Cacti

I shed a tear on a dead cactus today, and hoped that it would wake.

But it didn't.

I guess the movies lied. I guess we can't all be Matilda, and move objects with our eyes.

I guess fights don't always mean makeup sex, sometimes lies don't turn out for the best.

Reality is more than the hero pulling through, sometimes the villian does too, and the battle continues through eternity, casualties are many, survivors are few.

I guess love is not a picture perfect affair, with well orchestrated fights and beautifully shed tears. Sometimes we can't share all our fears, sometimes we are selfish with our dreams, possessive with our ideas.

I'm beginning to believe that we won't find world peace, there's too much hatred in these streets, discrimination is lurking behind bleached teeth.

Bleached skins and plastic grins, blaming entertainment industries to defend the very basic inferiority. Hide your identity in the search for popularity, acceptance and belonging more important than sanity. Exchange sane for fame, nobody sees the emperors new clothes but everybody's ordering the same, the makers of the magic fabric smiling, create the need for conformity to increase their gain. 

I guess honest politicians are as real as santa's elves, the only change that would mean anything is the change within ourselves. No leader is getting paid for giving a damn, its all a craftily projected plan,international relations and diplomacy all part of a big conspiracy and the painful truth is that we revel in our ignorance so none of us can see.

Illiterate supporting of political parties, archaic ideologies, on the basis of family history or tribality.

The very basis of governance has been snatched from we the peoples hands, the same way they are snatching our lands, but fuck it, all we want are literal political parties, organise a rally, play some music and let's dance.

Idolise the villains and canonise the heroes, we're only shown one side of the story, and even that is seen through smoke, so many bombs are dropped that it's an everyday deal, literally burning bodies to power industries, and we can't see that the Holocaust is still real. 

But humanity is like cacti, the poster child for hope. Because in the face of such adverse diversity we continue to grow. Inventions are made, children are born, artistes are delighted to perform. Beauty is seen, rarely, but still. We get a little money, call homies, we chill. We laugh. We ignore our pain.

Because no matter how dry the desert gets, every once in a while it recieves rain.

Daydreams.

Silent screams and quiet shouts
Lucid dreams and walking out.
Im living an imagination
And I cant imagine what its about.

Friendly ghosts and ghostly friends
Berating myself as I wait for the end.
Im living an imagination
And Im being real even as I pretend.

Reality never quite works like this
I know the answer to the question I missed.
Im living an imagination
And I betray with a smile, agree with a kiss.

Agree to what's neccessary, agree with what's not.
When love is my actions, and hate is my thoughts.
Im living an imagination
And my lie is the answer they sought.

But its not the answer I give
What my mouth denies; what my heart believes.
Im living an imagination
And their half is the all that I give.

Im living an imagination.
My half is the half I don't live.

The Proposal

Let us dance to Sinatra, let us run into a rose garden, kiss my wrist and tell me you pine for me.

Let's watch a silent movie in black and white.

Let's live in black and white. Let us be amazed at automobiles, and wave goodbye to relatives from the deck of a ship,

en route to Europe.

Let's stand at the helm of a ship and play Titanic. Ill be Rose. Draw me. Let me kiss you in a car. Let's steam up some windows. Let's sing. Let's waltz. Let's sit under moonlight and talk about ourselves.   

Let's live in Nazi germany. Let us be Jews, and try to escape with the family jewels. Let's pledge undying love as we drown in the Danube.
There's child next to me I wish we could keep. I could hold his hand.

You hold mine.

Let us waltz to Strauss. Let us love to Mozart. Let's dine to Verdi. Let's watch coronations and abdications, let us fall in love with Victoria, and Elizabeth;
"Isn't Her Majesty just delightful" "Yes, and so young, too, I think she's doing terrific" 

Let us watch operas and concerts from halls. Let us be thrilled by the happenings in america, in the colonies.

Lets us debate who should be free, and who should be slave.

Let me fall in love with you on the Seine. Row a barge under a bridge, stop and kiss me. Be aroused by my ankles and my hands.

Be my beau. Come calling at my doorstep, let's walk out together. Throw pebbles at my window and serenade me.

Love me in ruffles and lace and corsets and bonnets. Let us take a ride through central park without a chaperone.

Ive always had a wicked streak.

Go off to war. Let me love you in absentia. Let me send you scented handkerchiefs and long love letters. Let me cry myself to sleep for worry of your safety. Let me stand at the doorstep and look down the street with yearning. Let me scan the newspapers anxiously, give me the chance to sigh with relief when i don't see your name.

Let us wear Levis and have big hair. Grow a ponytail. Il keep a bouffant. I don't care, it'll be the swinging seventies and eighties and we'll run off and live in a hippie settlement. Let's be nudists. Let's have meth trips, let's get drunk and sober and drunk again. Let's dance in the rain.

Let's love wildly. I'll get a job. I'll be a feminist. Be a chauvinist. Be amused. Be impressed. I don't care. Just love me.

Let's get married. Start a family. Raise a coupla hell raising kids. I've always wanted a mozart. Lets name our kids amadeus and thaddeus and bobby. And laugh at them all their lives. Lets make the world our sockball. Let me love you in ages. And ages. And ages.

Die before me. I want to mourn you. Mourn me. Let's wear black. Lets love six feet under. We could be buried together.

Tell me your name. I want to fall in love with you right now. And over and over again.

For David, at 9.

The love of my life. You're 9 today.

So much I think of, so much I want to tell you.

Like how proud I am of you, and how much you mean to me.

And how I pray for you, and worry about how you see me.

Am I the best big sister you could have? Because I try to be. And everything I do, my love, you inspire me.

Will you adapt to a changing world, will your life be beautiful? As much as it is in my power to, it will be.

Do you worry about anything? You shouldn't. You've got more arms supporting you than a crowd-surfing celebrity.

And so many people are preoccupied with your happiness, I don't know how your life could turn out to be anything less than awesome.

But God give you life, more nine years like these, more beauty, more growth, continuous peace.

And God give us life, that we may see you grow into the wonderful young man we know you will be.

I could write at this all day, but I've got to put the rest aside to help you celebrate.

And one day, you will be old enough to understand that people get emo and write things like this, but right now...

Baby, just enjoy your play.

Washed Out

Purple is the colour of a flower
in the fields;
Growing arrogantly among the golden
corn yields.
Purple is the colour of a stormy sky
Or a sunset, announcing the black that
draws nigh.

Purple is the colour of his rages when
he's mad
And the colour of her tears
when she's sad
She smiled a purple smile when he came from work that day.
But she saw his purple, and her purple faded away.

Purple is the colour of the bruise
on her cheek
And the blood that flows out even
as she speaks.
Purple is the colour of her life ebbing away.
Purple is the colour of her night
and her day.

Purple was the colour of the sky that day.
And he hid purple tears as they
laid her away.
He followed as they drew him away
And he left his soul behind, once purple,
now gray.

Y.O.L.O

Where are we going? Do we have a plan? We're all dressed up and busy on our phones, twitter and facebook, so much concern on how our face looks, superficial is the new deep, deep is the new creep, creep is the new intense, myopia is the new lens. Thought gave way to pretense.

Stereotyped minds living generic lives, we're like tins of sardines, occasionally youll find one that is differently sized, but otherwise they're all pretty much the same. Trivialise emotion till it just becomes a game, were living abbreviations, short forms of the names. There's no true freedom, heterosexual beings calling out 'no homo' just cos they wearing pink. Its become gay to say I love you to your brother because were scared of what people would think.

Music used to live on this planet, remember the blues? Remember soul and jazz and classical pieces that moved your soul, no sound effects just one man and his piano, defining the thoughts of your subconscious, breaking you free, making you whole. Remember Louis Armstrong and Mozart, defining art, when was the last time a song made your heart pause pause and restart? Do you remember when you heard music so beautiful you could cry, now DJ Khaled and Rick Ross are stars and Nobody is asking why?

Remember a time when there were visionaries, crusading missionaries, bent on making a point in a world full of dots. Remember that time when thinking was cool, when the great minds were not confined by school? Sometimes I wonder if Martin can see us.Does he remember his dream? Do the ancestors of the slaves remember what form of pain made their grandparents scream? Doesn't it seem more each day like we're losing focus of the important things that come our way?

But no, today its more about where the partys at tonight, how many bottles of hennesy is politically alright, let's get wasted and faded, get drunk and degraded, just so our friends will know that we made it.

Let's make the dresses shorter and the weaves longer, let all the noise distract us from the fact that we're hiding the ugliest form of disorder.

Let us preach hell and damnation, scare people into their salvation, give them nothing to build on their initial convictions, and when they fall offer them condemnation.

Let us commercialise sin and sex, convince their narrow minds that these are best, invest in capitalist structures that enrich the rich and screws over the rest.

Tell her over there that he wont like her until she changes the clothes that she wears, tell him, struggling within, that drugs will bring the acceptance hes craving. Build up their hopes in crack and dope, in brazilians and europe, and then make a law that says, dont smoke.

Encourage perversions of the basest kind, give a man the legal right to deface anothers behind, give no thought to the consequence on social structures and the continuity and preservation of the sanity of humankind, and wrap it up nicely and call it human rights.

But these things are not in our place to say,We are children, what do we care of but today? What right have we to show concern over our futures, go ahead and destroy the only worthwhile legacies you could leave us.

But excuse us one day, when the world is going astray, we will sit and drink and dance, after all, you told us, we only live today.