Desperate Measures call for Naps

Desperation.

That is what I felt most of my life.

I didn’t know why, except maybe that all the adults around me were always holding something from me.

Or was it that I was holding everything from them, and they knew I was wondering what it was all about?

I can’t even remember how many conversations I had in my head before talking to someone about it, but I do know what it felt like.

It felt like I was the last person anyone wanted to be around, or at least that’s how I probably came off.

Or that I belonged on another planet, or that I WAS on another planet.

But that was probably just being a teenager…

Right?

Does the experience of angst prove that you didn’t have enough to do, weren’t responsible enough, or that a diagnosis of some kind to show definitively how you might be somewhat defective make it a closed case?

Long days of becoming a child and wishing the freedoms of adulthood allowed for exploring what others around can’t let me have.

But I don’t know what I want.

But I do want to be connected.

I do want to laugh and for my Mom to laugh and slow down, to not be so angry.

I want my sister to be what she wants to be.

I’m afraid of my dad. I’m terrified of my stepfather.

Why are men so obscure?

Why are they destitute in sensitivity?

Why are men unable to be fully accessible?

I would find out later.

And my enforced apprehension of expression would build up in me to such an extent that all the things that worked or got me by were exactly what destroyed me.

I found out what being a man is,

and luckily I am too sensitive and aware to shove it down or ignore it for very long.

Being a man is becoming divorced from who you truly are.

Being who you truly are is to embrace a wondrous and complicated presence which allows for ambiguity and vulnerability.

To cry,

To sing,

To love openly,

To hurt,

To not know,

To be able to say

“I care”

And to be entrusted to the fate of what happens to others you may not know,

Or that you don’t understand.

Then I understood manhood, as it is defined in militaristic America, is to be completely overthrown…if I was to understand and reclaim myself.

There is no freedom for yourself unless you are willing to extricate, to cleanse, to replace with grounded sensations in calm considerate waters what pollution has been dumped into you from all sides since you were born.

Now we are being barreled into the worst and putrid depths of petrified toxicity that the worst of unexamined propaganda could ever think to bring to us, and a majority of us are doing it willingly.

How much will forsaken ignorance cost us and our children’s children?

I don’t believe in fate.

At least not in the kind that doesn’t require our involvement in it.

That’s just fantasy.

I do believe that none of us ever knows what is going to happen in the future, and that we all overestimate our control in our own lives and circumstances.

We cannot know how or why we do what we do, not really.

And we cannot know who will be there in the morning for us.

With us.

And what they are willing to do, no matter what happens to them.

But we can act as if the best versions we have seen and can conceive us will be there to greet us in every day that we are able.

We are able to become what we would like to see.

And that does matter.

No matter what happens around us…

We must become our own saints to ourselves.

We must become our own saviors.

And we must accept that we will consistently fail,

But in the process will become better…

And somehow someone else might see this.

They might see us in our flawed calamities,

In our painful silences,

and our vibrant entwinement

to the spiritual community

And how we become aware of ourselves

In how we show up for each other

With what that gives our hearts and our bodies

That others can take inspiration

In ways we may never know and see.

This world isn’t ours to decide.

But we must protect what we can,

Because we have a muonumental purpose

and an even greater impact

on this planet and the universe around us…

Even if the majority of the worst and most ignorant amongst us

Refuse to see it

and hoard and destroy the best of which

Our time tried to offer.

This is our final test

In what civilization could accomplish

If we could only turn towards the earth as a lover

And not a whore to plunder into personal comfort.

Will we put up any kind of fight?

It looks like we will drown in high seas

and sweeping waves of heat

before we realize

That we could have had it better

If we just resisted a little bit…

But then again,

Next day shipping is hard to give up.