It's the last day of February. I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like March is going to be the start of something incredible. 

Earthquake

 They say an earthquake is coming,
A rattle that will undo the world.
We won't know until it's over
And everything we knew is gone forever. 
 
Until the day it happens,
We will think of it with awe.
"Just think of how cool it would be
To see the world turn upside down",
We'll say.
The walls falling down,
The light coming in,
The dust choking us while concrete slabs crush our bodies,
The moment it all ends.

But then we think, in the early morning,
About how hard it would be to prepare.
The bookshelves should be affixed,
The house should be braced,
But none of that matters if we're not home when it happens.
Then we remember what we'd lose,
The bits of ourselves that we stack up on shelves,
And that's when we realize
That we don't want the earthquake to come.

No matter what we want or think,
Someday we'll feel the earth shake beneath us
And watch the world crumble while our bodies break apart.
When it's over,
We'll talk on and on about how we failed,
And all that we could have done.

The earthquake won't be the sunset of an old world
Or the dawn of a new,
All it will be is a moment burned into our memories,
A moment when everything changed.
In the future, our children's children will talk
About where we were and what we did
When we felt the world rip apart,
But we won't remember it at all.

Will we move on from a city of rubble?
Will we build something better and brighter?
Can we learn to build something so strong and sturdy
That we'll be safe when the earth starts to shake?
Or will it only ever be a matter of time
Before we have to rebuild once more?

     Tomorrow will see the release of my five hundredth blog post! I feel like I should have something special planned, but it's just another poem like the ones I release every other Monday. Still, I edited this one, so I think it should turn out a little better than my other poems do. 

     I get the feeling March is going to be an important month for the world. I have no solid evidence for it, but it seems like a lot of important events are starting in March, and any writer knows that the beginning of something usually sets the tone of the rest of the work. 

Feelings

When my head hurts
And my heart can't stop pounding,
I write my thoughts
Down.
Compressed into words,
For those who want to read them.
Only on the page
Do my feelings make sense. 

     I've been hearing people talk about how Twitter is just Elon Musk's blog now. I've only been looking at people I follow recently, so I can't vouch for this personally, but if it's true, then I have to wonder why he didn't just start a blog somewhere for himself and his techie fans. It would have made everyone so much happier, and he could delude himself into a massive ego much more easily. Then again, maybe his fans are the problem. I know that you can build up a tolerance to any stimulation, so maybe he's just been so famous for so long that fame no longer has meaning. 

Suffering

There is no reason 
To allow suffering.
Suffering doesn't make people better
Or wiser,
It only causes them pain
And makes it more likely
That they will hurt others in turn. 
There is no meaning in suffering,
The only meaning is in stopping it
From occurring in the first place. 

    I have something exciting planned for next Monday, assuming I got the post dates right. If I didn't, expect a poem on Sunday. 

The Universe

 It would be so easy 
To live in a world that was safe.
If I could live alongside people
And pretend they cared about me,
It would make me so happy.

It would be so easy
To live in a world that I shared,
Even if I was the only one there.
To know that my life mattered to someone else
Is a dream I never thought would come true.

Why then, are there doubts plaguing my heart? 
Why am I waiting for the moment I wake up
And find this wasn’t even a dream I want to remember?
Why does it feel like darkness is all that awaits me? 
Why does it feel as though I'm about to be unable to even pretend that I'm loved?

The Universe is not exceptionally cruel to me.
You might even say that it's given me more than I really deserve.
Do I really deserve to live when so many would have done more in my place?
I'm grateful, but also scared,
Because every gambler knows that someday your luck runs out. 

     I wonder if schools of the future will have classes on how to post on social media. I'm sure people would be thrilled by it, but I think that'll make it so that social media is as devoid of opinions as real life often is. Still, I can't blame people for wanting spaces where they don't need to be opinionated in order to be heard. I don't think that's the soul reason everything is so broken, but I think that if social media is going to have a future, then there needs to be an acceptable norm from which one can deviate. 

     I've been doing three thousand words of writing a day as practice for the day I write a novel. You'd think that would mean that I'd have more blog material, but I think that it's just making me realize how little I have to work with. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot to say, just not a lot that I want to say publicly. 

Society

It's tempting to let society move you.
Don't.
It's tempting to believe 
That they can make you happy.
Don't.
Remember who you are. 
Remember the person
Behind the name
They gave you.
Don't turn your back
On your true self. 

      I hope that someday living in a Dreamworld is a common and accepted as being a member of a church is now. I won't say the Dreamworld is related to religion, but you can have a religious experience if you enter the right Dreamworld. I think that Dreamworlds being more common would allow more people to get in touch with God/their subconscious, because they can see a world based on what they actually believe. 

Great Poetry

Why do we not notice the poets
That can write only 
A few lines at a time.

I will grant that The Iliad
Wasn't written in a day,
But did homer know
How to say a lot
With a little?

I know I don't. 

     It's weird talking about the Infinite, and my Dreamworld. I'm so worried about judgement that I never really talk to anyone about it. Having a place where I can talk about it without fear of ridicule is awesome, honestly. 

The Game

 Is this supposed to be my dream?
Am I supposed to want 
To live amongst your kind?
Why do you want me 
To beg for your forgiveness and love?

You did not love me 
When I begged at your feet
For a scrap of hope and humanity.
You did not love me
When I gave you my world
And everyone in it.

Now that you've been banished
From the world in my heart,
You think nothing of tormenting me
Until I give in,
Until I beg you for the mercy
That doesn't exist.

I will not give in,
I still have my dignity and soul intact,
Despite everything that you've done.
I will not let go
Of all that I have left, 
No matter how much you torture me.

I am a human,
A voice screaming
Through the future
Until someone hears her.
I will not play by the rules of your game,
And I won't let you win the rights to my future.  

Realer than Reality

    For purposes of this post, let's pretend that I'm a famous blogger who everyone reads. I assume that anyone who read yesterdays post think's that I'm a conspiracy theorist. And I suppose I probably am, I'm just one of those people who doesn't bother to follow the trendy conspiracies. What kind of writer would I be if I settled for someone else's fantasy instead of trying to make my own? I'm not going to say that I'm a sane person who only believes in the things she can prove scientifically, because I most certainly am not that, but I will say that I don't think society will survive if we vilify belief. All of us believe in things. Not just because it's instinctive, but because our society depends on it. I'm not wholly unconvinced that the reason we teach our kids to believe in Santa Claus at a young age is to teach them how to believe in things that you can't prove, even if the logic isn't sound. I won't pretend this isn't problematic, since we have an entire coming of age ritual around realizing that Santa isn't real, but I use it as an example of how, deep down, most of us know the world we live in isn't real. The social part, anyways. 

     I don't think that all of us should believe that reality as an external, objective concept isn't real. I'm not saying we should doubt our own senses (although there are a lot of scientific studies that say exactly that), because I think the opposite is true. I think that when a world has crumbled to the point that we have to doubt everything we see lest we hurt someone, that's a sign that a world needs to be destroyed and replaced with a world that can be believed in safely. I think the purpose of reality, society, anything that you have to believe in for it to be real, is to protect people from seeing or thinking about the Infinite. I think that the reason so many have flocked to conspiracies is that they can't believe in society anymore, so there isn't much protecting them from the Infinite. 

    Science, wonderful in it's ability to enable progress, is so tied into reality that one can't really "believe" in it. Science is the only real tool we have to see what reality is, and except for crazy people like me, everyone agrees that reality exists and that we live in it and shouldn't question it. In order to believe in something, you have to be able to question it, to know that it either might not be true or probably isn't true at all. It's why society is less "real" than earth, because we know that society isn't real, but most of us go along with it because we benefit from believing in it, and not questioning those who run it. No one benefits from questioning reality, we just question how much we really know about it. 

     I think that it's time we start questioning our relationship to reality, specifically the part where we believe that someday we'll understand it entirely and we'll never have to question anything for the rest of our lives. First off, I don't think that's possible. Our Universe is too big for that. Second, I think that if we focus only on what's "real", we'll miss out on the things that matter most to us, the worlds that we build in our minds. I look at the rise of occultism, conspiracies, even people who are just questioning the virtues of capitalism, and I see the same thing. They're all looking for something to believe in, a back up for their reality, someplace else to protect them from the Infinite. I think that, even if objective, external reality exists and isn't just a product of an entire Universe of entities bringing it into existence, we aren't going to be able to live in it as much as we would like. We'd be a lot better off learning to build our own worlds to live in, worlds that are built to be more than places of profit or escapes from painful life experiences. We need to build worlds that are, in their own way, realer than reality. 

    I have a confession to make; I don't believe in objective, external reality. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, because you can't believe in an Dreamworld and say that you think reality is a myth at the same time, I just don't believe in a reality that exists regardless of your belief in it. I live in reality, I see it everyday, and I interact with the world that was built on top of it, but if we live in a world where society dominates our lives, despite not being real, I think we should acknowledge that maybe the reason reality functions without our help is less due to the fact that it doesn't depend on belief and simply that more things are willing to believe in it. To put it another way, if it wasn't for the actions of every planet, star, and galaxy in our Universe working together to make sure the laws of physics never changed, reality wouldn't exist. 

To be Simple

 Oh, to be simple
To be able to condense
My thoughts into words

     I know they say that the more things change, the more they stay the same, but could it just be that things haven't changed enough for us to notice yet? 

The Public Eye

 The person who dances
A lovely,
Simple dance
In the center of the public eye,
That person isn't me.

That person writes simply,
Words that people know by heart.
The person writes words that everyone knows.
I'm not complex.
I'm learning the rules
Of my own heart and mind.
The words that I know by heart,
The world that only I know.

The Fate of America

        I’ve been thinking a lot about the Infinite lately. We all know about it, know that we were born from it, and that we’re doomed to someday return to it, yet we cannot talk about it. Only in the most religious or philosophical settings can we admit that none of what we see and here is real, and most of what we know about reality is conjecture. I’m not alone in thinking, “If what I see in my mind is indistinguishable from what I see in my mind, how do I know that what I’m seeing is real?” But we don’t talk about it nearly enough. We talk about conspiracy theorists or evangelical Christians as though they were freaks, oddities, outside of the norm, and not merely a slightly more extreme version of humanities need to avoid seeing the Infinite. 

      It bothers me because our world fell apart in 2020, yet those in charge insist on pretending that nothing happened. I’ll be the first to admit, finding meaning when the world ends yet everything looks the same afterwards is hard. The world that ended wasn’t a world that was bound by physics. But it did end, and our leaders won’t even talk about it. Worse than that, they’re doubling down on the behaviors that made 2020 so awful. 

      It wasn’t just the pandemic that destroyed us, of course. It was the Trump presidency, and the decline of the Republican party into a plague of madness. But is unity truly the best we can do? No human has ever joined a group just because they said they were a group, they joined a group that was based around something. What, exactly, is America based around? Freedom? The police keep killing people of color and the Republicans insist on banning any book that has even slight hints of “wokeness”. Equality? Why was one man able to buy, and subsequently ruin, Twitter then? Religious tolerance? Then why are the only people elected to politics the same brand of Christian nutcase? The problem isn’t that we’re disunified, it’s that nobody believes in America anymore, and certainly not in the American Dream. Yet when people complain that they can’t believe in the world they grew up in, the only response those in charge seem to have is, “Well participate in it anyways.” 

      I don’t know what sort of message will be sufficient enough to bring us back together, but I don’t think I should be the one deciding that in the first place. I don’t believe in society as a concept anymore, let alone in the country I used to sing songs about. The world I imagine when I think of a Utopian future is so far removed from this one that it’s not even on the same planet. I just know that it wasn’t that long ago that people genuinely loved America and wanted to see it changed for the better. It could be that all we need to do to fix things is to simply start enforcing the messaging that brought people to America in the first place. 

      Frankly, I don’t think it’s that simple. As much as I, and many others, loathed Donald Trump, people still elected him. It may have been a fluke that got him into office, but he’s still popular among a lot of deeply broken/evil people. Even after destroying Twitter, Elon Musk is still beloved by a group of people who still, somehow, believe that he was sent to save us. I know Fascism is unpopular, but it’s also loud, mean, and has a bad habit of getting its own way. I’ve seen plenty of people on the left say, “You know, maybe we’d actually make progress if we stopped trying to be nice all the time.” And that’s just it. The messaging that brought people to America in the first place is a great foundation to build a community, but there still needs to be a direction for that community to go in, and all we have now is capitalism. 

      Whether capitalism was a good idea in the first place, I honestly don’t know. I just know that it keeps breaking on us, and the flaws that keep it from working as we want it to seem to be built into the system. To me, the biggest issue that it’s focused on increasing the amount of stuff we have, and that’s all it really tells us to do. It doesn’t tell us anything about how to make friends, what kind of things we should enjoy, it just tells us to keep buying stuff and making stuff and making more room for stuff. I get that it’s not the economy’s job to tell us about religion, but in America our economy has become our religion. 

      There are a lot of reasons we aren’t as religious anymore that I don’t have time to get into, but the core issue is that our economy became our religion, then Covid caused the economy to collapse, after we saw clear evidence that America wasn’t what we were told it was with a president who wasn’t committed to any of the stated ideals who stayed in office despite being loathed by all not inside his inner circle and being impeached twice. We don’t have a world to believe in and our leaders don’t have a reasonable response to this. I would think the bare minimum would be for someone at the top to acknowledge that Donald Trump represented none of America’s values, and that we the people need to work on fixing the problems. There’s your message, right there. “We know things are bad, we know we haven’t done enough to fix them, we promise we will hold all the corporations accountable and make them work with us to bring the country you knew back, only better, brighter, and more focused on happiness rather than just making things.” 

     But that won’t happen, because our leaders aren’t equipped to admit that, deep down, they know the world they built isn’t real. Like money, Santa Claus, and God, it has to be believed in, or it ceases to exist. But they’re at the center of society, the least equipped to admit that the ground they walk on isn’t holy. Fixing America would be a major blow to their worldview, and to the worldview of those who keep them in power. The fact of the matter is, in order to be saved, America has to die. It’s just a matter of who’s the first to kill it.  

The Road to Power

 The road to success is paved
With the bodies of those 
Who failed along the way.

Those who made it to the top
Never once looked down,
Never glimpsed those beneath,
Frightened of the carnage at their feet. 

There are those who stayed behind,
Those who tried to help others,
Those who did their best to listen,
To understand,
To comfort those afraid of what they would lose.

But in the end,
Power consumes all.

Success brings power,
And the road to power
Will devour you whole.

There was a time I reached for the sky,
Reached for the sun shining over my head,
But then it turned red with the blood of the innocent.
Faced with the possibility of needing to murder
To survive, 
I fled.

Now here I stand,
On the edges of the world I once knew.
A world now bathed
In blood and flames. 

I see those I once knew,
Consumed by hatred and fear.
All our worst stories,
Coming true before my eyes. 

As the last bridge on the road to power crumbles,
All I can do is weep. 

    I don't know if I'll have anything to write on Sunday, but today all I can really come up with is, "Man, it's really gloomy outside, even for Seattle." Which it is, but I don't think that counts as interesting, especially if you're in Washington state. I feel like there should be lots to talk about, but at a certain point, "Oh my god, can the Republican party get any crazier." starts to get real old. 

     The only good thing about watching the world collapse is that it gives one ample material for poetry. That being said, I'd rather have a functioning world than a world that give me enough material to write three poems a week, without any mental effort at all. 

Wealth

 Imagine being rich,
Money for everything you could want,
A house fit for a king.

Imagine having more 
Than anyone needs or wants.

Imagine having everything.
What is the price you'd pay? 

    It's groundhog day, but since I writing this in January, I have no idea how much longer winter's supposed to be. Not, mind you, that Groundhogs are in any way qualified to give weather reports. 

Coincidence

 It's nothing special.
There's nothing noteworthy 
About it at all.
The words,
The songs,
What you hear in your mind.
It's nothing special.