I just want to be loved. Want to be loved, and know that it is real. Not carry around these doubts and fears and suspicions. I want to hold someone in my arms that I care more about than myself. I want forever in an embrace and infinity in a kiss and passion and longing in the hours that I am not in their presence.
I want to find the things that I have been writing into other people since I was twelve years old manifest in a real person. And I want someone to find those things in me. I want to be capable of seeing those things in myself, and sharing them with someone. I want to be able to sacrifice myself without compromising who I have become, allowing myself to be a martyr without being put on a pedestal for it.
I want to be able to accept myself as someone who loves me would. I want to see my value outside of a lover's afterglow, yet through their eyes. I want the truth, from whichever perspective it rings most true.
Most of all, I want to be able to see why you still love me after everything when I find it so difficult to love myself after all of the same everything...
I want to know the truth, as seen through your eyes, before I cast judgement through my own.

I hope it makes you feel better, my Love. Seeing my heart melting for you on the roaring fire…
There is nothing that I could have done to change the way that this has ended, yet I would still happily melt to make you feel better. I would still burn to keep you warm.
Did you notice the way the fire made my heart glow in the orange yellow flames? I did. I also noticed the way that it cried out, feeling lost and empty and broken in its final moments of misery. And I heard how you cried out when you realized that there was nothing left but to set fire to my lonely love.
I cannot explain why I have chosen this route. I cannot tell you the reasons behind choosing to burn, and at the same time, scorch you with the melting remnants of my heart. The only thing that I can say is that I am sorry. Sorry for the pain and the burns and the fire, and the need for them all.
And that I am left, burning with you, just the same.
And in those cooling embers, there lies the ashes of me that I will never regain, for I have given it to you. It was the shattered pieces of my Technicolor heart that filled the barren canvas with the imperfections of my love. It was the only thing which has ever made any sense and at the same time, no sense at all. It was all that I ever hoped to be mixed with all the doubt of who I was never worthy of being.
It was yours, and I gave it freely to you. It should not make me sad that you have chosen to put it to rest in the funeral pyre, yet I feel the want to cry.
Sleep sweet, my Love, knowing that I would throw my heart on the fire a thousand times over for you to remain un-singed by its heat. I only wish that I could have.

For God so loved the World…
Why? How? Does He see the same World that we live in everyday? Do His eyes see the same people? I cannot believe that they do…
We are everything that He is not, complete opposites in every way.
We are ignorant and arrogant. We see something beautiful and immediately cut it to pieces to find out what makes it so radiant. We are hateful and self-centered, thinking only of ourselves even alongside the deathbeds of others. We are destructive and self-absorbed. We only help the needy for a tax credit and a clear conscience.
We curse and condemn and never give our actions a second thought. We tear each other down to build ourselves up.
We lie and we cheat and we steal and we ****. We torture and torment in the name of boredom. We rob and we pillage and we **** and we raze, leveling the achievements of our own for the temples of posterity.
We live in a world where dog eats dog and beasts eat God, and He goes on, loving us just the same.        How? How can anyone love something that is so perverse; so malignant? We burn what we do not understand to ash instead of observing and wonder why our neighbors stockpile gasoline and flame retardant clothing…
Love thy neighbor as thyself and hate each other, it’s alright, as long as you hate yourself for being like your neighbor and hate your neighbors for being like you.
We are the worst that the universe has to offer, yet the creator of all has still decided to bestow his love upon us? Why? How must His eyes see our wicked race to continue to feel that way? We are nothing more that wicked mud, and deserving of nothing more than a harsh drought followed by unending windstorms.
Bring on the sun and the winds. Wipe this plague from the face of the Earth. She will not miss us, just as your neighbors will not miss you.  
But please, dear God, do not stop loving us, for we are merely children with money, nuclear toys and a strong dependency on anti-depressants, and we know not what we do.

I start this off without any words. But they will come. This is the blessing, and the curse. Regardless of what has transpired in my life, or how much I wish to forget, the words will come. They are my salve and my damnation.
  The words that find their way onto these tomes soothe and comfort my weary soul, yet the ones that hide in the spaces between curse and condemn. They haunt each fiber of my mind, traversing the expanse between my neurons on the backs of false pretenses, the sugar coated electric lies that I tell myself and repeat to others.
Alcohol is not a crutch; it merely plays the role of ticket-taker, ousting the transient, stowaway misanthropes from the boxcar of truth that is my thought pattern, allowing me to take an accurate head count.
I am afraid. I am so frightened of being who I am and making myself happy that I settle for making others happy in lieu of my desires. I am paralyzed by thoughts of failure, as well as dreams of success. I am terrified that if I should start screaming, I may never be able to stop. I am usurped by panic at the thought of another day in this drudgery that is my own existence.
I am discontent. I am not happy with the way that I have allowed my life to turn out. I want it to change before I have reached the point that I only look forward to its end.
Yet, still I continue to laugh. Again and again, I regurgitate the same old sentiments of positivity and hopeless hopefulness that I have grown so accustomed. “Tomorrow is another day,” or “It can’t rain all the time.”
But tomorrow is another day. And how should I face it if it ends up being the same as today? And it can’t rain all the time, but better men than myself have drown in a flash flood.
So why do I continue to say these things? For the benefit of myself or for the person who is listening? Which one have I become?

As one may expect, anyone who has trod upon the loam of this planet for the last 30 years is bound to have experienced things.
While I am still a bachelor, I have loved and been loved. I have felt the light of a thousand suns and also endured the lonely embrace of the night.
I have traveled through a good part of the Eastern and mid Western United States, as well as parts of Europe, Canada and Mexico but have yet to traipse the cosmos outside of the veil of sleep.
I have never seen a Yeti or the Monster of Loch Ness or even glimpsed a UFO, but I still have hope.
I have seen good people stricken down before their time while evil men cavort through cemeteries under a cloudless night sky.
I have stopped to smell the roses on my lunch break from the rat race. I have reveled the sweet taste of victory and also the bitter sourness of defeat.
I have conquered beasts and monsters, even if they were only ones that lay inside myself.
I have taken in the view from the top of the World and from the bottom of the bottle.
I have experienced everyday and, while not always to the fullest, everyday, I experience.

The time has come, the Poet said
To talk of other things
Of War and Tax and Poverty
Of Peasants and their Kings
And all the treasures of the sea
That never shall be found
And all the Good that speaks in vain
That trods upon the ground
And why WE try, I shall not know,
For all will trod again
And all the truths that 'ere befalls
Shall perish now in vain
When all men born who cast a verse
A poet shall they be
And all of those will play their part
In slaying poetry

We only have what we remember. Do you remember? Remember yesterday and the promises that we made to each other in the early morning hours before the sun had risen its fiery head? Do you remember? Remember the lies that were only lies in retrospect? The truths that we swore were truth until the rays of that star cast our doubts and fears asunder and we realized that we were wrong for believing in stone and embers?
  We only have what we remember. We only have the feeling of our hearts beating in unison to the rhythms of our own lives, yet for one fantastic moment, their tempos were the same. In that moment, the pathways of our futures lined up perfectly, becoming an auditory road map to infinity, or merely to the tempo change.
We only have what we remember, and how often is what we remember a stacked deck in our own favor? The lies that we tell ourselves to quell the fervor of our breaking hearts its rotten tender.
We only have what we remember.