Photos by http://www.arguspaul.com
The Peripheral Way
Pushing
chubby kids on a swing-set is equatable to doing pushups, while crouching below
monkey bars to carry forth excitable youngsters by shoulder is certainly
preferable to squats at the gym.
A raging
class of pupils will wash away timidity much faster than a succession of unimpressed
girlfriends ever will, and two rivaling grades will battle over your playground
prescience; so forget any lingering
notion, or lack of notice thereof.
And how to reminisce
about lives that could have been?
Curling a soccer ball into the uppermost corner to the rapture of
elementary school students is strangely similar to the foregone conclusion of
my college soccer career.
It's the
peripheral way.
Preferable
I'd say.
Preferable
to the maturity which lingers within the external boundaries of our generation,
our gender roles naked knowledge, our paths insubstantial; we float in our own definitions. But still there are ways.
Ways which
are incorrect when political, and short the increasing trends of correctness. We have our greatest ironies of twisted
shields: that our truths are more self-righteous
than our beliefs.
So when and
why it was; that learning from children nulled my conceptions into maturity, rather
than did an entirety of life as a child?
The answer presents itself much simpler than the questions.
Who am
I?
From whence
comes our value? …And what makes us
socially desirable?
And what, O
what, is 'love'?
It is here
we were lost and found between two disengaging and aging roles.
When it
was.
Everyone said. Entertain me.
Entertainment
as a sort of instant gratification which yields any a friend of time and place,
yet they become both cumbersome and fragile; icicles frozen in remonstration.
Entertainment
is all anyone really asks of me.
It makes me
sad, somber, and willfully shallow. I need not the great wars of our fathers,
nor the struggles of scraping the bottoms of waterless ponds. - Only a willow of hope, a preoccupation short
of dreams proffered as realities, reaching like laughter filled with
gratification, towards branches never to be reached.
Yes, hope, thought
of as our friend, yet only a concept remolded for incessant consumption.
Every day we trade the potentiality of our
mistakes for the comforts of hopes, and like the never-ending story, our
memories fade like that which may never happen.
We have
only our subscriptions to happiness. An
influx of answers amid a darkening of buried questions.
Sagely said, "One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends--those were the
fascinating things in life," were Wilde's words. Yet as I write of these things, they seem to
be at once part of the very thing we don't speak of, much less share. That is,
simply stated - who we are, and who think others to be. Despite this, my perceptions have more
willingly begun to capture the brevity of life, and I will continue on, finding
these things easier to share. Past all
the bluster and pride, after all, we are much the same. Indeed, as we become less distinguishable, we
also become less vulnerable. And so,
beyond the ostensible, such thoughts will take their firmed reality within this
page.
The story
so unfolded. A story continuing within
itself, continuing within answers sold as choices. Our choices are flavored by their
pre-selected origins, and are as placid as no choices at all.
And, Ohh,
how we've learned to entertain ourselves as well now…
Self-entertainment,
the guise for distraction, litter for the mind.
Cup my freedoms into the hollows of the printed. Lay forth the tracks for the ticks in my
mind; my rebellious thoughts no longer quelling forth. Take me for a ride, keep me in transit. Prescribe the rain for my showers; let me
flow through without discerning thoughts.
Fight the internal clocks, and wind my answers within concrete times which
are obligatorily in weight.
Now I is re-defined. I'm all-incumbent and ever-compulsory.
Now I is re-defined. I'm all-incumbent and ever-compulsory.
Warp me, so
serenely, from the confines wrapping of my lucid mind.
And all I
have left, the abstract. Reaching back…
Do you see
Me?
