The Narrow Road

Passages, paths, and alleys for some reason hold a certain appeal to me. I do think they have an interesting aesthetic to them, and I like the perspective they can offer, not to mention they sometimes are suggestive of some secret, mystery, or something slightly ominous.

I like the way in which the car at the end of this one draws the eye straight down.

 

Nouveau Vintage

I love black and white photography. When a photography is converted into black and white it completely transforms the entire picture, the mood, and atmosphere of it. Black and White also has that power of taking everything back into the past.

 

Summer in the City

A series of photos taken on my trip yesterday to San Francisco. I like to try and capture different angles and perspectives of buildings. I also really like the way some of the shapes contrasts against the sky, or against each other.

  

The Devil & Death

The faceless man
(If man at all he can be called)
whispers temptations
in the language of the dead,
speaking in tongues
in a way that licks my soul
up and down.

I am speared
half-way between horror
and allure,
is he all illusion?
A nightmare or a dream?
I gravitate towards his promises
of immortality.

He beckons
to come perch atop his bony knee
yet I fear if I touch him
he will crumble away to dust,
but if I consent
my flesh may be rendered into stone,
and we will sit together
as lovers of the tomb
watching the dead dance
and life drain away.

He can liberate my soul
from these mortal bindings
of flesh and bone,
that are so limiting,
or so he says, though
he has not mouth of which to speak,
and the voices
may yet be within in my own head.

My heart becomes traitorous as I yearn,
I want to kneel before him,
but I might find nothing there
but air and falsity,

I would mortify myself
if he could release me,
and with but a kiss
bestow upon me the power of the gods,
I could travel among the crowds
like a shadow,
knowing that with but a touch,
their souls would unravel
around my fingers.

But in the end
he may just be another charlatan
carved from stone,
a fork-tongued devil,
who promises infinity on his left hand,
while the right hand strips you of everything.

Too Much Safety Can Be A Bad Thing

More and more these days I see these ads on TV for all these new cars with all these built in devices, and computerized systems made to help detect various different possible dangers, and help prevent car accidents. Cars that will stop themselves automatically if the drive is about to hit something, or give some kind of warning or alert.

I have very mixed feelings about this sort of thing. On the one hand, it isn’t a bad thing to make something safer, and it is good thing if less innocent by standers are injured or killed. People will always be people, so you cannot rely on them always to actually pay attention to what they are doing or not allow themselves to get distracted, and things will happen.

But on the other hand I think the more that we continue to make these new innovations in which the cars practically do the thinking for us, the more it will create a false sense of security and people will just start thinking to themselves that they don’t really have to pay attention any more. The more the cars overcompensate for the possibility of human error the more it is going to breed incompetence in humans. People are more and more forgetting how to function on their own without the aid of various different electronic devices. People are allowing computers to do the thinking for them more and more.  All these new safety features are just going to make people even more careless, because they are going to use it as an excuse not to have to pay attention to what they are doing.

Yes, driving can be dangerous (as life itself can be dangerous) and sometimes terrible accidents can happen, and sometimes people do stupid things, and while on the one hand it might seem like anything that could help prevent more accidents from happening is a good thing, but on the other hand we cannot just all live in some giant bubble at all times and be protected from every possible danger out there.

In a way over protection can be just as dangerous as not having enough protection, because we will continually lose more and more of our own survival instincts and the more oblivious we will become to what is happening around us and the more wrapped up in ourselves we will become.

Living life is as much about the possible risks as it is about the many befits.

 

Being a Bigot is a Choice

I wrote this in response to something someone else said in which they stated that it was unfair to bash Catholics who are anti-Gay, because it is not tier fault, it is their belief.

I found that an absurd statement. If someone wants to believe that, they have the right to do so, but they are accountable and responsible for what they choose to believe.

And when individuals think their own personal prejudices should be made into discriminatory laws, it is everyone’s problem.

 

Being a Bigot is a Choice

I read a funny thing today,
it said it is unfair for us to judge
those who in turn judge others,
that those who under the name of God
choose to spew hate against
people who choose another way of life
are not to blame for these thoughts
and feelings, it is only their belief,
so it is not right for us
to call them to account for this,
to bash the bashers.

How ironic I thought,
for I know many Christians
espouse that Homosexuality is a choice,
but I know for a certainty
to be a Christian and a bigot
is 100% a personal decision,
is there now a Catholic gene
I have not heard about,
to make them think and feel this way?
Or perhaps it is a disease,
if so I hope the antidote is found soon
for it is a spreading epidemic.

So if indeed they make the choice
to hold these beliefs,
to think and feel this way,
how are they not the ones to blame?

I am not here to dictate
what anyone should or shouldn’t feel or think,
but one must take responsibility
for the thoughts and actions they choose to take,
don’t complain about unfairness
while you seek to rob others of their rights.
and if you don’t like the heat you take
for choosing to hate, you are free to kindly
keep all those thoughts within your own
head, and don’t go blabbing them about.

But if you feel the need to shout
from atop your soapbox,
don’t expect us all to sit by silently
and watch passively, and don’t
cry woe is me, boo hoo,
when we stand up and fight
while you believe your ideology
should be the law of the land,
imposed upon us all,
who choose not to think
and believe as you do.

Ghost Lights

I recall when they told me
that by the time we see the stars
they are already dead,
so it is millions of ghost lights
which watch over our dreams
and nightmares,
collecting sorrows,
instilling hope,
their hovering souls
guiding the lives of men
to safety through the dark.

I remember
the enigmatic man,
beneath the moonlight
we delved into occultic
mysteries, seeking to decode
the secrets of life,
but he had a barbed tongue,
and desired to be worshiped,
it was beyond me to kneel
at the base of his pedestal,
nor remain upon mine
where he would keep me
as one keeps a flower in a vase,
so he vanished the same way he arrived,
but in his blindness
he possessed the ability
to hear the singing of the stars.
Thus he knew archaic,
and forbidden knowledge
of the dead, yet I doubt
he understood it for there was
shallowness beneath
his genius.

Does their lingering
illumination prove
there is life beyond death?
They pulse still, they dance,
they create their own harmonies,
and how vividly they live
within our imaginings,
how desperately we cling to them,
believe them possible of
miraculous feats,
we weave legends around them
we are haunted by them,
memories are hinged upon them.

Can we ever be as beautiful in life
as they are within death?

Consumed

I am consumed by love,
so much so
it strangulates me,
yet I could not forfeit this feeling,
it is a volcanic need,
from the inside it seems
to unravel my fibers,
rip through atoms,
tear me asunder,
but still it holds me together,
like a swirling vortex,
the gravitational pressure
of its force keeps
me from disintegrating.

If There Was A God I Would Be Barren

This is something of a little joke of mine, but it is also quite true. I have known from an early age that I would never have any interest in reproducing, there are various different reasons for my disinclination towards having kids, but the simplest and first and foremost is quite frankly I don’t like children (yes, I am a mean and terrible person).  I also think it is more environmentally friendly not to have children because there are already too many people on Earth and I have no desire to contribute to human overpopulation.  And as a misanthrope I generally dislike the human race as a whole and am rather disinterested in the continuation of the survival of the human race.

When I was in high school I told my mom I wanted to get my tubes tied needless to say she said I should wait a bit before making that choice. People never would truly believe or accept my certainty in the fact that I really didn’t and never would want kids. They would always say I would change my mind when I got older, or just wait until I met the right person.

Well here I am now, old enough (I won’t give the exact number but between 30-40) and in a happily committed relationship and still adamant about not wanting to have kids.

I think there should be some sort of sterility pill, to me it makes sense for the next evolution in birth control, there are always those people who did change their mind about wanting kids, but for those individuals who are certain about not wanting to have anything to do with breeding, instead of having to use some form of birth control that has to be taken on a daily basis, or have to be subjected to an invasive surgery, there should be a pill I can take that would just nuke my whole reductive system and not have to worry about it every again.

So I came up with this little joke of mine that I am proof that there is no God, because if there was an all powerful, all knowing, benevolent God he would have made me naturally barren, while some other woman who cannot have kids but really wants them would have been made fertile.

Would that really be so hard for God to manage? He could just be like “Hey, here is someone who really has no need or use for her reproductive system, and doesn’t really need to have one in working  order, and on the other hand this woman over here would be an awesome mother, but she is infertile” So just poof switch parts, the woman who is not going to use it can have the one that doesn’t work and the woman who would be grateful for it can be made fertile.

Then again if there is an all knowing God, he would know I would be sitting here typing this blog post right now (and know how I would come to feel about him and his whole religion) so he probably intentionally cursed me with fertility because he knows that for what most people is a miracle, gift of life, blah blah blah, for me would just be an inconvenience so he is just laughing at me and my fruitless fist waving.

Alas maybe if I had been a nice, better person I would have been blessed with bareness. But I suppose the good thing is that a woman’s reproductive system runs on a clock so I can just wait for it to wind itself out.

 

 

Life in Abstract

Life is painted in abstraction,
the way your love was always
ultra violet, and burned through
the pores of my skin, a spreading
cancer,

The impartial truths,
numb lies, which hide
behind green eyes
and rising smoke leaving me
held suspended in all the
varying shades of black and gray.

An Impressionism which at first
from the distance vaguely
resemble the shape of men
but the closer you become
the more it begins to fade
into blurred lines.

Cubic-like you are all sharp angles,
hard edges, cutting,
incomprehensible
uninviting, and yet with a strange
foreign allure,
you cut to the bone,
severing ligaments.

Dream-like I submerge
myself in pigments,
transfixed by the way your eyes
dance like a prism,
but soon I find myself drinking
turpentine, erupting
an inferno it burns my vision away,
and once more I am lost
within gray-scale.

Only rarely
does a Caravaggio appear,
turbulent, unpredictable,
even imperfect,
but with a beauty that is at once
breathtaking, and unforgettable,
revealing a depth of secrets
but without guile,
there is no obscura
only a brutal sort of honesty.