Over the years I became the definition of detached.
I became the shell of a person that wanted to look as interesting as the amount of numbness she felt for everything around her.
I spent too many of my days alive while not truly living and I wasted more of my time behind a facade than a picturesque home with no walls.
So I was never truly present within the moments you now refer to as memories.
If I was there with you, sadly all you memorized was my absence.
Tag: Poetry
Prayer
I still remember The Lord's Prayer, but I don't believe in God.
The words are imprinted into some strange, sunken shrine within my skull.
Forged into bone at age nine by naivety, parental notions, and nightly repetitions.
Each line in the dutiful prayer as meaningless as the instructions for a machine that never worked.
Yet they still rise up from the recesses of my mind like a reflex. Like a cough or a sneeze from a body that once bowed without questioning why.
Maybe it's because the cadence of it still surprisingly soothes, even though its content no longer convinces.
Scenarios
I have tried to imagine all of the moments that I could bump into you.
As if I could compel corny, casual encounters that are made explicitly for the cinema into existence.
Maybe it's during a late night trip for cereal at the grocery store, an early morning stop at the gas station, or a mid-afternoon pill pick up at the pharmacy.
Maybe we reach for the same box, we arrive at the same time, or we stumble into the same softly lit aisle.
But maybe within each scenario something inevitably goes wrong.
All the shelves in the cereal aisle are completely empty, every fuel pump is forlornly flagged as out of service, and somehow I completely forgot to refill my prescription.
I have tried to imagine all of the moments that I could bump into you, but it just never works.
How could my mind ever create a place that will never exist for a person who is no longer there.
Consciousness
I dread those brief seconds of unawareness and uncertainty upon waking up.
My eyelids barely open and my brain immediately panics as it begins to recalibrate itself with a barrage of questions.
What time is it? What day is it?
Am I supposed to be somewhere today? Did I miss something?
I recollect my surroundings, orientating myself back to reality as the window shades shift shadows across my room's smooth walls.
My consciousness resumes.
My body relaxes.
It's noon on a Thursday.
I have no where to be and I have missed nothing.
Unremarkable
In reality, too many people are simply a disappointment.
They live without passion.
Waking up each day solely to fulfill the mindless routines and mundane expectations that society prompts them to accomplish.
They simply exist to exist as they strive to subsist and survive.
Appeasing a world built purely around predictability, profit, and political propaganda.
How can people be at peace with knowing that their life will end as unremarkably as the day they were born?
Perhaps because mediocrity offers comfort.
Perhaps for many it is easier to die unremarkably than to risk the consequences of ever truly living.
Rooted
I know I haven't been there,
yet I feel as if I know how those streets would feel underneath my feet.
I can visualize how the light hits the buildings each day at sunset and how the air smells each morning as the sun comes up.
I can imagine the sounds of the bird's cheerful chirps mixed into the constant chatter from the chorus of passerbys.
And if I think hard enough, I swear I can taste the sweetness of a pastry that I've never actually held in my hand.
Still I know I haven't been there.
I’ve not walked those streets and I've never seen, smelled, heard or tasted anything within that place.
Yet in every sense, I am already there.
Rooted in longing and unformed certainty.
And perhaps that is enough for now.
Overwhelming
She tries to keep them close...
Yet her ill-fated attempts only
stifle, smother, and suffocate the people she loves most.
Her affection simply too harsh and overwhelming for them to bear.
Happiness
There are moments in my life that I'm certain time stood still.
Moments where minutes had no frame and seconds had no end.
Moments in my life when everything happening around me had completely stopped and all I felt was happiness.
Inadequate
Is there ever truly a word for what we're feeling?
How does 'sad' equate to any amount of hopelessness in my heart? Or the 'anger' within me that feels nothing short of rage? Emotions aren't finite, they change without terms.
They collide and collapse into endless waves of one another in such a way that can never precisely be described.
The adequacy of words for emotions will always fall short...
For not everything is meant to be completely understood.
RX
Compressed and covered
with an enteric-coated shell.
Altering my mind
to convince me that I'm well.
Branded to fix the low
dopamine and serotonin.
In lieu of my over-indulgence
of caffeine and melatonin.
AO Poetry 
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