Sadness

Can we be blessed with sadness?

Sadness, like all other things, is a state of mind. It's a place that we, ourselves, place who we are and who we think we should be, within. It's a place. It's a stage. I might be blessed with sadness only so far as it inspires me to create. Only so far as it moves me to progress as an individual who strives to master her own existence. I can manipulate that which I think is sadness, or those things that I believe to be sadness, but sadness has no inherent goodness or badness, it's just a state of mind that really, in the end, means absolutely nothing at all.

So, no. No Matthew. I am not blessed with sadness. I don't see it in that way, at least. In my own peculiar little world, sadness is the cessation of a struggle; the struggle is for a doomed-happiness, which I will never deny myself. The struggle to be real with myself and to be truthful to who I am. That is what you lose when you wallow and dwell in sadness. Like all other states of mind, sadness is just a human creation, a construct that which we bury our true selves under. Just as easily as I can create it, I can destroy it (realizing that it is slightly more difficult to destroy).

(Thanks to Matt Stangle, for inspiring me and succeeding, yet again, in distracting me from the "real" things I should be doing like studying for class and writing a paper on NAFTA...)

La Caída

Parece que acoba de nos encontramos,
algunos momentos pasado,
y a la misma tiempo
me siento que hemos conocido por mucho tiempo

te dejé atrás
salé en Cercanía

cada segundo que pasa
la distancia crece
es una sensación maduro
inexplicable

cada palabra
demasiado sentido
y a veces palabras no estan bastante

para que quiero significar,
para que quiero dignificar,
los sentimientos
es una pérdida, cuando traducimos
compensamos en exceso para llegar al destino,
usando el gesto
del mano
de la cara
del ojos
miramos
pero entendemos?

todo el tiempo en exceso para llegar a la cresta
y nos caemos como uno maremeto,
caemos en uno maremeto
uno maremeto de gestos


(July 2009, Madrid, Spain. Escribé esto poema cuando estuve en España y conocí alguien muy especial...)

coffee's bitter-sweetness

i loved
i loved
the freshness of you
cold side of my pillow
case, your hands (do tremble)
they touched me
blood pumped
feeble mind raced

illusion of you
death strong i couldn't erase
it, after you'd left
so long ago,
too much space wasted

still skin feels how when you left it, so
brand new

awakened her quiet
feels like she loved you
in seconds not hours
feels like time measured her intimate powers

she fit you, she did
into mine she devoured

your breakdown
your weakness
she's speechless
she's speechless
like
coffee's
bitter-sweetness

danger, us

never has the brimming mind
felt so dangerously inspired

elusive moments sting like wired, thoughts
grow wings atop dead-letter spires

we want to move in leaps and bounds, but
do so cautiously from here to there,
carefully not to expose our care, we satiate
our roaring appetites

andallthewhile
loving your stories,
themed childhood-places,
affirming your heroic glory
like footprints, you leave the past
behind paints and strides
doused in bitter wines
in deconstructed angry lines
hidden dirty appetite, that which
you have covered in streaks of light

going home
slender limbs graze my thigh
a blush i cannot hide,
must resist it so i try

and this will soon fade away
let's not get attached
you say
deepening curiosity is strong, but
do not let me forget
how this is wrong

Oh how I wish to sing
to you,
too much, much love could bring to you
the death of you and I (merely mortals)
into an afterlife

don't you know?
you leave many breaths behind
the moving heavy-passion kind
they cross oceans from your lips
to
my
mind

(for which you need a floating device)

wild looks I catch in your eyes
make it hard
to make-up lies

so

maybe i will trace your youth
and down it with a splash of vermouth
a simple mixed-up drink
or would it be uncouth?

stillness on the fringes instances
carries us for quiet distances
dark colors and places melt with our behaviors
pull the sky over honest smiles, it might save us

to want this with so much eagerness, stuck in
self-effacing bliss

many earnest words we spill
to overcome this will, this
box bleeds red and wheat
leave the sugar, we
don't need that which is sweet

tomorrow you'll wake up in the sky
and eat the ocean with your eyes
like the King, you'll steal the sun
in this world of disappearing fun

today i am Simone
in the shadows of wits my own,
you lived in me,
this day was never known

Language is war.

It is impossible to truly understand what another person is ever saying. Impossible to figure out another's concept or perspective born in their mind. It is impossible because no matter what we do and how we try, the only way for us as humans with cognitive activity, to learn, is through language. Through asking questions and attaching meaning to words (which will invariably be diverse and distinct in different minds), we taint the original meaning of words, of messages, of statements. The only thing that is guaranteed is that we humans will interpret things as we see fit, and in this process we will build and destroy. Language is war. Language is a problem. The question is now, how do we live with language?

Agreement in dialogue is technical. More than anything else it is technical. Agreement comes when my use of a set of terms and my chosen vocabulary reflects and triggers in your mind, the same associations by which you linked your original thought. That original thought you probably expressed using a different set of terms, different adjectives and subjects and verbs. Unique to you. Not until we have exhausted our ways of conversation, not until we find a point where I can say what I want and how I perceive what we are discussing to exist, and when that expression of my perception through careful use of language aligns with the idea in your mind, not until then, have we met agreement. Again, which can only occur when the words I have chosen to use to explain myself, happen to mean either the same or relatively the same things to you, in your mind, as you know and use them. And neither of us will ever know the true discord in existence, that lies between the shadows of our words, since we cannot feel it, since we strive for agreement, for peace. We will never really know how different our thoughts really are because we will always be striving to be in harmony. This duality is deadly but beautiful.

I recognize in this process that language and meaning is also always recycled. Social relation and communicative activity encourages the development of meaning by relying on other meaning. This is not important to me here.

It seems the only way for us humans to overcome this "problem" of language, to ever really see eye-to-eye, to ever truly see one thing from the exact same place in space and time, is to not speak. To not communicate. To not question. To not articulate. It is in translation that words will always lose their meaning, their associations, their histories. As we assign them meaning relative to ourselves, we destroy what they meant to another. As they pass from ones lips to another's ears, they morph into something new. That is why we as the carriers of the meanings of our words, are the ones to blame for the consequences.

True peace is silence. Pure peace is blackness and emptiness. Might as well be dead. If language is conflict, I don't ever want to be peaceful. Bring on the heartache.

Sedmikrásky (1966)