To keep us from wanting more . . .

We tried to buy the world and it was never enough.

When we were younger we were hungrier. Starved for the solace secured in the self-projection of the self. The comfort in knowing that the world around you, too, would know you as you are without the social filters, without the freshly hemmed trousers, resting like a trophy down the fall of your leg.

When we were younger we did not know that our personal injustices were likely far surpassed by those without even the luxury enough to consider such spiritual repressions. Those souls whose daily battle was mere survival, to whom the prospect of the opportunity of developing a self would have been considered as fine a gift as fresh fruit, miraculously birthed from the deserts drafty pockets. A gift that would not be seen by such battered eyes. Nor the taste ever known of.

And there we were in our air-conditioned middle American homes, crying over our own frustrations of the middle-class warfare. Boredom, ignorance, and bliss. Our neighbors in the other worlds did not even have terms for such words. We got real good at hating ourselves, and hating one leads to hating the next.

We learned about education, and power, and monetary units we could hold in our hands like prophet’s words. Like a solution. We lied to ourselves and stood on our new thrones of ash to cast down potentials on the pure we had squandered. We drank heavy these distractions, as they comforted the ever churning mind, into its peaceful submission. We could hardly live the other way. What were we supposed to do? We were sad, and so affected.

He could consume everything with a single swoop. He found more in wanting more, and he paraded in this gluttony for a few years. He was running to and from the gut of these things, in a roundabout, circular fashion, until he once day ran back into his own arms. And away from inadvertantly killing himself, by the previous excursions. He seemed surprised I should understand this falling, but should it be any surprise at all?
We’ve all been trying to annihilate ourselves since birth, by force, by right, or by walking through the lines of fire, on our way to someplace else. Honey, I’ve been choking on those words so painfully long as you have. And I hope we don’t have to any more.

Because more,
Is never enough
For the insatiable soul

It’s not in the crisp green papers of freedom
It’s not in the golden brimmed bubble in the mug
It’s not in that plastic bottle with your name on it

No it’s none of those things, which provide us the freedom of confusion
It’s always in the things we’d prefer to be confused of

Cause they sting on the tongue as they exit your mouth
They tremble in your throat as everyone’s having a good laugh
And they stick to your skin like the sweat of another
Who feels like they should have been there from the start

So as our brown skinned siblings are plowed down by our boredom, I sit here with my new vision. I received glasses today, and have seen more distinguishing lines than ever before. And I talk about the other world as if I knew. As if my mother had been blown into stars by sensationalist antics and their mighty forces, as if my best friends had died without even trying. There may not be stained battlefields of bleeding red, of flesh, and demolition. And I may be trite and self-involved by even tainting such happenings with my own colors and visions, but it’s the best I know how. And my privileged, freedom bound friends have, in fact, been dying their mighty deaths, by the hands of their own repressions. But we, we here in our “civilized” world, we have the privilege of the walking dead, in their burial suits of gray, flimsy white-washed skin, jaundice and wanting more (air, life, love, peace, a fucking hamburger?). We watch our dead as they go about forging a life, filled by haunted memories of what once was. Our imaginations of ourselves. While the other side of the world has us to blame for their lover’s and loved ones tombs of eternal sleep, we too have ourselves to blame for the graveyards upon which we walk every day; the vast neon streets of candy-colored flesh in New York City, San Francisco, Las Vegas, all the way down to Little City X, America. The walking dead firing its weight to the eternal dead. I’m wondering who is fighting who, and if it’s fair to point any fingers at all.

You see, sadness and hate are world epidemics. And they plague our evil President like they plague the linen laced extremists blowing up the innocents in the name of their saving grace. It’s easy to forget how to live, when we’ve fogged up the glass, that could only be wiped clean by good love. We’ve become so consumed by fighting, either for the fighting to stop, or simply firing the guns, that we have nearly forgotten how to love. And now, most of us would find it easier (and more practical), to scream at politicians, or simply fire a gun, than to do something as simple as say three one-syllable words. (without flinching or thinking that the world might end).

And is life worth preserving if the preservation bears no fruit? Why is it so critical, so important that we stop the killers from their killing? If you want to stop the babies being aborted, you damn well better have something waiting for them on this other side. You better be sure you give them life, if you deny them death. You must sleep in the bed that you make, not force others to lay there. This is critical. That our good intentions, can march further than just principals, and the moral, and deliver those good intentions to fruition. Once we have stopped the killing, what should we have that warrants living for? These do not singularly exist. If we are so overzealous to stop death, and the hate, perhaps we should start exercising our capacity for the opposite as well.

And I’m trying to find some sense in this delicate web. The best way to invest the good intentions. Because we are unaware of most of what will grace us. Too inexperienced to know of the celestial that will sweep our paths to come.

So, I’ve been reading the news,
Been thinking of how to use it, and
I figured it’s best to just keep pushing …..

Until we’ve arrived.

And I wonder,
Will a lifetime ever be enough,
To keep us from wanting more?