I'm writing this on memorial day. It's supposed to be a day of remembrance for fallen US soldiers, but I can't help but reflect on all that's been lost in the past six years.  

Apathy

 They said they'd give us
Bread
And  circuses.
Enough food to live on.
Entertainment to dull the pain.
They said they'd give us
Enough to live.
But instead they took away
Our right to survive.

When we look up,
We see them
Staring
At us.
Looking at us with empty,
Thoughtless,
Eyes.
What they feel,
If they feel anything at all,
Is a mystery.

The city is theirs.
They built it with their money,
Though not with their own 
Two hands.
The city was built 
By people.
By those who needed money
To participate in a society
They were not allowed to build. 
The city  is theirs,
But they forget who gave it to them 
In the first place.

Now they don't want 
To even pretend
That they care about us.
They only wish that we would go away.
They say just enough to placate us,
Just enough
So that we'll stop banging on the walls
Of the towers of glass
They built for themselves.

Why do we keep working?
Why do we keep giving them
All they need
To keep pretending 
That they don't need us?
How much longer 
Until we look around 
And remember;
We are a trapped in a glass house,
And all around us there are stones.

    Every time I write Sundays post, I feel excited, because that means that Monday's post will be up soon. As a poet, I always get excited at the possibility that other people might read my poetry. 

    Why do I get the feeling the politicians are hoping that if they tell us to shut up enough times, we'll eventually go away? 

Doom

     Last night, my mother told me that she noticed that when the Sandy Hook shooting happened, the news went on about it for weeks. This shooting was forgotten about after a few days. That's true in the mainstream, but I think that people are a lot more outraged about this one than they were about Sandy Hook. Or maybe their like me, thinking that shootings are so common they aren't really news worthy any more and angry that our country is so broken that that's been the case for, god, years at this point. 

     I have to ask, is there any point to having politicians at this point? I thought the reason you had a government was that if there's a societal problem that's too big for you to solve, the government would take care of it for you. All our politicians seem to care about is winning elections. They don't care about anything else. I know that this is partly a systemic issue, but if the system doesn't work anymore, then why are we still following its rules? 

Answers

    I don't claim to know how to save the United States. I won't stand here demanding that people listen to me go on about things I know nothing about. But I do know that many people have been saying the same things about us for my entire life, so maybe, instead of ignoring them, we should actually listen this time. 

The Right to Dream

     Some people look at the world and see people starving because they can’t get enough to eat. Some people look at the world and see people dying because they can’t go to the doctor. Everywhere you look you see people dying for lack of resources, denied the right to live by the greed and apathy of those and charge. 

    I look at the world and I see people being denied the right to dream. 

    Denying people the right to dream doesn’t kill them, not instantly. They go about their lives accepting that, when the chips fell, they were doomed to a life that was small, and not allowed to dream of anything better. But they do die, in spirit at least. 

    All around I see people trapped, not by walls or moats, but by the belief that now is all they have and it’s a sin to dream of anything better. 

    Life isn’t about fighting for more, it’s about the belief that, if you wanted to fight, you could have more. It’s the belief that somehow, someway, you could be amazing. We may be shackled to reality, but in our dreams we can be free, and that freedom is dangerous to those who want our power, all of it, regardless of if they’ve done anything to earn it. 

    I hope that, someday, we take back our right to dream. It’s a right that should never have been taken to begin with. The idea that school, work, society, anything was more important than our right to be ourselves is absurd. More and more, I see people realizing that. I wonder if, someday, others will agree with me that when you take peoples ability to dream of a better world from them, you doom society to a slow, agonizing death. 

A Moment of Joy

 All of the world is filled with pain.
When will all this sadness end?
All I want is one moment of joy.
Is that too much to ask?
A simple moment
Free of pain and misery.
Free of the worry gripping my heart.

The infinite

 Reality is only real
As long as all of us agree 
It's real.
Every atom,
Every Star,
Every being within our universe
Must agree on what, exactly,
The laws of physics are.

Until now the system's worked.
But how much longer do we have left?
How long until we learn the truth;
That our universe was doomed 
The moment it came into existence?

The infinite,
The place where all souls live,
Where they are "born"
And where they may "die",
Surrounds us.

We don't see it.
All of our collective will 
Is focused on forgetting it's there.

But all of us know about it
And it's only a matter of time before,
In a moment of carelessness,
We remember who we really are.

Outside

Out in a strange world
Filled with pain and memories
Where old and new live. 

   I wonder what the future will bring for us? 

Attention

 I crave attention
The feeling that others
See me as I am.

Eyeballs on my face 
Fill me with joy.
Let my inner self 
Spill out onto the page. 

The End

 Is it really over?
The time when everything
Is falling apart
Leaving nothing but ghosts?
Am I simply dreaming
Of better times?
I don't know if that’s true
Or if it matters anymore.
For now
I just want the pain to end. 

A voice

Do I have anything to say?
Or am I simply a voice screaming
Into the darkness?

    Things have been very difficult for everyone since, well, 2016. I don't want to claim that it's getting better, but I am enjoying the sunshine outside of my bedroom window. 

A Hundred Years Ago

 I wish you'd died
A hundred years ago,
Then your art would be magnificent
Instead of fraught
With shame.

If your art had been 
As old as the earth,
My love of it
Would be quaint.
An archeologist 
Searching for our present
In the past.

They say the past
Became the present,
But the past will
Always be out of our control.
There's nothing
Wrong
With looking at the past.
One is simply looking
For lessons.

I wish you'd died
A long time ago,
When bad viewpoints were common
And nobody knew any better.
Then your art wouldn't be awful,
It would simply be
A product of its time,
Maybe even a little progressive
When you think about it. 

If you weren't alive today,
I wouldn't have to try
And push you from my mind. 

On Artists and Morality

     Back in 2018, I fell in love with TheFatRat's music when I heard "Monody" in a listicle video. It was both like nothing I'd ever heard before, but was also deeply familiar to me in a lot of ways. Over the years, I listened to more and more of his stuff, eventually reaching the point where I subscribed to his channel. Not everything was amazing of course, but ever single song was amazing, at least musically.  Then 2021 came, and in late November he posted a (now unlisted) video announcing he was going to start selling NFTs. 

    I was, and still am, so angry at him for doing this. You can't tell me he didn't know that what he was doing was wrong. Despite this, it took me until the middle of April to unsubscribe from him. 

    Some people claim that it's possible, even morally just, to separate an artist's work from the artist who created it. I don't buy that. I've studied music history for years, so I know that art hasn't always been seen as a personal venture the way it is today, but I also can't pretend that I don't think that what Mozart, Bach or Wagner wrote wasn't a reflection of their views, at least in terms of what makes music good. So I'm not going to pretend I ever thought that my choice to continue listening to his music afterwards is anything but a reflection of my principles. But I kept at because, simply put, I loved his music. Music, to me, has always been a way to express my emotions about the world in a way that words often can't. I can't say his music was the most emotionally gripping for me, but it did help me express feelings I didn't even know I had. 

     I'm not subscribed to him anymore, and I don't plan on listening to any of his music. But I will say this, it's harder than you might think to break free from a favorite artist, even if you don't have a deep connection to them. It seems weird to say this, but his music was a part of my identity for a while, and turning away from him meant unbuilding and rebuilding a whole part of my personality. I don't even think I'm finished doing that yet. This is also something I'm not used to dealing with, most of the music I listen to was written by composers who died over one hundred years ago. I'm not used to having to decide between music I love and not supporting someone I think is horrible. This has been about deciding who I am and who I want to be as a person, and it's been the hardest fight I've ever had. 

   At times like these, when my world feels like it's out of my control, I try to remember Chaos theory. If a butterfly can cause a tornado with one flap of it's wings, who's to say I can't still change the future. 

The Price of Power

    Disclaimer: I don't usually post poetry on days other than Monday, aside from the time I forgot to post "The Future" during the week chapter 7 of All the World's a Stage was released, but I've been feeling really depressed lately, and this poem fits my current mood. 

A song by Ellen Thomas

Tired, So tired,
There's nothing of me left.
Our world, so  broken,
I'm now simply bereft.

Each day now, My family,
Begs me to let go.
I see the failure
And my heart is set aglow

With power comes power,
The power to destroy
The world I once knew
Is falling to the void. 

Empty, there's nothing
I wish the world would end. 
The actions of leaders
I do not comprehend.

Of something I'm certain,
I've nothing left to lose.
I've spent far too long
Simply taking abuse.

With power comes power,
The power to destroy,
My home's gone forever
It's been taken by the void. 

The State of the World

    It must be said; when you're a writer, you run the risk of having your words reflect the reality of what's happening in the world. I can't help but wonder if that's why so many people peddle conspiracy theories, you don't have to worry about being right. 

    I've been writing about the state of the world for about six months at this point. Mostly just to get my feeling on the page and to try to make my voice heard in whatever way I can. I've got poems about how the world is dying. I've got poems about how hard it is to believe in anything anymore.  Most recently, I posted a poem about how everyone is trapped, and now we have to fight to get out. None of these poems were written based on facts, they were written based on what I saw and what I was feeling at the moment. 

   Now a billionaire just bought a social media platform so he can peddle his own beliefs without consequence, and the supreme court is in the process of repealing Roe v. Wade. I can't help but think our leaders have grown tired of trying to placate the masses, we keep demanding the same things, even thought they've made it clear they have no intention of listening to us. So now they're trying to destroy our sense of worth, pushing us down, making it clear we have no say in the world that we helped create. 

    I'm scared. I don't miss the old world, but I'm scared that our new one is going to be so much worse. 

Where to next

     I'm still riding high off of publishing "A Glass House". I confess, though, part of me feels just a little bit bummed. Not that it's probably going to be very obscure, I always assumed nobody was going to wind up reading it. It just feels like this blog's been building up to the release of this poem for so long, I'm not sure where I want to take it from here. 

     I do know that I want to write more fiction. I've been telling stories ever since I was very young. My writing grew out of my tendency to daydream. I'm also not going to stop writing poetry. I hope I can come up with another poem that affects me the way this poem did. I want to get better. I want to write poetry that I genuinely think is great poetry. It's been my life's dream to be a writer, and now I feel like I've finally made it. Someday, I want people to read what I've written, and I hope I can impact the lives of other writers the way I was impacted by my favorite authors. 

The fall of the glass house

   I don't know how it normally works for writers, but blogging for me has been driven by the desire to get people to listen to what I have to say. I've written for almost my whole life, mostly fiction, but this has been my first attempt to get my message out into the wider world. I want the world to know me, to see me for what I am. I want the whole world to read "A Glass House". It's the story of the world I saw in 2020-2021, a world of people who were desperate for anything, and an upper class determined to withhold all they could. I confess, I'd hoped it would be obsolete by now. I don't envy writers who words become truth, because people start to take everything you say as gospel. But that doesn't change the fact that I think people can be moved by my words. I'm not special, I know. In truth, some of my favorite words have come from authors who simply wanted to tell a story, and got at uncomfortable truths entirely by accident. Truth is odd like that. 

     Whatever the future holds, I hope the world breaks free from the glass house we've been trapped in for who knows how long. People hold certain inalienable rights, and among those rights is the right to speak and be heard, a right we deny to too many people. If this is supposed to be our world, then why do so many of us never get a chance change it directly? Why do we have to sit back and hope that whatever god we believe in listen's to us? 

    It's time for the world to change. Too long we've been trapped in darkness, hoping that tomorrow things will be better. It's time to do more than simply wait for the dawn of a new day. 

A Glass House

 The cities gleam,
Forests of glass and steel,
Roads paved with the remains of ancient beings, 
and the stones upon which they once lived.

The people gaze upward, 
searching for the sun, 
searching for the dawn of a new day.

The rich have claimed the sky and the sun. 
They stare out of giant windows, gazing at the masses, 
At the heart that pumps blood through their cities.

The money they make, they will plant in the ground.
To keep it safe, they say, from those who would steal it.
"We plant it so that it will grow, nourished in our care.
Someday it will bear fruit, fruit from which we will all feed."

The people are angry.
"That's not true," they say. "We give you our money,
And in your hands it withers and dies, leaving us with 
Ground upon which nothing will ever grow. With our money, you built 
Skyscrapers to blot out the sun, machines to replace us, and the homes in which we are trapped.
Everything you do you do for our benefit, but all you have brought is suffering."

But what can they do, trapped in their world of glass and steel,
Driving over the remains of forests and deserts, trapped in their concrete walls?
What can they do but scream as the earth warms, disease spreads, and their world turns to ash and dust?

They are trapped in a glass house,
And everyone is holding a stone.  

The people cry, 
angry and sad and alone.
Voices unheard,
Echo into darkness.

Trapped in their cities, 
Unable to survive,
Begging the rich for the right to live once more.

The rich, defiant as ever, denying what's to come,
Laugh and say,
"What will you do,
In you world of glass and steel,
When the windows are smashed, the steel frame rusts,
And the pavement becomes unbearably hot?
How do you plan on stopping us from making money,
No matter the price you pay?
We have taken your money, and we couldn't give it back even if we wanted to.
If you want it, you'll have to take it from our corpses,
If you dare."

The people rage,
"We will do what it takes," They scream,
"If it is you who has destroyed our world,
Then it is you who must make it right,
For that's the reason we gave you our money in the first place.
What we gave, we gave in the hopes 
That you could do what we couldn't do on our own.
You said that with enough money,
You could bring the dead back if you wanted to.
But the weather gets worse,
Our wells dry up,
We die from plague after plague,
And still you watch us
From your glass towers,
Mocking as though we aren't able to destroy you."

Will they break free of their glass house?
What is the price they'll pay?

The smart ask what they hope to accomplish,
While the stupid pretend nothing's changed.
The fearless demand they grab boulders,
While the timid say peace is their only hope.
Neither good nor evil
Knows what their goals should be anymore.

Concrete is broken.
Stones fly.
Towers collapse.
All our morals burn,
Replaced with emptiness so deep, no amount of hope could ever fill it.

In the end, we couldn't go back even if we wanted to.

Glass lines the streets,
Steel beams sag,
The air is thick with smoke, ash and dust.
We know how it happened,
Though we do not know why.
Everyone sits in shock,
Quietly blaming everyone else,
And all ask themselves;
What happens now?

The cities crumble,
Pulled down by the weight of their steel frames.
Plants push through pavements,
Broken by wind and rain.

The people gaze upward,
Through smoke and dust,
Searching for the sun,
Searching for the dawn of the new day.

The rich are gone,
Eaten by scavengers,
Paying the price for their greed and thoughtlessness.

Slowly,
Carefully,
People rebuild.
Their anger spent, 
They get on with their lives.

Some say things are worse,
Some say they're better,
Most agree the price was much too high.

As they look around
At the remains of the glass house,
A prison and home at once,
They ask themselves;
Did we do the right thing? 

      I wonder how many Americans agree with the statement, "My world is ending and I'm scared."

      I would say that the world is ending, in a way. People everywhere are realizing that they aren't happy with the status quo, and they want to change things, to make things better for them. 

     I've been waiting for the right opportunity to publish "A Glass House". I keep hoping that people are going to read it. I don't think it'll be remembered as one of history's greatest poems. To be honest, I'm a little sad it's stayed as relevant as it has. 

     Ever since November of last year, I've been working on trying to increase my blogs popularity for one reason and one reason only. In 2020, shortly after the George Floyd protests, I started work on a poem I titled "A Glass House". It took me over a year to finish it, but I've finished it now and I want people to see it. It's a summary of what I think the problems with society are and how I think things are going to shake out, more or less. 

   I've decided I'm going to publish it next Monday. It won't be famous, in all likelihood, but now, more then ever, I think people need to see it. I'll post it on my Facebook and Twitter accounts to. Heck, maybe I'll find other places to post it. I just think people need to see why it is that our world is falling apart. 

     I have one opinion on the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. It's wrong, morally, ethically wrong, to deny women the right to abort, no matter the reason. It is, I feel, a decision that shouldn't need defending at this point. People keep telling us why abortions are necessary, why they're complicated, how it's not just about abortion. Yet people keep fighting it, because they will defend the lives of children, so long as they never have to see them. So long as they are never reminded of the fact that not everyone is capable of raising children, or the fact that the United States has never made childcare an adequate priority. The decision to overturn Roe v. Wade stems from the same mindset that gets rid of benches at bus stops so that homeless people can't find a place to sleep, a mindset that insists, "If we ignore it, it will eventually go away." 

     The final segment of Fantasia 2000 is set to Stravinsky's The Firebird, and is based on the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Watching that segment again, I was struck by how hard it was hitting me emotionally. It just felt a little too close to home watching the spring sprite's reaction to the forest burning up, and seeing her almost dead afterwards. But that segment isn't about loss, it's about rebirth. That's what I'm hopeful for. I don't want to go "Back to Normal", I want something new. Maybe something that looks a little bit like what we had in the past, but I don't just want a retread of the old world with all of the same problems. 

    I look at our country, and I'm struck by how badly we need something new. People are watching the world fall apart, and they feel powerless to stop it. I don't understand why the right keeps pushing for a return to the past, as if it were perfect. You don't have to think to hard to realize how wrong this view is. I know things will get better, but my heart can't let go of everything that we've lost. 

A Few Vague Plans

     My mother got Disney Plus recently, since they kept adding shows we wanted to see, and me being me, I did the obvious thing you do when you subscribe to Disney Plus; set about watching Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, two of my favorite films. 

    I love both these movies so much. I'm a huge classical music nerd, and my favorite thing to do when listening to music is to come up with stories in my head, so both these films are very much my thing. I still remember seeing Fantasia 2000 when it came out, and how awesome I thought it was. 

    That doesn't mean I think these films are perfect. They both have a problem where they choose pieces of music that are popular rather than music that short enough to fit into a movie made of shorts, so as a result they wind up cutting a lot. This isn't usually that big of a problem, since the shorts still mostly work otherwise, but it can straight up ruin some of them (namely Pastoral Symphony). There's also the fact that, for Fantasia especially, you really have to be sold on this concept for the movie to work. I don't find the lack of story in most of Fantasia's segments to be that big of a deal, as the music and visuals usually do more than enough to carry the film, but again, Pastoral symphony is the big exception to this. 

    Honestly, I have a lot to say about these films. I love the fact that when it came time to do a sequel, they chose to do it in a completely different way, which really helps it stand on it's own, but that means that the sequel has had a much harder time gaining a following. To be fair, the original didn't become immensely popular until decades after it came out, so I'm still hopeful that Fantasia 2000 will have a chance to shine at some point, because it truly deserves it. I love the fact that Fantasia is so vastly different from any of Disney's other films, which means that it's held up very well, but has had the downside of making it a tad niche. I love the fact that when they put Fantasia on DVD, they restored all of Deems Taylor's original dialogue, even if they had to get someone else to dub over it (in all honesty, whoever is dubbing is doing an excellent job), though it does have the downside of making the opening to Fantasia 2000 a little weird. 

    I've been thinking that I could probably write entire reviews of all the segments. I just love both these films, ever since I watched them on VHS when I was a kid. In general, I like the overall presentation of Fantasia a lot more than in Fantasia 2000 (although it's still excellent), but I think Fantasia 2000 did a much better job on the segments themselves. 

Tomorrow

Nobody wanted the world to end.

It just happened when everyone was watching.

Our leaders ignored us,

Our culture disintegrated,

Our world crumbled before our very eyes.

I want to get out so badly.

I can see outside

But I can't possibly escape

The grind,

The pain,

The feeling of loss.

Why do our leaders not care anymore?

Can't they hear our pleas for help?

Can't they hear our voices

Begging from below?

We gave them their power,

But they seem to have forgotten

The price they were supposed to pay. 

Every day 

Is another reminder

That the world doesn't belong to me.

The people in charge don't care about us anymore.

For what is an atom

To a person?

Every day

I grit my teeth,

Telling myself that this is only for today,

That tomorrow must be better.

But how long can I go on

Searching for the sun,

Searching for the dawn of a new day?

Note: Originally, this was a repost of something I'd already posted before, that I'd forgotten I'd posted. Here's a link to what was originally here. 

    It'll be the first of May when this post goes up. One of those holidays you completely forget about unless you're looking at a calendar. 

     May day. I'm not the first to note that it sounds like a cry for help. I don't know that people want help exactly, but I have a strong suspicion that most people are looking for a sign that things are going to get better some day. 

    I'm not the person to give you one, if you are looking for one. Frankly, a lot of the emphasis that things will get better from people strikes me less as optimistic and more as desperate to believe in something. But I do think that things are going to get better. The human race has proven to be a spectacularly stupid species during the two million years it's been on earth. But in spite of our limitations, we've accomplished a lot. Mostly by not giving up, even when we clearly should have. I can't say I think the next year, or even the next decade, will be easy, but I firmly believe that when the dust settles, we'll get right back up and keep going, learning exactly as much as we usually do from these situations. I don't know where we're going, I just know that we'll end up somewhere nobody else has been before.