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WHO ARE YOU?
Life, when spoken through the tongue and scope of someone living is always inherently skewed. Even the faults that we’re aware of in life are romanticized -- either that, or they are blown out of proportion entirely.
What is this sense of self; is it all an illusion limited by our naive grasp of environment, further stifled by our senses that only present a small scope of the universe at a time? For instance, I love the way the sun rises in the morning and turns the entire sky a vibrant shade of orange for a short while, but is that really how the sky looks? How many colors am I not seeing? How many skin particles are floating right in front of my eyes, that old sense of self dissipating back into the atmosphere? Consciousness is limited by the things we are able to experience, but that’s not what is truly happening. What does that say about life exactly?
Life is fleeting, and because of that, it tends to embrace another illusory concept: separation. In truth, I believe we are all of one consciousness. I understand that is new-age bullshit, but I really do believe it. The ideals that confine and isolate us are truly irrelevant in the grand scope of things. Countries build bombs and strong-arm third world countries to maintain their power grasp. This happens every day, and it occurs with the complete knowledge that all the money we waste killing people could be used to help them instead. Everything in the world is dictated by illusion, in this case the invisible lines of culture, but it all boils down to that irrational lack of understanding. We are no different than that sun that rises over the horizon in the morning. We are made different by the inconsequential. Religion, sex, race, social status – the list is truly endless. But we’re all apes, we’re still evolving, and we’re all made from the same collision of stars and gas. Everything that exists – from a tree, to a rock, to a puppy, to a human being is truly the result of natural phenomena. It’s the lesser evolved center in all of us that embrace this separation. We are all one people and we’re all floating aimlessly on a rock mostly made of undrinkable water. The eternal struggle between the universe and the sense of self is a product of our inability to grasp that it’s all in our heads. Self is an illusion. We are biological machines.
I think that’s beautiful and scary at the same time.
So who am I? Is the nuance truly important? How many people feel the same way I do about everything? There are billions and billions of people on this planet right now; surely some of them have the same mental make-up as I do. How many people don’t? Who cares? I see life as a revolving door of consequence. Nobody really has a plan, we’re all winging it, and everyone is just as confused as I am. They are just as lost and afraid. Some people can delude themselves and others can just hide it better. That doesn’t change anything though.
I enjoy music with my ears. What separates me from other people is the style, the tone, and the inspiration I get from certain songs. Does that really make me any different than somebody who is affected by Justin Bieber or any of his teenage counterparts? Not really. At the core, we’re both still being affected.
I enjoy taking photographs, probably because it gives me a gauge on my time here on earth. But what exactly is time? There is no such thing as yesterday, even though I have skeletons in my closet that I don’t believe I’ll ever truly transcend. Yesterday doesn’t exist. It might as well never have existed in the first place. The common theory is that time equals wisdom, but I think that’s false. Becoming concrete in your experience does not transcend the fundamental human condition. It doesn’t equal maturity or wisdom, it just means you’ve been here longer. The future scares the shit out of me because it’s not linear. It’s a tree with six-hundred-and-thirty-thousand different limbs. Tomorrow will be the start of the rest of my life. Today will be made irrelevant, it will turn into yesterday. They are both illusions. The only thing that truly exists is this moment, right here, right now.
I type this from a dirty bedroom that reminds me constantly that I’m a total slob. It’ll be cleaned eventually, though, and what I am looking at now will disappear completely. I am the same as this room. This room is the same as me. Everything is in a perpetual state of shift until something destroys it. Eventually I will die and rot in black, Iowan soil. Everybody I have ever known, ever loved, ever felt in a warm embrace – will die. The memory of me will be tainted and eventually lost within the cosmos forever.
We live in a cold and uncaring universe. We are all truly alone. But you know what? That’s okay. Bask in the delusion and enjoy your fucking life! Enjoy what you can make of it, what you can grasp and feel. Enjoy that morning light as it appears to rise, but know that we’re the ones spinning. Quit separating yourself by the irrelevant. We are the same. We are not real. We will end.
I think that’s beautiful and scary at the same time.
-- March 7th, 2011
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Like and anti-war protester that still showed up to the rally in his loaded SUV
He screams this fight's unjustified in his clothes made overseas
But you know, if we would just listen to those cowards in disguise
who make bad decisions for us so we don't hate our lives
so we can have our products and our open all-night diners and even waste our food!
When right now there's someone starving in a cold, dark ally or a third world country
But guess what? It isn't you.
So that proud man on the megaphone's the same one waging war
He lives his life by owning things and ignoring the poor
To let our veterans be homeless? It's an empty threat in voting
and distract us from distraction like it's empathy promoting
a brand new world with common sense! Like the one we're in's worth saving?
These patriotic imbeciles, all in trucks with flags draped; hanging
Riding down an infrastructure crumbling and broken
The mass of people that all believes it is better when unspoken
I don't represent them but they embody me
From shopping mall to magazine. From shore to oily sea.
It's cognitive dissonance -- A shame in being self-aware
I devolve back to ape, transcend the will to care.
We are trapped in a burning amusement park and it's no longer amusing.
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4. |
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I LIVE IN A DREAM OF A COUNTRY
I live in a dream of a country
I live in the valley of stars
It's better when you take the back seat
and blend in with the rest of the cars
I should get a good job and a faithful wife
I should go back to school and make my parents proud
I should chase a black car for the rest of my life
and choke on the fumes from its toxic cloud
It's like I'm only on this earth to play a roll
Like the moment of my birth was nothing small
Like it's any different from a funeral
Deliberately illiterate
Consider it, a bathroom stall
Because I live in a dream of a country
and we piss on the concept of truth
An abyss where nothing is new
and nobody's free
not even our youth
Because there's cops at school, and the adults are nervous
from the impending thought of the next disaster
Guns are easy to get and our cinema's violent
and kids these days just grow up faster
It's a good message sent to the American young
You don't step out of line because they're always among us
I was arrested once as a kid myself
in this dream of a country
bent on self-fulfilling prophecy
Where you can't pay your fines
but they say you're still free
Until you're put on probation for a year...like me
And the funny thing that I can never seem to wrap my head around
is the thought the school had planned this out
to teach the rest to settle down
They could have just arrested me before I even went to class
Instead they chose that around 3,
They would arrest me in the nearby grass
I live in a dream of a country
I live in the valley of stars
It's better when you take the back seat
To be the last on a cop's radar.
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I smoke like I have death in mind
I guess I'm not the cautious kind
I come unfurled in this unkind world
I should have stayed curled up in bed
but I watched the saddest news instead
a corporate chain and talking head
brought to you by the state of unemployment
and you don't know why, but you know you want it
the second that it's advertised
but don't blame us, we're unadvised
and in fact we are encouraged
A consumer buys to feel baptized
in a place that makes him feel pint-sized
and discouraged.
Have you ever been on the poverty diet?
Where you eat your bologna and you're thankful and quiet
because at least you got to eat today!
and it might not always be this way
because we are a country perpetually stuck
We are all millionaires that are down on our luck
and use social programs like they're poverty camps
"Thank god it's a card now and that it's not still stamps!"
Is life about just buying shit?
Is that the only thing that makes us tick?
Our Jesus Christ of Bethlehem has a corporate sponsorship
Nobody dares bite the hand that gives to us
The Holy Writ of Consumption.
and you have no control of it.
It is your life's presumption
to obtain and to acquire
in a global mass corruption
You can only feed the fire
and mourn the next eruption
Come morning it will start again,
the rules of which have always been
Do not feel at home in your skin.
Do not let your neighbor win
and have the bigger SUV
The better home and family.
It's the American way and the way to be.
Our grandparents fought. They were draftees.
For us to have the rights that they
lost on graduation day
so we enslaved the middle east to pay them back
A brown desert turned the darkest black
We installed dictators specifically catered
to follow us through on this blessed attack.
The money made was worth the lives
that it took to have these cars to drive
You could hear them as their bones snapped
and cracked so we could thrive
And then there come these two airliners
with passengers who decided violence was how they'd react
Our leaders took the bait from terror designers
And forced onto us, The Patriot Act
Who needs a warrant? Privacy is archaic!
We can read all your lives on the blogging mosaic!
When everything is about to crash
you have to stay a step ahead of the population
They work against you because to them you are trash
These are the people that make our decisions.
It's kind of like praying in that you can do it and help nobody
but still feel like you did
If you're ignorant of history
you can be proud of what it is.
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7. |
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The lust was so heavy, like the burden of the day
To be without the levy when the water made its way
Except the water was liquor and the levy was your hand
where one became two; but then it was back again
It's the essence of life -- it's the means to an end
when my life is both dull and painfully bland
You were a spark that when lit, hit the core of my mind
but then it grew cold and in the dark I was blind
Because
One is the loneliest number that I've ever known
You were the loneliest person that I'd never know
Tripped on the words through a plastic telephone
End up in youth and then right back home
But I won't forget the taste of your flesh
or the beat in your chest or the lack of your breath
Your frame was atop me, but mine was alone
One is the loneliest number that I've ever known
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9. |
It's Dark Again
01:14
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10. |
Planted Feet and Trees
00:55
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Fast asleep, she couldn't wait to leave
She couldn't wait to pack her things
and couldn't say a god damn word
But I suppose
The emphasis in silence says more
than her quivering lips ever could
even though they probably should
We are debris scattered after a storm
because it might resemble home
but it doesn't feel the same as it did before
Since my feet are planted and I'll never learn to fly
or learn to tell the difference between a girl and her lies
It's under that coal, black sky
I resist and capsize under the weight of unrivaled apathy
As I swallowed some air and collapsed under a gravity far away from home...
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11. |
Exploring Inner Space
01:42
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14. |
Unuseless
04:06
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and i awoke, half drunk with the wind in my empty eyes, looking at kind of sun that blows and shifts, but doesn't shine
and there was a girl sitting on the curb crying inaudible
her black dress shined hard against the unrelenting sidewalk, used both now for feet and for teeth, as hers painted the ground, and she picked them up to preserve her beauty
she wept, but she didn't really make noise, she just blanketed the earth and opened her legs for boys to come inside and reproduce, the placenta from the lives before still cackled, still cooed
her hair was ratted and roaches were swimming, not the bug but the end of a cigarette, still half-aflame, where the ants picked up and the buzzards left off. eighth notes and coffee stains, a name in place of wedding rings, i heard her sing in silence
sympathizing for the devil, with my head level, i have empathy for children throwing their bodies on to uncles and brothers, and cousins, it wasn't like she was enjoying it. at least, it didn't look like it. laying there, half alive, mostly dead, i remember how she used to tell me that the grass wasn't green, but magenta, and that the clouds weren't really blue, we just accepted them as blue and because they weren't, then nothing in this mother fucking world was true. and since nothing was true, not the colors that we'd grown accustomed to, not the sounds that we'd fucked the night before to, that meant that she had nowhere to go, too
so that's where she was. and i looked at her with eyes of oceans, weeping silently to myself too, as I hadn't much to do on a bitter sunday morning. but she could have warned me.
i didn't know what to do. so i put on some pants, a shirt, took a shower brushed my teeth, too. then i grabbed the closest object, some telephone wire, walked through the dew between my toes and admired the cool summer breeze. to me, that's all that was left.
i strangled her to death as she coughed for breath and found redemption. did i mention how green her eyes looked? or were they magenta? i could still smell the placenta as her toothless mouth expired their final sentiments.
but i couldn't be bothered to find out what they meant
so i left her there and i went back to bed
because that's it was, as i poured some milk onto my cereal that morning, there were myriad reasons why i couldn't wake up and ignore it.. the sound of color just played and played and i knew deep down, that everything was a lie, so I couldn't just ignore the sore tongue i'd been speaking with. or the bloody tip of a good idea turned consequence. because the end justifies little things, but the bigger picture remains a scene too big for the low-minded. so don't mind it, as we aren't meant to get it.
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15. |
Monroe Face
02:15
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I'm a Monroe face in a dead place
With steady hands to clip the wings
Of birds in flight that die by night
And come back to tell of better things
Of things that never come to be
As love becomes a hate machine
Load up on drugs and kill your friends
For sad rock stars with holes through heads
I'm a Monroe face in a dead place
With eyes that see like a liar's lips
Of times now gone by setting sun
It's always been the way it is
The way it never should have been
Is now the room we're playing in
Of girls I've fucked but rarely loved
But said I did...because, because
I do not know who I have been
And I only have these memories
I've tasted every flavor here
But have yet to taste a single thing
I've seen the shores of those unknown
As my body slept in Iowa
The wind across my face did show
A lack of contribution
I'm a Monroe face in a dead place
Now put me back inside the earth
Poke holes beneath so I can breathe
Because death is not the anti-birth
It's the anti-birds in anti-flight
That feed on tides by vast moonlight
And dim streetlights
And dull fistfights
And there is no fear where there are no guns
No teeth where there is no pavement
The cops are here, now hide your life
I'm pretty sure they're here to take it
There is no wrong
Where there is no right
And since the dark
Defines the night
We must be going places, dear
But they're never going to catch me here
Let me make the sentiment clear
I'm a Monroe face in a dead place
And everything dead
Will always be
And everything born
Will still someday be
Dead
So carry on, forget the sun
And come back to talk of better things.
I'm a Monroe face in a dead place
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16. |
Radio in Color
03:01
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sit still
until
the hill
turns over
sun turns
winter
into something
gold
the radio played the days out in color.
sun turns the winter
into something
old
and i turned these splinters
into wounds
and roads
right on down the tributary
pluck the skin right off the berries
and suck the poison straight
down
go down
easy
nothing that is real is
from her dark hair
to mine
through pale eyes
and down the river
banks
where our mute lips
touched shore
to create tide
an irrelevant eclipse
from an old life
to one that will not
die
Saliva falls from the girls bruised lips
Fingers pressed against warm, crushed hips
The weight of the dirt with sun in her eyes
and blood in the skies
Oh, blood in the sky
Winter rain fell, turned the day into night
and the living to ice near the ghosts of twilight
In lieu of fresh garden, we settle for dirt
and everything hurt
Oh, everything hurt
What kind of man am I
To taste the fruit
of obvious lie
and lay beside a wounded bedspread
her breasts were pressed up against
my chest
and my heart was caving in
to walk that diving board
again
and sink
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19. |
Conniptions
20:58
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