking down your meat suit for further processing.

But you – your energy has ether moved on to a dimension we are unable to perceive within this flesh, or reaches a resting ground state.

Death does not come for you. It quietly waits for you to arrive.

Will you be on fire when you hit, or just another cold breeze coming through the door?

Troubled Waters Is an instrumental track that started as a piano composition.