Trust

I felt the sound of the world and smelled the heat of the sun
Reached my hands to the stars and seized the life from one
I used a lariat to harness the body of an idea
then took a breath and with it exhaled out all my fear.

I found in truth that there is wine, a shifting paradigm
A loosed tongue, a life undone and lost a love Devine
I met my mistress Minerva toward the ending of a circle
She reassured me that nothing rhymes with circle

Snowball fights in August.
They happen now and then
They bring you clean and clear the soul of all the pain that it may know
While Bending the branch of time again.
Snowball fights in August
Not as uncommon as you may think
You've got to go a-ways, I know, but the feeling is distinct
Of taking shot from friend or foe
Of a snowball thrown in August and the place you'll grow to know
Cause for a snowball fight in August the highest mountains you must go
Or find yourself flipped upside down in a land that's down below
A snowball fight in August is a thing you otta try
Cast away those shackles and live before you die.

What if where you're going is where you've always been
What if all your about to be's are really your remember when's
What if you could see a bit of hope in me
What if money's not the end

How can I open my world up to you
How can you start to trust me too
How can we start to be free
How can you speak out while she's holding me

Loved and lost and loved again
It's true I drank away my only friend
I can't begin to see the hurt I've caused
Because of you I stop and pause

We'll breathe a breath again one day
We'll watch the children laugh and play
We'll sit and sing the song
Of all the right and the wrong we have done.

We get so few

I met a moment
She touched my world
I let her go
She stole the cold of my soul
But I let her go

I made a memory
As Water molds the stone
I let her go
Never felt at home
When She let me go

I missed my mark
An arrow crests the wall
I found her here
A drop spark on fire falls
I let her go

Thoughts in a van

The moon and stars,
A muse for hours.
A lite that lingers
loving like an artists finger's.

This place, still wild...like the heart of a child.
A dance, a day, a night to play.
A chill so real it's hard not to feel
So cold
and alone.


Never stop embracing that child from within.
Sing a song, write a poem, do a cartwheel in a park far away from home!
Live for today, tomorrow is a myth.  The who we are not the what we have becomes our greatest gift.
We have this moment to achieve a better version of ourselves, to rise and fall, to do it all, to place our fears upon the shelf.
Feel the sun grabbing at your naked skin, run and play throughout the day and never grow old again.
And never stop embracing that child from within.



I wrote a poem today and said most of what I wished to say.
Though It became a challenge toward the end ...
to make it live, to make it fly, to watch the words ascend.
It wasn't till I stopped trying that the words they came to me.
A lovely lesson learned in letting life's mind live free.



I want simply to sit here all day long and write a song that proves that we are not gone.  That we remain the same, no less humane, not just avoiding but removing all our pain. The people who I speak with have many things to say, some are good and some are bad but most have forgotten about today.  They gather for tomorrow like a squirrel in an autumn chill, people have forgotten that this moment is all that is real.  The size of your TV or the name that's on that degree mean nothing to me.  You see, these are the things that keep us from being truly free.

How Far I've Come

If you only knew how far I've come since the day you walked away.
If you only knew the hardship in being cast astray.
If you only had the heart to stay,
You'd see how far I've come, since the day you walked away.

The who I am, the what I know continued every day to grow
Every part of me better than the one you used to know
For all the times I waited, and when you didn't show
The who I am, the what I know is from the pain I pushed below

If you could see how far I've come would you still have left me then?
Would you know that my potential had not yet begun to begin
When I think of the strength your leaving's left me, I just have to grin
If you only knew how far I've come maybe we could start again.

But the who I am and the what I know now belongs to someone else
Their faith in me has summoned something surpassing worldly wealth
The day you walked away was the one I moved toward health
The who I am and how far I've come belongs entirely to myself

life is single handedly the most painful, beautiful, horrible, amazing, gut wrenching experience.  Like you, I have one.  I have one chance to be a better version of myself each day.  I have one moment that is in no way encapsulated.  I have one moment to scream that I love her, I have one moment to be the best of myself and not judge those that have fallen below that same line.
I often miss the mark.  I often come off too strong or not strong enough but I can say that never, not once, did I give less than my everything.  This is our chance to inhale, to breath the viscous, stinking hell that is life. Somehow we have been given autonomy.  We are our own anathema, we are the plauge that scars the face presented to seas of waves that could no better support us than they could a leaf adrift.
This life cuts small, cuts small adrift in a sea of sharks.  Life is in no way our demise.

the novelty exists in those poor souls who have little more to offer than a pretty face.  a flash of flame that has little hope of greater contribution.  longevity is in no way a product of random occurrence.  character runs deeper than the shallow depths of ones hair, it transcends the trivial curves of taunt skin.  money, prowess, sex and deception are the coins that seem to trade hands.

I'll walk until my feet are bleeding

I've seen things, man. I've seen 14 countries in the last two weeks. I've seen a women do things with a Ping pong ball that defies every college anatomy class I ever attended. I've seen the inside of burning buildings and barrel waves alike. I've seen two wars and all the hell they bring. I've saved lives and taken them. I've seen the apex of human kindness and cruelty existing in my own heart as well as in others. I've seen the finish line of several Ironman races and the inside of an octagon. I've seen seen a women selling weed brownies at sunset on a beach in Costa Rica while doing a yoga class with half a dozen Scandinavian women, yes I bought a round for the group and indulged. I've seen a Beautiful blonde Russian women invite me for a naked midnight swim off the shores of Thailand. I've seen strangers open their homes and their hearts to a homeless, unemployed veteran. I've seen the inside of a jail cell and broke bread with heads of state. I've been kicked out of bars, universities and countries. I've stowed away on trains and jumped from planes. I've loved and lost and loved again. I've lived enough for a hundred men. The life we get, we get only one. I refuse to stop living till the living is done. We get one chance to cast away, the dirtiest word you can ever say. In your life only one thing can stop the go, it's your fear of living and that foul word, no. If hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul, the only way to keep it flying is to answer all invitations with an enthusiastic, "Let's roll!"

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.