mind drifts within evolutions
pull; enclosing thoughts in
earth's many wonders, causing
brainstormed emotions into
ideative air pockets; casting
kaleidoscopic prisms to realms
of life's many gifts as we
intellectually ruminate cognitively

They said that I could be whatever my heart desired
But I don't know what I want; All I know is that I'm tired
The world's too big for someone like me
The world's too small to fit people comfortably
The cities are jam-packed and all of the bodies
Are writhing and bending like awkward pilates
But the abs don't develop, the friendship's avoided
The only way to the top is to blood dope and 'roid it
There's no one that smiles as I climb on the train
And true, my own smile I made plans to retain
But maybe that's it! We've got a vicious rotation
Of these serious faces, a shy person's vocation
"Put up the wall!" cries the brain in a fright
The same little voice that grabs the wall switch at night
So let's bring them all out of the hand-painted shell
That covers them up and locks them in so well
But back to the start, I don't know what I'll be
And it's so hard to think with these people around me
They crowd up the alleys, the houses, the street
And it's funny, two strangers with same routes don't meet
We wrap ourselves up with the survival of the day
And we become more robotic as our humanity slips away
We entertain the thought that we're cognitively higher
And we've been doing that since Prometheus stole the fire
We've got all our gadgets ideas and tools
And we set codes of standards and morality rules
Sure maybe we're self-governing and make our own laws
But how does this make us above those with paws?
Are we wholly smarter by gift of this tech?
Because it seems to me that the world is a wreck
We took over the planet with ignorant spreading
Closer and closer the moment we've been dreading
Is nearing the Earth through the vast population
We're nearing the point where we'll need a space station
To hold all the people, too eager to quit it
To keep it in your pants, think before you hit it
To keep our races intact, to ensure man's survival
We're our very best customer and salesman and rival
"Help yourself and I'll be right along"
Is the tired old phrase, the motivation song
And some things you can change and fix with a thought
But the number of things that need more? Quite a lot
You can't save a nation just by a mental notion
There's no telepathic messenger who will fly across the ocean
On the wings and dreams of the oldest dragon
Whilst carrying the remedy in a silver flagon
There's no Wish Police who will answer your calls
And pull down their Fix-it Guns from the racks in the halls
So to move a nation, you might think it funny
But the thing that speaks to all is valid currency: money
To make all the changes you wished up in there
You've got to pull out the cash and flip back your hair
Make a statement that sure, you've no clue what you're doing
But you're willing to try, and while politicians sit stewing
Over who voted how and which bill not to pass
"The elephant says yea; Let's legalize grass!"
None of that matters if you get full support
And when you work for the world, who takes you to court?
So I guess the whole point, the big picture theme
Is that changing the world will take more than a meme
It involves more than **** and ******* and wines
It's more than those selfies and twerking and vines
It's more than that petty stuff you find so amusing
The internet was information, but you all are abusing
You muddle up facts with your silly fan fiction
U and I are ovr because you've bastardized the diction
The syntax is wrong, there are so many errors
These are but one of the grammatical terrors
That plague the nation, plague the world
The torch is passed and the baton twirled
The next generation knows no better
Than to follow our actions to the letter
What can they change when we've taken it all
And compacted it down to six summer weeks small
The information they're using is paraphrased
And the original sources have been erased
To make more room in the data banks
For storing the info on nukes and rebel tanks
Let's all converse and stop these risk stunts
Grab the bat from the player; "Take a risk, not a bunt!"
Change to the world has got to be swift and loud
Stop mumbling ideas when you can shout at the clouds
Let loose the brain you've kept locked away
And shout at the world; let them hear you today
What will I be? Well, I've got to make dough
To make waves in the world and change it, you know
I'll do what I can, within moral reason
To gain leverage on everything and it might become treason
To fix the whole world using ideas and cash
But I'd much rather my back feel the sting of the lash
Than condemn my mind to the essential lobotomy
My only medical surrender will be to phlebotomy
So take out my blood and my money too
If the world's gonna change, I've got to learn to trust you
That will be our base, our motto and creed
To strive for the change fueled by trust, not by greed

Imaginary Boy
builds imaginary walls so tall he trumps the Taj Mahal.
He walks corridors to imaginary doors
where he stores his love in hoards of fantasies,

but he figures her
the mystery,
the puzzle to be solved.

Imaginary boy
composes stormy melodies.
He plays them through
imaginary seas,
but in his heart it is the sirens,
with songs diminished, sickly,
who claim his ship for the fiery deep.

While he fills his pockets with stone, he screams,
"I stored my love in hoards on board, and she's taken all I have!"

Imaginary Boy
lives in a dream, but never sleeps.
Quietly, he mumbles, "That woman, she makes me bleed."
but she could never penetrate that deep,
because he cannot see her
through his warped expectations.

Imaginary Boy
doesn't know that love resounds infinitely through our mentality,
and cognitively,
it is our decision to love,
and we decide how to love,
and who to love

Imaginary Boy,
love is a verb, never a noun,
and so very real,
so very profound,
that the loving cannot be real
if the expectations are imaginary.

I always wake during the strangest of hours. Time is supposed to be a foundation—something in which to measure and organize our existence. For me, it slips through the fingers of an outstretched hand and dissipates into vapor. There is no comfort in its passing, only a fleeting shadow of an old friend. I recently drove through the worst fog imaginable; every moment was a struggle to remain between the worn-out lines. I squinted even harder and my singular headlight tried its best to help illuminate a path. Its efforts were valiant, yet meager. This is how it is for me now. This is how the days flicker by; in fog, in a haze, no true distinction from one to the next. I squint. It is in vain.

3:00am. I abruptly sit up and my eyes dart around the room that has become mine for but a little while. My conscious mind is still unscrambling data—separating dream from reality from memory. It all comes into focus and my chest heaves as I remember that my children are 539 miles away. They are in their own temporary rooms. My fingers touch the place on my bed where my son recently lay and told me how much he loved me during our last night together before the Five Week Separation. I cognitively continue to process the situation while simultaneously repressing it into deeper and more distant caverns.

My feet touch the floor and I find something to eat. I watch a movie to distract myself, but only feel all the more hollow. I shake my body into movement. I dress myself and head outside. An introspective playlist accompanies me as I walk along the Rock River. I drink in the breaking morning light until I become intoxicated by the sheer beauty of every single moment: the couple walking quickly by; the glow from a nearby kitchen window; the fishy smell of river water. This is the town of my youth, and in a few short weeks, I am leaving it far behind—yet again.

I walk the familiar streets and enter a café that is filled with countless memories of old friends, love, and laughter. The tables are now bare and the chairs empty, but I can still see the ghosts of memories projected throughout the room. The owner asks me how I am doing and how many kids I have now. I respond in as few words as necessary without being crass. I pay for my latte and scone, then turn away and wonder if I will ever buy coffee here again as the door’s abrasive dinging announces my exit. I slip my headphones back on and turn the volume down on the world around me. Everything seems more cinematic when I am orchestrating the score. Cars rush by and my scarf flutters in the breeze as a violin crescendos and a banjo jangles.

I trek back to the place of transient residence. Enough self-reflection for today. It’s time for some productivity. Everything is so very different now. Strange and painful, yet beautiful and mysterious. I am still me. My children are still my children. I think of them as I breathe in the damp morning air and slowly look around one more time, trying to record every detail in my memory. Everything is calm. I exhale deeply. As the breath escapes from my mouth it leaves a vapor that dances upward and disappears in a second. In that moment, time seems tangible again.

What is an empath
I person who neurologically
Feels emotions of other people
You cannot hide from them
As I am one
I have felt the emotions
Of myself
And another
Since I could cognitively remember

My incoherent rantings upon this white,
tainted by my virulent thoughts expelling out.
I leap at echoes of what may have been cognitively
expelled but never given true form.

"I just lingered my mind in the air like a net catching
stray speculations that were never musing,

I never understood why infuriated wording
was not given form, why I lingered outside my
window like a peeping tom. Waiting for those
Drifting inconsolable lost thoughts never given form.

Some were so sullen a tear would edge closer to
my yearning of falling but then I'd catch and devour
it. Swallowing that sorrow to feel that pain needed
to ink better vocabulary then I had penned before.

"I hear things in the night, feverish dreams of inscribing,

I understand my conclusion of what I am spilling in
irrational contemplations, that wield meaning of
what should lucidly be realized within my words.
But my ink is waved upon as to complex in thought.

"I am a man with no water yet I am drowning,

Can I be enthusiastic in my wonderings of captured words,
expelled but never used. I hoard them within me, so others
may not take what I thought what I took from the breeze.
I think I'm cognitive, but others think I'm rabid in inducing.

I.
She waits in the shade
Of a best-loved oak,
Where he once carved their names inside a heart:
"This means forever."

II.
The heart needs tending
--she visits from year-to-year.
Her security, a vow.
His constraint, a contract.
She made to open the door but he detained her,
A perjury.
Pruning stems, branching
--cognitively speaking--
Dead or alive.

III.
The landscape has changed:
This place no longer holds water.
Listen now for love's addendum,
Measured in the signal-to-noise ratio.
(You'll hear it all the time).

IV.
Oh, painfully leafless gray meadow.
Sufferance is a viable timekeeper,
When it storms the weak run for shelter.

Deliberation, restoration of a beaten nation. Beaten into the dust, rusted, cohesion gone, the gall of so many wrongs finally come to fruition like children's songs of un-suspended remission.
     Cognitively oozing out of pores like sores of an otherwise un-marred beauty, and all the scoundrels come looting rudely to destroy the tapestry deliberately deployed to instill an air of utmost joy.
     Money falling into the hands of moral lepers, economic pressures untoward, yet still pushing forward. The tenacity of ants, unparalleled cohesive cerebral structure, chants of a buddhist nature bleed desperation wrapped in graceful slumber to ward off the mortal structure, inevitable in its destruction which ruptures the potential reduction of essential corruption.
     A gleam in the eye of every schemer, transferring blaspheme to the revelry flying high in the mind of every dreamer. Spewing out clouts of reconciliation, renewing like dust clouds of just degradation. Rejuvenation of this nations ancestry, patient in its wait, parched in the ancient vestry, waiting to sate the state of arched backs, superstitious black cats. Careful if a human crosses your path, losses run amok...invoke the acumen of wrath and bad luck.

Reptiles the pathfinder of humankind
Come from quagmire cognitively blind
Claws become digits, hind legs took on knees
There eyes looked forward, they wanted to please.

From upright gaite he saw his first sun rise
Walked towards horizones enticing skys
Began to gather, his perceptive root
To plant his rational, interlect route.

Grunts become recognised vocal conduits
Which co-operate with reasons pursuits
For eruditions ultimate clarity
Wisdom works for familiarity.

Knowledge deciphered in words to provoke
The birth of conscience a central yoke.

My newly gotten kitten,
was playing in the kitchen,
chasing a delectable treat

He pushed it around
on the cold-hard ground
as if it were live meat

Now that he's older
and learned cognitively
that treat is not what is seems

So now there's no push with a playful paw
No thrill, or excitement, or lifeless, I saw.

For there instead
in his bemused head
the thought his beliefs are a lie

So now he just eats it greedily
because it comes so easily

..this is our reality..

Imagination is a word
seldom ever heard
except to describe the child inside

That kitten, you see,
represents you and me
because we once had those ideas

Nothing is real,  Nothing is fake
it's all from inside, it's all what you make

But our society has told us what is right and wrong
and we have believed it far too long

You must follow a one mind track thinking
instead of listening to your truth

Just like this kitten,
who played in the kitchen,
chasing a delectable treat

Why is your soul so attractive to me?
       I wanted you before I knew you
I made you up
                    unknowingly
piece    by     piece
                          you came together
   in my past, endeavoring, thoughts
before I knew I had you
       in front of me

From the first moment I knew
   I felt like we've known each other before
                          maybe we have..

It sparked my curiosity
        why are you so intriguing
   it is rather exciting
        
Cognitively, I put up my security
      and held up my heraldry
But I am slowly seeing, you are not one to be fearing
       Why are you this way?
               Why are you so beautiful
    Perhaps because I am use to the hostile

You must experience darkness to appreciate the light
    I embrace your light and soak it up like the rays of the Sun
                    Of all the questions I have but just one
        to answer me,
please       can we continue to be

The map is not the territory.
The menu is not the meal.
Cognitively, we dwell in a symbol-scape
and easily mistake
the signpost for the path.
Spiritual and New Age medias
offer signposts,
but,
if one enshrines the sign,
it can make captive the one wishing to walk the path.
Leaving the seeker abandoned of their journey for a
golden calf.

Really, all teachings are distractions from the Truth.
Science and Spirituality are methods of inquiry
and, surely, have little
or nothing
to do with watching videos on the internet.

you really like
labels.

you like being able to say
"i have THIS"
or "i have THAT"
now the therapist can begin a new ritual
a new rain dance
a new prance of prescription
to make me feel better about myself.

dyslexic
anxiety
adhd
PTSD

google is your doctor
informing you of all the ways you are ill
and without a formal analysis
you diagnose yourself
and then inform the world.

you like being able to articulate what is wrong with you
so people will stop accusing other outside forces
of being the cause
like maybe
mommy
problems.

this makes it all easier. because honestly
you don't know
what is wrong with you.
and you don't know
how to make your lungs feel able to breathe alright again
though you profess you do...
and that my lungs are in need of your theripistal jargon as well -
personal salvation at the hands of a 16 year old child.


i have seen more than you.
and the more that i have seen i have even understood better
and fully.

want to get wordy?
i was able to
cognitively deduce the situation
because my brain was fully developed.

tell THAT to your therapist.

I'm not who I was
never have I been who I am
My love and admiration twist
I have no confidence
because I am cognitively dissonant
raised with values too extreme for humanity
not able to shake free of them
I've done terrible things, too few I regret
and even those still echo desire in the depths of me
but I'm not going to allow myself to wake in this darkness
not going to be complacent
pain follows change, but so too does joy
I'm not yet free, not yet me
I don't know if I can break free
but I do know
I'm not done yet