she listened to me vent on being an unknown nobody who aspired to be more in a world where being seen counted more than being heard, but i don’t like the face i am forced to carry, my words don’t carry enough weight to distract, to detract from awkward smile stuck on with super glue, high on the fumes and screaming coarsely in the arid day

she pushed and prodded to convince me to go on, to convince me it was worth it, and it felt like at any moment a pithy little aphorism would pop out and the vein in my forehead would follow closely after

i can’t stand those little nuggets of wisdom, those colloquial phrases, applicable only under certain perfect conditions, a clean room or a vacuum, where the grime and particulates can’t ruin the test batch

if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, but what if it is broken, horribly shattered beyond repair, microscopic fragments that fall in between the atoms like particles of negative energy, of dark matter, of dark matters of the heart, it is broke dammit, it is, so now what do we do, ignore it like we ignore everything else, sweep it under the rug and if mom asks tell her the dog did it

absence makes the heart grow fonder, the absence of gravity makes the heart grow rounder, the absence of love makes the heart grow bitter, the absence of joy makes the heart withdraw, shrink, dry up like a grape left on the vine until all that remains is absence and by then the heart sputters along anyway

don’t judge a book by it’s cover, or the blurb in the jacket cover, or by the synopsis on the back, don’t judge a book at all, don’t judge anything unless it is your job and even then you should only judge based on facts but there will always be flavoring based on the cover, even if you didn’t mean to you judged it based on it’s cover, by the title written in bold print, you came in with preconceived microjudgements, admit it to yourself, be honest

it’s why i don’t add pictures to my prose, because i prefer to paint with the words not be boxed in by the art, but let the art that is the words speak for itself, i live without a cover, just a lion blanket made after the fire, if i don’t have a cover my cover can never be blown and then i can sneak around in my meat suit pretending to be human just like you

out of sight, out of mind

i call bullshit on this, if out of sight equalled out of mind explain why i cannot get over her, i haven’t seen her for so long but i can smell the wildflowers in her hair, taste her lips like the finest wine, hear her voice echo through the trees, she is always, perpetually out sight but never strays out of mind, out of focus, always dancing on the edge of my vision, taunting, tempting, tainting every single thing

or easier said than done, i have choked on the words i could never express that would have done more good than the harm of silence, they were neither easy to say nor easy to do, they spilled forth across my tongue like razor blades and carved their way out of my chest instead of my mouth, those words unspoken, so easy to say yet not so easy to do except when staring into the void that was her eyes, the deepest blue, the sublime green, the milk chocolate oceans of her

so spare me your petty aphorisms, your pithy little wisdoms passed down through generations and generalities

save them for someone who buys into dime store wisdom and half cocked philosophical meanderings, the truth of truth cannot be boiled down into a simple phrase if it is a truth worth pondering at all, and your truth and my truth don’t necessarily share any common ground

i don’t have a leg to stand on nor pot to piss in, all i have is the rending and tearing of insignificance that pours from my pores

i have bittersweet reminders of what could of been, had i been enough