I'm becoming incredibly grateful for my blog. I can post anything I want to on it. To be fair, you can post anything you want on basically any platform, provided you're okay with the possibility of getting banned and you don't mind people yelling at you for abuse or hate speech. But for me, anytime I'm in a group setting, I'm always running speech through my head to make sure it doesn't sound terrible to my listeners. I don't have any natural filters. I'm okay with being brusque, but I'm not okay with hurting other people's feelings. 

    I wish more people talked about how hard it is for some people to know how to interact with others socially. We treat socializing like it's an inbuilt skill, but everyone knows that kids suck at being polite to others. Not because their being mean, but because they haven't learned how not to be mean yet. We take it for granted that it can be learned naturally, but a lot of us don't learn social behaviors naturally. We learn through books, or having it explained to us. 

    I don't think it's everyone else's responsibility to teach me how to be a better person, but I do wish it were more widely known that the best way to tell someone they screwed up is to just tell them that they screwed up, plain and simple.  

Backwards

 All of a sudden our world stopped,
Held in place by strange forces
We couldn't comprehend.

Then everything went backwards,
Back to a time people thought
Would be better than now,
Better than a world that was falling apart.

Looking at pictures and dresses
It was rosy and gorgeous,
But in real life we were miserable.

How do we stop it?
How do we stop falling in the middle of a black hole?
I can't see what's coming,
But I know this won't end well.

    The weather's been weird here recently. It's been weird everywhere. I know it's because of global warming, we wouldn't be having this issue if we'd put the brakes on. It's not fun being the ones in charge of the climate on planet earth. 

    Also, Happy Easter. 

     Writing for National poetry month has gotten me wanting to practice poetry writing more. Currently learning how to tell the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables, which is really making me appreciate the value of dictionaries. That way I don't have to look up if a word is stressed or unstressed in google, which is kind of embarrassing if the word you need to look up is "the". 

     It feels genuinely awesome posting poetry on twitter and watching it get feedback. I love writing, prose and poetry, but I don't know that I ever thought I was good at it. I don't know that I'd say  I'm good objectively, although I do like to pretend I'm the greatest writer of the twenty-first century sometimes, but I think I'm just happy knowing that people like what I write. 

    One thing I enjoy about national poetry month is it puts a spotlight on the fact that most poetry isn't great. 

 Participating in NPR's poetry month has really got me wanting to find a local poetry group near me. I love how casual and pleasant it feels to just post whatever you think is interesting, without putting too much thought into whether or not its good. I'm almost having more fun liking other peoples poems then I am writing my own. 

    Weird thought: Why is it we have to worry about the rise of Fascism but we don't seem to have to worry about the rise of Anarchists? 

A Story

 Built from ideas
Written on paper and stone.
A planet spins through its galaxy,
Following its star, 
Endlessly searching for its place in this world.

On its surface are creatures that grow,
Move,
And change it.
Endlessly working to build a paradise,
Endlessly searching for a better place to live.

At their heart, the heart of the world,
The heart of the planet hurdling through space,
Is a story.
A story of determination, of hope,
Of searching for meaning amongst that which has no meaning.
Ours is a world of rebels, 
Fighting to hold onto a dream that is slipping away.

Day by day,
We awaken.
We remember our past,
We glimpse our future,
And we tremble in fear. 

The only thing saving us from damnation 
Is a story,
Built from ideas,
Written on paper and stone.
The story of soul, lost to space and time,
Searching for the meaning of life

    I just found out it's National Poetry month on NPR. I've already tweeted a poem (just a haiku, nothing special) and I have to say I'm so excited. People are seeing something I've written! Maybe some of them will like it a little bit. 

    I've been writing a bunch of poems that don't qualify, so I think that once April's over, I'll expand the ones I like the most, and then post them at my regular posting time.