Mister Peace.com

I miss people I used to feel connected to that I never speak with any more because they drifted.  I miss feeling like I matter.  I miss someone I was supposed to have forgotten about years ago, as if I could just walk away.  I still think about her, I still dream about her.  I miss sex.  I miss feeling desirable and making someone else feel like she’s the most beautiful woman on the planet.  I miss not missing things, I’m nothing but memories.  Every year makes it harder to move forward.

(Source: misterpeace.com)

You tighten the leash
You steady your voice as you
Issue another demand
Your iron confidence is paper-thin
And your leash is a
Cheap masquerade, a ruse
A thrown voice, a paper tiger
You are fractures and sighs and slumped shoulders
You are the tightened edge of a forced smile
And you hate that I see through you

(Source: misterpeace.com)

Glass barrier locks you out
And locks me out
So we burn down our evenings
Watching and longing and aching

I could wait a thousand years
It’s too sweet having each other
But itches need scratched
And I can’t get younger
Let’s feel without feeling for another night

Use what you’ve got
Don’t waste what you’ve got
Don’t wait for permission
And miss your moment

(Source: misterpeace.com)

You were a whisper.  You were breathed into my life and gone almost as quickly as you arrived.  You imprinted yourself onto my skin, a scar, so that I couldn’t forget you after you had dissipated into nothingness.  I gladly absorbed you and let you cling like cigarette smoke.  You burned me from the inside out with your recklessness and asked that I proceed with equal abandon.  On cold autumn nights, you, the whisper, turned into a roar.  Those were nights both sublime and visceral, where we were elevated and basic.  We felt one another with perfect intensity, in full focus, and let everything else blur into the background.  Anything not your body turned into dream-haze and I was bidden by my desire to know and adore every facet of your being.  Your smile as you closed your eyes and were lost to sensation, the rapidity and hotness of your breath as you let the urgency of the moment take over, the reddening of your face as your hair glanced off your cheeks and the feminine softness of your breasts and hips were too much accumulated beauty to drink in in the space of a moment.  I lingered on you then, desperate to turn seconds and minutes into a perfect lifetime and I linger on you now.  I didn’t stop until you were overwhelmed and slick with sweat and you drew me close and we clung together with our hands and our legs and our hips, our faces pressed close and our hearts racing, asking us to never be finished.  Your pale skin and dark eyes were an absolution, I loved you for the pain you gently erased with your benevolence.  I loved you in the way I loved something perfectly natural and pure, for its essence, the miracle of its being.  And then you were gone, like a shadow, like a murmur, like a glancing zephyr in an indian summer.  You were a whisper. 

(Source: misterpeace.com)

One by one, the old icons fall.  The old gods, objects of faith and endless trust, dedication and devotion.  They are torn down by the piercing laser light of insight as the tools provided are used as weapons against ages-old institutions that are failing.  It’s an effort to snuff out the lies, to weed away life’s falseness, to pierce the cheap plastic veneer, to tear away the blinders.  Something true and real has to be beneath the bullshit so the detective takes over.  Whatever remains must be the truth.  So down comes family, down comes dogma, down comes government, down comes society, down come the old manifestos and credos and exemplars.  Down comes anything that doesn’t make sense or can’t be proven or feels too shallow.  Down come the bogus relationships and the fake smiles and the small talk.  Down comes trust and fidelity and connections to others and down comes love, the happiness-in-another fallacy, the last and longest-standing.  And in the end, emptiness.  The realization of true isolation, of absolute endings, of the end of the self, of everything.  The big finish.  The only objective truth is the absolute assertion of nothing at all and the detective is cold and alone and feels an ebb.  Desperation sets in and time passes.  

But that’s all wrong.  The truth doesn’t lie in the answer, it’s in the question.  It’s not in the conclusion, it’s the process.  It’s not in the demanding of absolutes, it’s in the mystery, the silence between the notes, the text between the lines.  There is no meaning except the meaning you feel in your gut, your under-mind, your sensory preceptors.  If you don’t see it, you keep reaching until you feel it and you don’t ask for numbers to back it up.  The reaching is an act of faith, it’s an invention, you devise it and you believe in it and that’s art.  It’s playing pretend, it’s writing a fiction, it’s truth.  The rebuilding begins and something to believe in will return.

(Source: misterpeace.com)

I adored you.  I loved the way every unique bit of you was put together in composite to create a perfect woman-architecture.  I became a student of you, I wanted to learn and explore and discover you.  You were a wonderful maze, never entirely to be solved and I wanted to never quite finish being surprised by the new and inimitable ways in which you were beautiful.  I loved the depth and warmth of your doe brown eyes, your dark hair, your fair ivory skin… and I appreciated your quiet miracle.  I wanted to speak messages into the nape of your neck in a morse code of kiss and murmur and to evaporate into the warmth and softness of your breast.  I wanted to enter you, into your mind and your heart, to be breathed into your lungs.  I wanted to enter your sex, to permeate you and I wanted to allow you into the sacred corridors of my heart that I had previously been too cold and afraid to acknowledge.  I wanted to dwell in that shared bond, that special union and to entirely know a woman, a beautiful woman’s soul.  But what lies and what a traitor heart to deceive and betray me a fool.  I still miss you and I miss your mysteries.  I miss being allowed in and my heart aches for being so free and rid of you.

(Source: misterpeace.com)

She felt naked on the inside, empty and cold, when the news came.  She felt hard ground give way under her feet and she felt her stomach rise up as she went into free-fall and tumbled downward.  She attempted to cling to whatever she could find and she took comfort in place of stability if it worked for a moment.  A gift in the form of a check from her estranged family, a drink, too many drinks, the kind words of a random outcast at the end of the bar.  She never looked forward, never dreamt of more than a couple nights ahead of where she was because she didn’t want to lie to herself, she didn’t want to have the illusory promise of a false guarantee.  She only knew tonight and tonight it was pills and tomorrow, maybe a stranger’s bed.  She spun through night after night of free-fall, with her stomach in her chest, remembering to pray and cry so that the anticipation of what came next didn’t eat her alive.

She still had her Little Angel who was, at once, the hope and despair of her existence.  She was frightened and humbled by the immensity of her love because she had never cared for another human being so much, had never been so afraid to lose someone or fail.  She often watched her sleep and was in awe of how pure and purely natural she was, how beautiful and innocent and perfect a human being can be.  She wanted her to stay that way forever, to never feel the ache of betrayed trust or feel the degradation of being used and discarded.  But those days were far off and those thoughts were stricken from her mind as soon as she had them.  As always, there was only tonight and tonight Little Angel gripped at plastic baby toys with her chubby digits and looked up at her mother with eyes that were clear and eager and she smiled with the total freshness of a soul that had never suffered.  She kissed her daughter’s forehead and breathed in her miracle, her cleanness, her love that was basic and untouched by money or avarice.  A tear grew into the edge of her eye and she was thankful for her Little Angel’s stupidity and ignorance, that, for tonight, she wouldn’t have to know what desperation and pain felt like, that she didn’t have to think about money and that she didn’t know what her mother would do after she left the apartment.

The streets opened up and consumed her and became her chilly inferno.  The gusts of wind were punishing November wind and bit into her skin with no mercy.  Some nights she forgot and put distance between herself and herself, where she could do things without thinking about them or being a part of them but tonight the numbness abated and her heart raced and she was afraid.  The streets seemed particularly hard tonight and she wanted something to make her dizzy again.  The same brown Buick Lacrosse circled the block five different times and the same pair of beady eyes, glassy with disease and addiction, gleamed out at her and she knew that when he felt brave enough, it’d be him.  She bit her lower lip and made herself think about food, about the rent due next week, about her Little Angel and she left that street corner for a moment and went somewhere warm.  She was holding her daughter, who was soft and hugged her back and she could protect her just by kissing her hair and saying I love you while she drifted to sleep.

(Source: misterpeace.com)

She felt made of charred, ashen things, of the gray, dried embers that remained after the last sun-hued glow had burned out of an evening’s fire.  She was driven by fire once, fueled by the combustibility of her own desires and unburdened by the trammels of age and propriety.  In those days, she awoke with purpose and an eagerness to fight, to love, to hate to live in each degree of the full gamut of human experience, her engine powered by will and an incurable faith in the permanence of her youth and vitality.  In those days, nothing was impossible and the word no was a laughably diminutive hurdle fading into the backwards-horizon of as she launched into the next, the new, the untamed future.  How then this, the choked, anxious, walled-in place, the feeling of empathy toward a smoking fireplace, a dwindling twilight, as her fire was snuffed away in seemingly calculated, measured years? 

He felt made of poison, of noxious things, of rot and decay well-hidden, buried under a veneer of pleasantries and artifice.  His face was smiles and his words half-hearted, glib tokens of speech and he feared that his self-inflicted disease would spill out and he would stand naked and exposed as a fraud, a charlatan.  He was full of his own toxicity, composed of his years of enjoyment, of years of no restraint and it ate at his insides and made his body a deathly swamp to trap his aging soul. 

She wanted to burn brightly into a cold night and he wanted to immolate and be destroyed upon her pyre and the night beckoned, asking that they each refuse the word no one last time.

(Source: misterpeace.com)

The cracked streets etch a fragmented sigil onto the city, fragmented like my memories, like the signature of a great, overpowering fate that has made its mark on my heart, claimed me and gone.  Those streets were vessels rich with life-blood, vital and pulsing to the beat of loud music and young sex, packed with the city’s night-children who were blissfully ignorant to the possibility of tomorrow’s regret and responsibility.  Those nights were nebulous dream-lands, smoke filling our lungs and the dizzying red glow of our intentions, our affection for one another, bathing everything in a rose-colored smog.  Braced by the confidence of resolute virility, I said nothing but yes and made every possibility my adventure, the libation, the liberation, the thunderclap roar of laughter and dive bars calling like siren song and most of all, you.  I wanted you and was given new breath, a new heartbeat by the look in your eyes that told me you felt the same.  Before you could turn the lights out, you peeled your clothes with serpentine undulations and a warm push of anticipation, unburdened by doubt or fear of consequence and I loved you for the sureness, for intrepidity and enthusiasm and the wholeness with which you embraced me, the embracing of our young lives.  We were one another’s prize, one another’s adventure, when we had no questions and we carved our names into the shape of the city.

(Source: misterpeace.com)

Crime is what you call it when poor people fuck someone over for money.

The American dream is what you call it when rich people fuck someone over for money.

(Source: misterpeace.com)

I’ve never heard silence.  Not the near-silence of a still room, with the distant hum of an air conditioner or someone shuffling around in the room next door or rattling keys as they open the lock.  Not the friendless nights with no conversation and no sound but the rain tapping on a roof or a dog barking across the street.  Not the almost-silence of a shared heartbeat and sympathetic breathing as lights die down and evening becomes a shared space where skin and sweat and daydreams of happy futures mingle to the music of her touch.  Not the sound of turning pages or daydream visions conjured by long-dead wordsmiths who composed symphonies with the alphabet.  Not the fevered jungle-rhythm of my own heart as I felt the rush of speaking first.  Not near-silence.  I’ve never heard silence.

(Source: misterpeace.com)

You are the rosy glow of light as the sun pushes up against a black night sky.  You are the velvety-soft flower petals that bloom on a May morning.  You are dew-drops that form on blades of grass as the chill of night gives way to the powdered warmth of daybreak.  You are the natural sweetness of a fresh piece of fruit.  You are a smile coaxed from the edge of a stubborn, jaded face grown old and made ill by the world’s pollution.  You are the entirely organic and unforced, your lack of pretense and design only enhancing your beauty, born of the pureness of your intentions, the selflessness of your acts and the sweetness of your heart.

(Source: misterpeace.com)

I can only offer a short moment’s escape, an escape from the grief and anxieties you drag like an anchor around your neck, the trammel that keeps you girded against life’s tumult.  For just a moment, you can forget and we can vanish from earthly consciousness and become vapor trails in the night, we can melt into one another and float off into a charcoal sky.  We will encircle one another and be absorbed into one another’s breath.  Like an invocation, like a spell summoning a force beyond reason, you will whisper my name, hot and desperate with yearning.  Your voice, just a whimper, will communicate your passion, deep and warm and aching with want.  I will graze my fingertips over your skin and feel you shiver in the warmth of the night.  I will reach inside you, into your essence, and caress until you open and yield, pouring out and your burdens lifted.  You will be in flight, in commune with an azure sky, too high to see dry ground.  And you will apex and return and the short moment will be over.  I will vanish and return again at my time of choosing or not at all because I am an enigma, I am the fool’s muse.  Goodnight, fool.

(Source: misterpeace.com)

“So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon… I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.”

- Sylvia Plath

That is why everyone loves nature.  Nature has no pretension or falseness or cunning, it exists just to exist and its beauty is entirely without design.  People crave this in their lives because it is a break from the artificiality of human construction… it’s why you invite an animal into your home or feel better growing flowers than you do writing corporate mission statements.  There is no lie in something purely natural.  At the risk of sounding mentally handicapped, I love pigeons.  I just love watching them whenever I’m downtown, waiting for a bus or something.  They exist completely oblivious to the concerns of the hundreds of thousands of people they share those streets with and aren’t bothered just walking up to you and pecking spare crumbs off the ground.  They will walk into the middle of an intersection, eat for literally a second and then leave before more cars come barreling through.  They don’t give a damn.  They just waddle around and you could be there or not and it wouldn’t make a difference.  Nature is only capable of being genuine.  Those city pigeons are surrounded by well-paid businessman who have stuffed themselves into sharp suits and glance nervously at their watches as they scurry to a meeting with clients, trying to lie their way into a bigger sale which will net them more cash which will enable them to buy bigger versions of things they already own and I have to wonder who’s actually stupider in this situation.  Plath found a friend in the moon because nature will never judge or condemn you, it’s entirely pleasant in its apathy, never contrived or intimated. 

(Source: misterpeace.com)