Whither Emo Youth's Flower Come Autumn Now Upon Us

 Wait, is there ever time to figure it out? -Nate Rateliff

 Lounging in the languid allure of autumn, that early crisp stillness punishing me with profound guilt. What did I miss? All this summer, short as a day gone by. A tide of nostalgia. I decide to put on some music.  The universe decides to gift me with the most poignant soundtrack— haunting melodies that make my heart ache and my soul long for… something!  Je ne sais quoi.

"All the bells say 'too late'" as John so aptly put it.  Why struggle through my itineraries of boredom, you may ask.  Or perhaps I have met your oddly complaisant expectations.  Let us not forget the autumnal equinox is this week upon us, heaven knows, that perfect moment of balance between light and dark. How poetic! But here I am, out of balance with my inner abrogate darkness and unable to capture my essence in a few well-chosen words. I feel like I’m a stained glass, all my tools locked away, lost in a forest of feelings, wandering aimlessly, brow furrowed in a vague impression of furthering of frustration.

A rememberance: The summer before school started I took a trip through the southwest, drove through the night, and in the morning decided I was going to be a geologist. So then I had a professor who taught us there are three types of rocks; igneous, sedimentary and metaphoric. I wondered about yacht. I switched my major to anthropology. 

But oh the injustice, my belt doesn't fit. Feet hurt in falling-apart shoes. Do you yet mock? Call me Doctor Mocksman. Emo music is our classic rock.  Deep, wistful emotions that swell within me. Why can’t I just pluck the right words from the air like the leaves falling from the trees? It’s as if my brain has turned to mush, a sad, autumnal pudding unable to articulate the bittersweet beauties swirling around in the air. I listen to this music, and all I can think is, “This feels profound!” But what does that even mean? I'm here drowning in feelings yet you percieve me as but a puny puddle of vague sentiments. I'm a bright peacock without a squawk, and you see a coal-tarnished canary.

Oh, the irony! I can feel the weight of solitude pressing down, the kind that only autumn can conjure, and yet I’m left grappling with empty phrases like “sad” and “melancholy.” Thanks a lot, brain! In the car I scream, “THIS IS WISTFUL AND LONESOME!” at the top of my lungs but I hear myself sounding pretentious, foolish.  If I wasn't so dull to the world it would be infuriating!

I close my eyes and see a face looking back at me made of warm light and composed of many faces, like a collage on a stalker's wall, shifting, shifting, through nose, eclectic eyes, cheek or bearded check, mouth, foreheads, and hot, too hot to look at in the eye. But I try and see that He is us, we are Him, and We are a bright and untouchable multitude. Maybe God doesn't want us to feel alone because we don't exist.

I'm not angry.  I'm just prevaricating. In fact it seems to me I'm glad to be here. The days grow short, dream songs mingle with waking ones in vague sepia sibilance. A rememberance:  Humidity. The Subaru Outback engine shaking in idle, shrouded in heat, while we, in the back seat shake in our idyll. Apologies are offered for the sweat, warm comparisons are made, then we emerge to dress and a breeze tells me that God's saying "cool it" and I smile, my face the arc between guilt and consolation.

Sorry for the episodic irruptions.

A toast: to the castles of emotions we guard! Here’s to wanting to cry and laugh simultaneously. Is there a name for this? Let's drink.  I'll articulate it. Turn the music up loud.  Catch the wind in a jar—or better yet these falling leaves! Who cares who's singing what, stop caring about names, words, let the music wash across you.

If you need me I'll be here, withered and wrestling with desolate inadequacies, an eerie sihouette's shadow in a whisper of words I can't understand. Ugh! Autumn, you bittersweet siren! How dare you distill such conflicting feelings in me without affixing any clear liquor labels!

Gaia Ga Ga and the Kojos of Rhythm

Fly with me. Past the din of this city. The cold night air wrapped in errant streetlamp glows, vibrant with dissafectancies. Up, like a bird over the edge of all this land in the valley, all these boxes sheltering slumbering lives, curled in comfort and dreaming.

To the moon, her pallid crescent waning against the shadow of all the light that slips past Japan across this lolling mass of earth. See how tiny she is? See how large this continent, spinning? Americans, pressed to the breast of the Pacific crest, shrouded in the conundrums of evenshade and glowing at the hope of safety these tiny white dots assure us. The moon, so small, so slow to roll about in its eternal descent. Lovers colliding in the paradoxical gravitation of the sublime. And that light, that light that draws its lines across her brow and shows us so clearly the sure azures of the ocean on the other side of our blue ball earth, coming from the sun so far away. So massive, a burning wall of fire and heat and radiation. The warm happy center we are all trying to reach, trying to shy from.

From this distance it doesn't matter who loves you. It doesn't matter who fathers your children or who goes to work on time. It doesn't matter what your carbon footprint is. What car you drive. What you buy for breakfast. What you write in your memoirs or who gives a damn. We are all reduced to a speckle. Life. One word. Our planet has it and you are part of it and at a greater black distance we shall fly and see that it is nothing but a dot. Nothing but the memory of a dot.

"The Milky Way," our ancestors will explain to their children's children's children, casting a finger toward the heavens and lowering their voice in that manner which bespeaks great mysteries afoot. "There, those are stars, and in olden times it was thought that like a stream of milk cried over a black floor, they were the bringers of life, the sustanence of the mother Gods whose love for us is a question we may spend our lifetimes answering, as a child knowing it must suckle upon the juicy breast but why? Where does this glutonous goodness come from? That soothing voice, singing a song without words, that heartbeat pounding warmth and stability and comfort. We nuzzle to it. We drink and we are filled."

It makes you want to cry.

But instead you grow. We grow until we understand that on this squirming surface life clings like a fragile lichen. Leaves fall in a mountain stream and winds blow without understanding, and night and day overlap each other until it makes you want to vomit at the sadness of the speed of it all but you do not. Instead you fly.

Fly with me now.
We are more than our thoughts. More than our heads full of ideas and more than these frowning faces, bent into the light.
Tell me we are more.
And we will fly.