I wonder how people
Would get along
(Myself too)
If religious icons and statues
Didn't exist
And were never made
(Like thinking if technology shut down suddenly, to reference a friend).

Would that challenge minds
To dig up more imagination?
Or panic
About an afterlife being no life
Without post-apocalyptic relief
Through pictorial prognostication?

There's no cost to death,
Only a cost for living.
Death is an open-door,
Anytime and anywhere
Policy.
No charge.
No refund.

Does hope die
Out from a dying person?

I know a little about solely
Learning a job on the spot
Or opening a college textbook
Right before an assignment is due,
But conversion at death?
Doing anything for another breath
Is like wanting more water
When no longer parched.

What I used to crave
Has now lost its pleasure;
I have dipped into the abyss
Of emptiness in life’s glitzy amusements.

I have access and power
To what had seemed far from reach.
Pity me! I take freedom for granted
Unlike those uncountable souls past
Who chiseled history to now.

Believe me, I have jested with struggle
But not for day-to-day freedom
Of choice
To grow my character.

I meet my carnal needs
So want flushes me
With the drive for more.
As if I can’t be satisfied
For a breathing moment.

No more do I receive
Gifts the same.
I know I will live for my birthday
The luxury of how I live
Taken for granted through the years.

Instead of indulging in the anniversary of my birth
I consider the significance of life.
No more is it a brainless fun
Where I ignore what I cannot see.

No more do I receive
The day in childish anticipation.
Eagerness exists still, but when it wills
To water the blood inside
My soul, a life I leave starving.

Road trips neither blast my pulse
Nor weigh as a burden.
I am only more familiar
With land connectivity,
Surprising my sense of location lesser.

Instead of looking at my belongings
With a thankful tone
I mumble: “There’s dust on this!
That takes up space”
And mourn the items
That enslave me to them.

“Can’t you be happy?” most retort me.
Yes, but growth shall have its share
Of struggle
Thinking this phase as death itself.

I’m not mad,
I’m not mean,
Unlike the dual-colored monster:
The Big Blue-Green.

The Blue Green’s not orange
And especially not yellow,
Because he’s as irate
As the red of the rainbow.

Don’t call that Blue-Green pink
And definitely not purple,
Or prepare to give into
A raging Blue-Green whirlpool.

All the other colors
Turn faint white
As they cower before
The Blue-Green’s might.

What can the Blue-Green do?
It’s only two colors.
Ah, that’s the Blue-Green’s trick
To entrap some fellers.

The Blue-Green doesn’t dye,
Nor lives as a vision to glance,
But it’s the fear inside you
Whipping its lance.

A masters in disasters?
A bachelor as a chancellor?
A Ph.D. in you and me?
When can it stop, this silly slop
Of pun exposed to everyone?

At a panel with only high-schoolers my age,
The summer of 2015,
I asked a question related to the topic of vocations,
But the response was humiliating:
“We’re all single in life” sayeth one, with accompaniment of bass laughter
In the background.
The only one not going along with the laughter was the questioner.

Why do people tell me to smile more?
To not be too serious?
To take a joke?
What I would do sometimes to show people
All of my character, from birth, to prove them wrong.
How easy that is to do
Unless I acquire useful thinking.

People have instructed me before
To relax, but if I did “lighten up” at those moments,
I’d fear losing touch of public etiquette,
And receive a verbal penalty from the ones who told me to unstiffen in the first place.

A reverend once told me that life is such a balance,
But how can I balance the “what-ifs” in my head
With what is and should be appropriate in accordance with time and place?

My “Confiteor” is that I am part of the fault
Of not taking people seriously;
As I grow, I arm my eyes, ears and nerves
That what I unexpectedly receive I do receive
With a slower reaction.

I often imagine myself approaching the people,
Fists locked parallel to my hips, if you will,
Who have picked on me, joking or not, for just being aware
Of my surroundings and courtesy toward public environments,
And unleashing loud, assertive imperatives,
Reminding them I am not a carpet to step on,
But a warrior-patriot prepared to defend and even make-believe reasons for the moves I make…And I’m serious.

6 a.m. Saturday morning,
Brothers Bobby and Dylan submit
And accept the snow-grounded car ride to Mount Yeti’s ski ***** with their mother,
Sarah.
The skies resembling a TV screen powered off,
Bobby and Dylan sleepily ponder their future outing:
Their mother likes to ski upward,
Powering against the ascribed gravitational acceleration
That ordinarily compliments the sport of skiing.
On this cold winter morning, with a finger-nail of purple-yellow sunlight
Peering in the distance of Mount Yeti,
Sarah maneuvered the royal-blue Ford F-150 into a parking lot with only one other car.
Two hours past, and Dylan began to moan, faint sights of cold air rushing out his nostrils
As he, Sarah, and Bobby muscle their skis up Mount Yeti’s *****.
As it turned out, the ******* arrived later than they knew it, swallowing
Two more hours of ****** exertion.
Skis finally shaved snow on the head of Mount Yeti and Dylan fainted forward
In daffy exhaustion.
“Get up, dude, it wasn’t so bad,” Bobby teased.
Suppose the uphill battle was worth it, for Sarah, Bobby, and Dylan
Saw the smiling figure of Sarah’s late husband, Warren, swaying naturally
In the early-morning green-blue glimmers of the sky’s auroras.

Dance, I shall
I arise in the morn’;
I welcome the day
Like I was just born!

Dance, I shall
Unaware of what’s next;
Though the day may be hard
I see past the vexed.

Dance, I shall
So many ways to live;
How can I help?
How can I give?

Dance, I shall
I don’t dance alone;
I dance with the fam’
And my brethren of bone.

Dance, I shall
But with breaks on the side;
As the day wanes
In shelter I abide.

Dance, I shall
Preparing for rest;
I dance with God
Who brings out my best.

Dance, I shall
In the portal of dreams;
I dance high in the sky
By the star’s bright beams.

Dance, I shall
What a way to show praise;
I shall dance for my God
The Giver of my days!

Perceive:
Focus on the goal,
Plan it out in your mind,
And maintain confidence.

Achieve:
Win the match,
Make the game-winning shot,
And/or walk away with something greater;
Winners don’t brag,
Winners are those who hope in their time to come
Even after potential success.

Believe:
Remember that each has a time
To shine, to radiate.
For show? Not so,
But to discover
What was missing all along.

I know the feeling well:
Though I felt great before
In extended video-game time,
My cranium always knew
That the parental limitation
Was keeping me from losing
Not the game, but my reality-focus.

Though I fight certain urges
To fill the empty gap of routinely desire,
I cannot escape the guilt that
The amount of time I wanted to spend video-gaming
Was mentally unhealthy, a statistic I tried ignoring
To keep my head in the game…literally.

“It ***** your brain out,” my mom would criticize.
Bah! I’d think to myself.
Maybe my attachment to video games was never understood,
But the value of my life recognized as more
Than a set of eyes wandering an intangible world
That requires a certain power to play,
Yet that power won’t always be “on.”

When that power’s not on, my mind is,
Fulfilling its created duty of remaining in a world
That I see as a video game…
Since a video game, in its own rite, is a world.

Now I know the consequences of locking my eyes toward a telepathic portal;
I don’t hope to fall prey to the innovative trends
Of becoming more “virtualized” and in a game deeper.
Yet I don’t completely distance myself from my generational kind
In splitting entirely from gaming.
Just far enough to keep my life dignified
And to avoid the “Sim-toms” from gaming too much.

How fast I wanted to turn 20,
And, on-and-off, how fast I want to rewind.
I feel a freedom
I’m not used to.
I’m bound
Because of my freedom:
To choose, to make many choice calls.

There are those
Who let me make decisions,
Yet those same people
Sporadically pour “suggestions”
My thinking ebbs in empty confusion.

I felt I held my collegiate throne well,
Until that feeling suffocated me:
Where am I going?
Where are my new social connections I expected?
I’m giving an all-out effort;
I never tried or would want to force an answer,
But answers never showed up.

My edition of 20:
Stranded on a social island
Of not a kid yet not quite a full-fledged adult.
“It’s so hard,” I moan sporadically.
Do I focus more on myself?
Is that selfish?
When I’m used to defaulting to care for others,
What effort it takes to come away,
But I know coming away more often
Can bring more of the best out of me
For when it will count most,
Not counting 20.

Though my eyes resume looking outside of me,
I see images in floating space,
In my lids or where I look,
Which mentally recreate images and scenes
Of achievement, accomplishment,
With people who have since become more distant
Or who seem farther from social and spiritual reach,
And those times and places where I picked up
A new idea or skill.
As long as I know I left trail marks
Along the path of my life journey,
I hope I’ll be able to trapeze toward “That happened”
Rather than lust for “Let’s do it again.”
Life moments uniquely occur once,
Which is the challenge that comes with the fragility of memory:
Am I willing to gamble the previous “feel-good” times
For what I still have yet to do and explore
In an unknown tomorrow?