But Who Will Save the Savior?

I once had these dreams and aspirations that were crushed and stomped out by new dreams and aspirations.

All I could think was, "What's the point of dreaming if I'm only to out-dream myself?"
But before I finished dreaming, I dreamed some bigger thing and forgot those tired, old dreams all together.

Then time went on and dreams turned to calloused stones and birthed the doubt that living wasn’t worth the endless effort. But despite my growing faithlessness, I still have hope in saviors. I’ve been haunted by these demons and graceless fallen angels - but there’s an antonym for everything, so there must be something beautiful reaching down to drag me out while all these terrors fight to claim my longing soul - at least I think so. My knees are bleeding from the rocks and falls and there’s dirt beneath my fingernails from how I’ve crawled and clawed through the soil to dig my own deep and early grave. But Hell still hasn’t claimed me yet and I’m nobody’s slave. So I stick my hands inside of my chest and tear out my crying heart and try to nurse it back to life and wash away the filth to no avail. I can’t save my falling self - I can’t do it; I just fail.

Still I beat against the rocks to try to break the calloused shell; but nothing works.

Instead my hands just start bleeding. I'm in need of something because right now I feel defeated.

So I stumble to this churchyard, but find it’s been set fire by the raging flame of apathy.

No one cares to rescue me - for the congregation is too preoccupied with some new social gathering to realize that they’re all just dying together - unaware that their shelter is burning down. I stagger in with my bloody clothes and my iron heart but no one seems to see a problem.
I scream, “I’ve got these dire needs and I need somebody to solve them!”
But no one has an answer or solution to absolve them - they just hug me and say, “We’re praying for you, son. It’s going to be okay.” Then, instead of washing off my wounds, they condemn my injured faith and whisper of how far I’ve fallen and sad it is that it’s now a mystery if I’ll be saved.

But I know that answers can be found and heard that mercy never falters.

So I take what pieces I could salvage from the walls of the church’s ashes and neglected altars and tie them together with rope from the flagpole; and use what’s left of the tattered banner as a sail atop the fragile ship that I created. Church and state are integrated as I cast my timid vessel to the arms of the raging sea.

For the first time in awhile I believe that I’ll be free again - or that I’ll at least die trying to find what my father told me comforts him. Waves beat hard and the wind batters my tiny ship to pieces. I scream for help - I scream for Jesus! Then, out of nowhere, this hand grabs firmly to mine and drags me onto this rock in the middle of the ocean somewhere. There’s still endless commotion everywhere, but I feel at peace despite the violent, vicious storm. You throw my iron heart to the ocean floor. I watch it sink and break apart and float back up as something pure and innocent. You act as if I’ve never let you down before - and I swear I never will again. Now, when I look back on the shipwrecks, I don’t see hurt - I see survival

I feared damnation, but revival sparks a flame that recreates the burned down churches and builds walls stronger than the tempest’s spiral. Healing comes in stages. Pain hurts and scars can change us. My haunts are all on burning pages, but they brought me to whatever shore I’m found today. I’m stronger for the fractures and no shattered legs can keep me from climbing all these mountains that I’ll claim. Still, my past is full of sinners and my future’s filled with error, I’m afraid. But if cells can re-create themselves and forests grow from fallen seeds that should have withered  - then I have faith in a forgiver.

Even Jesus Christ himself once prayed for saving - but no one saved the savior so the world could one day feel the grace of changing. Falls are part of living and everyone needs saving.

We're all in need of saving

We're all in need of saving

Nothing Wrong With Shyness. In Fact, You're Quite Adorable

Have you ever felt that presence? You know, the one that ticks within your mind and keeps you just lucid enough to deprive you of sanity? Tick tick tick. I'll tear out the walls for the source of irritation. It's not right, rotate my bed and arrange the books in the corner. That's not right either. Re-order the things how they were. Maybe if I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling long enough it will all go away and everything will just be over. Maybe I won't wonder anymore and all that driving senselessness will disperse. It won't. It's become normality, these raging mental wars and doubts and unbalanced, pulsing heart beats. I wonder, sometimes, amidst all the questions and wondering, if there's more than endless struggle and a pointless, dreamer's existence? What if that undefined deep, gripping, nothingness that keeps me grasping for something and hoping that someday, somehow I'll make it is really just a backlash of insecurity and tragic, emotional misunderstanding? It's senselessness, it all. It's been hours or weeks or minutes or days - it doesn't matter - I've been sitting here, staring at the white, painted ceiling for what feels like a dozen lifetimes. It's a prison cell and I'm allowed to walk free; and that's what's heinous about the whole thing; I walk free. I sing and talk and move about but face the consciousness of being caged and held and tortured by whatever unseen thing will haunt me. I run and tour; but it's always present. It stops sometimes, the ever-revolving constant. It rests, building steam and plowing full speed ahead - until she walks in the room. She calms me and the demons hide awhile. It isn't love; just a presence that sees the soul. I'm not an artist or a writer or poet or liar or singer or anything much more than nothing to her - I'm just this kid from Florida with wide eyed dreams and irrational aspirations. I'm more than fictitious hope and faux-confidence that I'll reach the lights and the long nights and the ten thousand voices screaming beneath the monstrous, engulfing stages. It's not a blurry, twisted, fight to trudge on and keep from falling but a literal existence to her. Existence, you hear? I exist beyond paper and struggle and amplified reality broken down to glorified pieces of something in poetry. Maybe I don't. Either way it's calming and I'm not calm now. Maybe I'm tired. I haven't slept in three days and everything seems distant. What's it really matter anyway? Kings and paupers and poets - we're all just hoping for purity and our portion of grace eternal come judgement day. Sure the living matters, but what of the greatness? I'll die alone and reach the same immortal end as if I passed in the loving arms of thousands. I don't want to be great; I just want to be heard. If greatness accompanies, so be it. If not, no pride will be hurt. I'm too shameful for pride regardless. What do dirty hands and tattered souls know of arrogance. Perhaps too much too often.
I keep staring at the door with this sort of desperate hope that it'll open and you'll walk in and save me. Maybe we'll just sit in the corner and sing for awhile. You always sing so grippingly. You're timid and shy and the way you blush and tremble when you perform is more endearing than embarrassing. I love that you almost need me and use my faith to get through the frightening lines. No need for nerves, my dear - I'll guard your heart and keep all the critics at bay. You sound amazing and look even better than I claim. So lock stares with mine and we'll play through the night 'till your stormy eyes close for their resting. Dream sweet, my dear. Dream sweet...

I Won't Let You Down; I'll Always Let You Down Again...

Everything stopped. Nothing was moving. My mind was stagnant. I felt emotionless. That's brilliant for some. For me it was homicide. Like infection on the brink of cure; it couldn't last forever - I hoped. How cancerous can stagnancy become? Asphyxiate. Suffocate. Contemplate. Knock knock. Shatter shatter. The Harriet Tubman of imagination arrived to release my soul to freedom - thank God. The faucet turned on and ink, like bleeding wounds, ran rampant. It covered the pages, it tore through the paper as if searching for some buried secret and wouldn't rest until all was uncovered. I found it. Deep within the wells of conscience, it was. Flooding out like fountains, it poured. I drowned in it. It covered me. My hands looked like a typesetter and my white heart grew speckled with black oil and fingerprints. The billows grew. growing, growING, grOWING, GROWING! Splash, splash, splash! I swam through the streaming muses and clung to my pen to stay afloat in the churning waves of flowing thought. Undertows dragged me to the ocean floor. sink! Sink! SINK! Blackness. Everything was black there. Tiny fish lived in tiny houses with tiny front doors and tiny windows. They wore tiny sweaters and drove tiny, little cars to their respective work-places. Where was I? Did I die? I couldn't have. All I was doing was writing a ridiculous story. BANG! Biting claws. Bright light. I was torn from the inkwell and ripped through the sky and up to some place high above everything. Dear God, it felt windy. Flying. I looked down on the storm and the waves and the ships being eaten alive by the monstrous ocean of devouring ink I'd created. It all seemed so brooding. I smiled. Black rain poured from even blacker drawings of ever growing storm clouds. Screaming, childish, letters clung desperately to pages for safety - while the pages, growing soggy from the fluid, fought heroically to stay afloat despite the added weight. Pirate ships and princesses from other sonnets and stories soon appeared; washed in by the raging vastness, I suppose. What a gathering. Serpents climbed from the deep to swallow prose and consume full paragraphs of things that I had written. I fought to find structure in the chaos of beauty and destruction. CRASH! Lightning. Thunder boomed. I covered my ears. I fell. Down. down? DOWN! and onto some random island. Shivering, frightened, Rhymes gathered in groups, hiding from the rain and consoling younger Lines near the fading shoreline. The rain poured violently. What was left anymore? I walked the island but soon discovered it to be merely a dinner plate lost within the ever rising flow of endless endlessness. I didn't see it ending. "We're all lost!" faithless Lyics cried. The rain poured in and the plate kept sinking. Soon there was no one left. Alone. I floated a while - clutching to whatever helpless substance floated by; a wasted thought or a drowning fragment, a lifeless phrase or broken piece of tainted inspiration. Finally, I guess it all ended; or I just got rather sick of it all. I found myself back on the couch, mindlessly flipping through photographs and questioning my ability to reason. No ink. No source of brilliance or clever composition. Just vastness. My hands are no longer black with toil and my paper looks pure and un-attended. It's raining now; fitting for such an occasion. Some black&white film skips across the television and reminds me of black and white pictures in some black and white story about black ink oceans and white dinner plates I once read somewhere. Penguins fit quite easily here. Killer Whales too. It went like that for awhile; my cluttered thoughts and memories. Then everything stopped. Nothing was moving. My mind was stagnant. I felt emotionless. That's brilliant for some. For me it was homicide...