I don't want to loose your hold on me

People speak of talent.  There is no such thing as talent. Quite simply there is a person that worked harder than you.  People use the word talent the way they use the concept of divinity.  Talent is an explanation for how someone could be better than I am.  God must have done that.  God didn't do that, the collective hard work and experience of an dedicated person did that.
People call Mark Ziya "talented" every time he picks up a guitar.  I know better.  That man has no talent.  That man sat angry in front of a Johnson Millennium amp, guitar in hand, until his fingers bled.  He doesn't have talent, he has something to prove.  Stop giving credit to talent, start giving credit to agony, start giving credit to being the smallest kid on the bus, start giving credit to the part of you that would rather die than come in second.  You are talent, you are capable, you are your own hero!

I gave my everything

truth is a spurious devil.  

Truth tells our febel mind that it is correct.  A sinister whisper falling on the footsteps of an


What color are your leaves.  Is it your autumn or your fall.  In what particular circumstance and fleeting attitude are you embracing this day , this season?  Your truth is no more relevant than the color of ink on this virtual screen.  What you possess is the greatest farce of the human race.  Lucid is the dream that you are in, real is the play unfolding before your delicate, feeble mind.  Your truth is no more or less collective reality than that of Hitler's.


How much do I know?  I know all that I have lived.  I know all that has been told to me through a perpetually jaded filter of a life lived by those with regrets.  I have a lifetime of tainted and otherwise corrupt memories salting the streets of my feeble mind.  I have little more than a drowning chance of knowing what truth is than any mislead creaton which exposed themselves to the realities of humanity as any other.  I know no truth.  I know only what has been feed to me.  I know only one more thing than most, I know that I know no truth.

On this, the stone

 On this, the stone....
On this the stone we carve ourselves.  We grind our delicate cylindrical shape into a jagged edge.  We use that edge to cut those that would challenge our belief.  Reasoning, when in line with our own, goes unchallenged and applauded.  A freedom to speak out, a freedom to oppose and make fervent against is the very spark which stone to surface omitted.  Why then is there anything but gratitude when one uses that spark?
Dissension is the highest honor that a citizen can bestow upon a soldier.  To blindly give thanks to a series of actions is more insult than compliment.  Human emotion prevents the course of logic more often than it lends favor to it.  To see the inanimate object for which one fought desecrated somehow supersedes the simultaneous preservation of ideology for which both that object stands and the underlying reason for which it was fought for to begin with.

through the Evergreen park

In its origins this was to be a place free from the judgement of audience.  In its infancy the intention was to serve as equal parts journal and creative outlet.  As all things in life should do, there has been an organic evolution of ARTV.  It is still unclear to me where this thing is going.  I am not sure if this place is a necessity the way it once was.  The vernacular that I once whispered to myself in the safe dark confines of my tiny basement apartment is now read, recognized and appreciated by more people than I can count.  This platform has, for sometime, acted as an unintentional whetstone.
There is still a long way to go before I am a great writer but for the first time I recognize that that is the direction I am headed.  Does a polymath set out to be such?  Or is a similar condition in which I have found myself entangled in?  Often I wonder what it would be like to be the very best at something but it has never been a pursuit that has interested me enough to follow.  Through more endeavors than I care to discuss I have achieved a reasonable level of success and moved on to another, completely abandoning the previous.  From the earliest age I have found passion in things.  Those things become all consuming until the point in which I know that I have mastered them and then I become uninterested.  The same can be said of many of my relationships.  There have been only three women that I have loved in such a way that they could cause me pain.  My belief is that was because they remained illusive and unconquerable.
One of my only fears is that this idiosyncrasy will leave me forever alone, never having mastered any aspect of life.  For now I will write.  I will do so until the entire world knows me for being a great writer, when that happens I will grow tired of writing and evolve once again to the foothill of another seemingly unconquerable peak.  In time I will summit all that life will present to me, all the while truly and forever alone.

this bell tolls for an old man by the sea

"Writing isn't hard, you just sit at the keyboard and bleed."


Have you ever been called a coward?  Have you ever had a random person that you have never and will never meet sling an atrocious tittle in your direction via a keyboard?  I have been called everything by humans in more countries than I can count.  I have allowed the better thoughts from the last four years find their escape through my fingers and the best of those have been apprehensively presented for public consumption.  Never, not once did it feel painful or exposing to write those words.  Maybe Hemingway was right, maybe writing is little more than a hemorrhage, something we are all capable of.  Bleeding, however, doesn't hurt.  There is only one thing that hurts more than an uneducated, ignorant retch of a human being attempts to belittle you in a public forum because of what you have written.  That is when no one says a thing.

and by opposing end them?

Hate


Hate is a word that I try to avoid using.  There is so much more power in that word than the amount of gravity that it is given.  The word cunt seems to be atrocious.  Saying the word nigger in certain company will get you killed.  Yet the word that gives power to each of those arrows is tossed around with obnoxious frequency.  I reserve its use because the significance that it carries.  To hate something is beyond loathing, it is beyond reasoning, it is beyond comprehension.  It is pure, unadulterated emotion at the opposite spectrum from love.  No, I don't use that word lightly.

I hate myself.  I hate myself more than I could ever hate anything or anyone.  There are certain things that disgust me.  Intolerance disgusts me, prejudice disgusts me, ignorance disgusts me, yet as bad as those things are I still don't hate them.  No, I reserve that designation for the worst offenders, I reserve that for myself.

I hate that I am the reason why I am constantly in pain.  It is not my choice to feel every pin prick with the magnitude of a dagger.  It is not my will to be an open reciprocal for the purging of life's overflow.  Yet for some reason I feel things that I believe others do not.  In short, I am an emotional lighting rod and I hate myself for it.  Its not that I cry when a kitten dies, I don't even like cats.  I'm just not wired the same as those I share a crowded bar with.  In them there is a chase, a pursuit.  In me there is a struggle, a battle.  I don't even want to be here, I want to be with her yet the women here are calling my name.  I am their celebrity and I hate myself for it.  Above all else I hate myself for, once again, for wanting her more than she wants me.  I hate myself for finally caring for a person in the way that I swore I never would again.  I hate myself for exposing my naked chest to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Tall truths topple taller tales.

.
Entirely Dictated by Life is life. That every thing we do, every decision That we make, every word we utter is the by-product of a previous interaction or experience. Tastes and intolerance is molded by the joys and pains Which seared Themselves into our deepest crevices. Phrases uttered by an unnecessary impact on illustrious idol makes idiom.
We learn to love the setting sun, the demise of a day and all the hope that its predecessor brings.  We adapt approach to prevent the repeated torment of our central pump.  Like a wild animal once kicked we flee from any potentially aggressive boot.  Even the slightest shuffle can create a stampede in the opposite direction.
We are a ransom note strewn together from the pieces cut from others.  The truest version of ourself is not our our title, our cover or even our pages.  Who we are is the shifting of the eyes of those who read our words.  We are a letter cut free from a magazine in an effort to construct someone else's sentence. 
When the letters used to construct our sentences are abrasive we do not do well to comfort the eyes of our readers.  If, by chance, your misfortune is that of having struggled though similar symbols to those of a new note it is natural to remove yourself from such a circumstance.  Life is easier lived when mistakes are not repeated.  

In trust we survive

Infidelity is a choice that we must trust another not to make.  We lend our lives to others in hopes they tred lightly.  No pain could be greater than betrayal at the hands of our own heart.  No human emotion can so closely compare to sheer and utter lunacy as that of love.  Truly a condition worthy of incarceration for its absolute form is unadulterated madness.  To give yourself completely to another in hopes of remaining unscathed is asking a star not to fall.  It may come maliciously or without intent but at some point the ones we love hurt us, they are the only ones that can. ....



It is a dangerous trail we tred when committing to the condition of love.
A scary rail we ride when placing another so far above.
A light, a flash and wave to crash.  A beach, a shore you've never wanted more.
A touch, a taste, a feeling you can't replace.
A pain so real, one you long to feel.  A helplessness in absence.  A relief in embrace.
This pain somehow alleviates the pain of living.






..... That pain is unique.