It's the end of 2023. May the next year be, if not good, better than the years that came before it. 

    It's weird that the year is coming to an end. It happens, but it happens just infrequently enough that after twenty-eight times it still somewhat catches me by surprise. I suspect I'll never adjust to a world where time, for better or worse, goes on. 

The Inevitable

 The deaths of a thousand,
The cries of a millions,
The silenced voice still screaming
For redemption and love.
Why did we let the loss
Of all we hold dear
Become inevitable?
When will we learn that you can always 
Wake up? 

    I think my resolution for next year is to do more creative writing. I've done a ton of not creative writing this year, and while I like to think my writing has gotten better, I do still want to write fiction. 

Unexpected Friends

 Never let labels
Define who you meet.
You never know when you will find
Your next unexpected friend. 

     Hope you had a fun holiday. It's time to get ready for the new year. 

Confusion

 Movement.
Every day

Something changes,
Disrupting the rhythm 
Of the world
I once knew.

It should be the same,
So why does it feel different?

I try to keep busy,
To distract myself
From the facts
Right in front of my face,
But I can't.

The old world is gone,
Ripped apart by a storm of change.
Why can nobody see it?

All is noise,
Meaningless and pointless.

All is confusion.
What's the point of continuing?

Is this real life?
Is this only a dream? 

     I'm not posting a Christmas poem tomorrow, and that's mostly because, as I've established, I really don't like Christmas. I don't like it because even though no one's forcing you to celebrate, there are a lot of societal forces acting upon you that expect you to celebrate Christmas. Not an issue for most, as it is the kind of holiday that's malleable enough to be meaningful to most people, but if you don't find it meaningful, it's impossible to escape from it. I don't object to commercialism most of the time, and I won't pretend that I think Christmas counts as an exclusively religious holiday, but so many people celebrate it that it feels weird and unnatural to me. Partly because, even if you don't celebrate Christmas, you're still expected to celebrate something. Is this time of year inherently meaningful? Have we just celebrated so often that we've convinced ourselves it is? I don't know, but I do know that while Valentine's day, Easter, and Halloween are just as commercialized they don't bother me nearly as much. I think I just view Christmas as a holiday blown out of proportion. It's a day off and a chance to have fun with family, nothing more. 

    As of today, only two more days until my least favorite holiday of the year. I don't want to sound like I'm demeaning the many people who celebrate Christmas. I just don't like it very much, and I've always gotten the impression that a lot of people don't like it, and are just going along with it for the sake of not ruining Christmas for everyone else. It just feels like a holiday that has massive issues that can't be addressed, because otherwise the entire creation of Christmas would fall to pieces. 

A World Far Away

 How I dream of traveling
To a world far away.
How I dream of going
To another time,
Another place,
Somewhere I'll be happy and free.
How I wish I could dream of tomorrow
Like everybody else.

     I'm running out of short poems. Guess it's time to write some more. 

Only One

 No matter who you are
There is only one of you,
Only one person,
Place,
Or thing.
Why then
Do some men
Have so much power over others?
How have they conned us of our very lives?

    I can't wait until the days start getting longer. I hate it when it gets dark this early. 

The Problem

 I know what the problem is.
I've seen it with my eyes
Every day of my life.
I know the truth.
I've told it to everyone I know.

Why can't anyone else see the truth?
No matter how much I explain it to them
They seem to think they aren't responsible
For the world being 
What it is right now.

Everywhere I look,
People claim the problem is something else.
They say the problem is that we're cruel,
Spiteful, stupid.
They say we limit each other 
But never acknowledge that we might have limits.

I cry out in agony,
Desperate to be heard,
Desperate for someone with the power to fix things
To do something.
I know what the problem is,
But I have no way to solve it. 

   As of tomorrow, it's only a week until Christmas and two weeks until New Years Day. Let us hope that I'm wrong about what the year will bring. Let us hope all of the doomsayers are wrong. 

     I'm debating what new years resolution I should make, if any, for 2024. I feel like it would be a good year to get out of the house more. 

Winter Sky

 Moments before
Winter's icy grip
Seizes my soul,
I cry out for sunlight.
Gasping in pain.
Feeling the warmth leave me
Until spring.

    I've thought about this a bit, and I have to wonder if our obsession with intelligence would be considered toxic and dangerous if intelligence was as easy to see as beauty is. I think the reason we consider obsessing over beauty to be dangerous is that it's very easy to see that our definitions of beauty are arbitrary and can't be objectively measured. Intelligence is supposed to be different, we have a test that spits out numbers for it after all, but what if we measured intelligence by how well one blends in? It is true that intelligent people are much less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and Autism, after all. I've also read plenty lists of how to tell that someone is intelligent, and all I could conclude from reading them was that everyone who wrote something for that list saw someone do something that made them think, "Wow, this person's smart!" How do we know that intelligence is objective? Could it be a social construct, like beauty is? 

Small mistakes

 The small mistakes I make
Leave a large stain on my soul.
Who must I confess my crimes to
In order to escape the crushing despair?

     I liked it better when we weren't enabling genocide. 

The Middle of the Ocean

 I can't remember the storm.
I can't remember the moment
Before the ship I was on
Sank to the bottom.
All I know is that I'm sitting
On what's left of it,
Staring out to the horizon.

I'm floating,
Alive for right now,
But how can I possibly get back to shore?

How can anyone save me
When they don't even know I'm here?

When will I be able to admit there is no escape?

Of course, I'm not in a real ocean
Surrounded by the carnage
Of a wrecked vessel.
Of course, I'm not alone.
Everyone else is going about their day.

But everyone is trapped as well.
Far away from shore,
Unable to beg for help.

How is it that we're all about to drown,
Too far away from shore to be saved?
How can so many of be in so much trouble,
Yet none of us can find someone who will help us?

Is it too late to try and swim back to shore?

     It's less than two weeks before the official start of winter. I can't wait, because I want the days to start getting longer again. 

     There's a certain amount of relief one feels when one completes one's Christmas shopping. For me it feels like the final of my Christmas obligations is complete. 

A Piece of History

An item of value,
Broken in transit,
Easily replaced, 
Yet it's one of a kind.
Why is it that the normal becomes historical
In the blink of an eye?

     I'm sure everyone has lost at least one celebrity. Between Covid-19, NFTs, AI, the rise of fascism, and the decline of social media, we've lost our faith in someone we once believed in. I don't think anyone can say they came out of the pandemic as the same person they were before, but it's devastating to think that so many "regular" people grew, or at least stayed moral, while most of our leaders abandoned morality entirely. It would be easier to move on if we knew our world would be moving on with us. 

The Seed of the Future

Within our world of sadness
Is a seed of the future,
Destined to bloom
Into a magnificent being.
Dare I ask if we can last
Until the day it can shade us
From our misery and fear? 

     I'm not writing this because I know it will happen, I'm writing this because it feels like it will happen, so if it does happen than I want to say that I called it. I feel like the end of this year and beginning of next one will, in hindsight, become a historic moment, one of those moments when historians say that everything changed. Like how we view the end of a century, or a millennia. I have no logical reason for thinking this, but look online and you'll see that a bunch of things are coming to a head at once. Maybe they'll boil over next year, maybe the year after that, maybe we'll last a few more years from now, but one way or another there will be a year where everything changes. That's not the part that I'm guessing, because it's already happened to me a few times. What I'm guessing is when the next big event hits. 

To Have Everything

 Tell me what it's like
To have everything.
To know that 
Everything you love
Will be there 
When you wake up.
Tell me what it's like
To know your world 
Will be there tomorrow.

Tell me what it's like 
To know that politics
Doesn't matter.
Tell me what it's like
To believe in the world
You were born into.

Tell me what it's like
To see imminent collapse
And say,
"At least I don't have to worry
About that happening here."

Tell me,
Does it feel good
To know your world is real? 

    I'm a coward. I've been living the past year as though fascism was a distant thing, something that doesn't affect me. I don't leave my house, I've never had a job, in the six years that I've been blogging I've only gotten about 2700 views, I'm not listed by google and I don't have any followers. I can't possibly be a bigger loser than I already am, so what could this world possibly take from me? In truth, not a lot, for which I'm intensely grateful. But it still finds things to take, things that mattered a lot to me, things that aren't important in the long run. I tell myself that it's not important, that the only way a reasonable number of people will see me is if I beg them to on Facebook, but I have to say something. I have to prove, if only to myself, that I have a voice. Someone, somewhere, is listening to what I have to say, and they're waiting to say if I'll be brave enough to speak my mind. My world is falling to fascism, but I won't give up my power even as I stand before the firing squad. 

     It's almost the end of 2023. I'm a superstitious person by nature, despite being the kind of person who studied chemistry and biology in college. One of my strongest beliefs is that the more you focus on the bad outcomes in life, the less likely they are to happen, though you should still make contingencies just in case. As a result, I've been predicting the worst that could possibly happen next year, at least in my eyes. That way, even if some of my predictions come true, most of them won't. Once the bad things in life know that you're expecting them, they'll run away from you as fast as they possibly can.  

The Thing I Can't Say

 The thought always pushes
At the back of my mind,
Begging for me to put it into words.
How do I tell it
That I only speak what is true,
And nobody will believe what it says?