"Masks"

Seduction is the mask we all wear.

The mask that is what is acceptable.

And to our true selves, this is unfair.

Hiding behind the walls 

Of someone you are not

I see behind the lies

Without a second thought.

"Learning"

Do we focus on what matters?
To truly learn?
Or do we think we are learning?
What is it truly to gain knowledge? Are we gaining a new perspective?
Lately the answer has been to have no answers.
To learn is to endlessly seek and never find. We may find something that works to the best of our knowledge...
But in so doing, how is it clear that we are not creating more problems?
Usually we do.
Drilling the earth for oil to fuel our machines. We can create, travel, move, explore...
But how much drilling can the very planet we live on sustain? At some point it has to crack.
Frankly, a crack in a giant sphere made out of pressure and heat sounds terrifying.
It sounds like a bomb.
Volcanoes anyone? Yes? No? Giant molten clouds of choking ash, boulders, and various debris are not enough to dissuade?
Alright. Fair enough. It is not our problem.
Yet.
But what happens when it is? Will we learn then? Or will we think we are learning?
Or will we simply be dead?
Mankind is adaptable. So adaptable that it is a problem. Once our environment poses little danger because we have eliminated it all, wolves, bears, sickness...what is left?
The new problems we create.
Tear down a forest that has dangerous, natural predators and kill them to eliminate the danger. Sure. Sounds good.
The soil erodes due to lack of dirt-holding roots.
The non-threatening herbivores reproduce at alarming rates and starve due to overpopulation.
Species go extinct.
And we build nuclear power plants on the site of a previous forest.
This is a great idea. Nuclear power is safe and efficient. Until it's not.
Chernobyl. Fukushima. 
Those were accidents. We have "learned" better ways to create danger intentionally. The very thing we have used for energy we have also, horrifyingly, used specifically to kill each other.
Before Chernobyl, before Fukushima.
Hiroshima. 1945.
We dropped a nuclear bomb on an entire population of people without understanding the full implications of what it would actually do. The damage from that bomb is still being recovered today in 2014.
So, what did we "learn" from these incidents and tragedies?
Absolutely nothing.
Even after the horrors of Hiroshima we continue experiments with nuclear power. Studying nuclear matters is not the issue. Putting them in to practice without fully understanding what we are doing is the problem.
However, we continue to make more power plants. We continue to make bigger nuclear bombs, just in case.
Just in case what?
Someone else somewhere else has a bigger nuke? What the hell is the point? Making another nuke just further increases the danger by astronomical amounts. The force of the bomb that hit Hiroshima was but a trifling firecracker compared to the horrors we have today. 
We have learned and adapted since we have been on earth.
Now that natural dangers have lessened, we are creating new ones.
New dangers that no amount of learning can overcome.
If we keep making nukes
If we keep using the very lifeblood of the planet as fuel
If we keep "learning"...
Everyone and everything will die.
And no amount of knowledge can prevent death.
So please, if you are reading this, consider what you learn and why.
Why do we learn?
The more I learn the less I know. The fact that we put experiments into real-world practice before knowing the consequences frightens me.
Learn for the sake of learning. By all means, expand, explore, seek until you can seek no more...
I beg of you, let the pursuit of knowledge and the abstract thought, the possibility, the thrill be enough.
But do not create Hiroshima 2.0.
That is called a Supernova.
And it will be our end.

"Sanguine"

Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Guise of death all draped in red
The sight I saw is in my head
But now I can only wait...
To except my death...
Tis' the only fate... I have gleaned...
From the ones who have seen. sanguine.
I wish I knew what to tell you
The few of you who choose this tale to view
But what I tell you, I tell you true...
From victims past I've seen visions... scarlet haze...
All screams and pain and fire... a deadly, bleeding maze.
Each one began with a cut. A small, simple thing, to cut a hand...
One does not think what a simple thing could summon, could attract...
But how could they, indeed? Only one who has seen what I have seen would know, and nothing in between...
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
A boy in the civil war with an amputated hand.
He soaks it in the river with gunfire behind, only pain and survival in his mind...
Then, in the river's reflection he sees. and screams in fear...
For sanguine is seen. Very near. Tick.
He looks to his right where the reflectee should be... only to find a weeping tree.
Whether or not inside his head; the boy swears to me that, like his hand, this tree bled.
Right now this boy, he warns me. He died from blood loss decades previously; yet today he warns me. Tock.
His scarlet cries rip at my soul and beg release. His anguish will never cease...
A black man with a bleeding nail, washing it inside a pail.
He curses and swishes the water back and forth.
Inside my mind he says to run, but I feel warm, I feel...like...like one...
He tells me that within the pail... was a wraith from hell. a wraith of which he cannot possibly re-tell. Tick.
Above his dark face in reflection it leered, doing nothing...and causing fear.
This black man inside me now screams. He bled to death in scarlet dreams. Tock.
Now I see myself ten minutes ago
Shaving quickly; I was on the go.
A razor slipped; I nicked my hand.
The water faucet runs and runs.
Wissshhhhh.
The sound hurts me now.
WISHHHH.
Grating. Grating.
The boy amputee, the black man with bleeding nail and infernal pail...
Yelling...
AHHHHHHHHHHHH!
But in the mirror... the past me did look to see...
A passive figure draped from toe to head...sopping, oozing, pulsing in red.
Now pushing away...the yells inside my head...
They scream, they burn, they yell and yell.
No! DON'T GO! 
I ignore them. I want to go. Oh...oh...
The past me looks to his right in surprised fright, only to see a bathroom light.
...Bleeding...and glowing a soft... pink light....
Their tortured voices are louder now...
I would silence them forever should I know how...
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Of course. I am running out of time...
Now I see what I must do. I must go. I must be with you...

Drifting...
...................
I see myself...
In a puddle of....
...Red...
...RED!..
No...
Get out!!! Tick.
GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!


.................................


Tock...............................
...................................... 
.......................................

"Gemstone"

Somehow
Somewhere
She is there.
The gemstone to my setting.
Separately the gem and setting are beautiful, true.
But together the two can do something that, alone, they could never do.
Gemstones are flawed despite the polish, despite the cutting, despite the showing.
In gemstones is a certain sense of shakiness, of unknowing.
Settings are without purpose, empty, harder than bone, but nonetheless, alone.
In settings is a base, but a base without a place.
Alone, gemstones and settings are beautiful to man
But alone, can they really, truly stand?
Conjoined the two create a one.
A one that is steady
A one that is whole
A one that is perfect
A one to behold.
A gemstone is cut to fit a setting
A setting molded to fit a gemstone
And though I am an alone and empty setting
I will be a one with my gemstone the day of my wedding.
Even though we maybe have not met
In my heart I have her set
There is a place, a home
For my perfect gemstone.
I feel the empty space, the air
Where she will eventually reside
I feel the room inside my heart
Where she will live inside.
My gemstone I feel and love and miss
But one day perhaps each other we will find
And I will no longer miss
And maybe, together
We will lock the ring together
With one final kiss.

"Endless Pain; Brutal Resolve"

From the depths of our sorrow is the strike.
Preying upon our fears, our love, our hate.
Like a festering wound does it smoulder
Until our hearts grow colder, colder, colder.
The darkness in man lives and thrives
But it must not claim all our lives.
You may endure daily agony.
You may face emotional hardship and pain.
You may feel that every moment you live in a hurricane of acid rain
The acrid drops burning your flesh and mind and leaving nothing behind
In the world there is little mercy. Problems are difficult to solve.
And so I say to you, the troubled
You must find your Brutal Resolve.
Mountains weather but seldom fall
If a true mountain doth fall at all
This is the mountain's Brutal Resolve.
A boy lying in a bed and crying; thinking that he is close to dying.
But he looks at the ceiling with tear-stained eyes
And decides he will not stop fighting until he dies.
Nine months later after excruciating pain
He is wheeled down the halls in a chair.
Alive. Intact. The illness did not win, and that is a fact.
The boy had found his Brutal Resolve.
She stands there on the alter
Left alone and speechless
Her husband to be had left her there, alone
With little to do but to return home.
She finds her hubby-to-be at a local bar
Hanging on another woman in his brand-new car.
In the tub she sits with blades
Wondering if it is the end.
She cuts her wrist deep and fast
So she can be rid of the pain at last.
But as the blood flows through the tub
She clasps her wrist and shouts 'Enough!'
Her life was worth more than this man.
She must not die. She never can.
In the world there is something for her
Even if she cannot see
Though others had shown little mercy
Her life was hers; it had to be.
Though at one point she no longer wanted to be alive
She had found her Brutal Resolve. And she had survived.
And so I say to you, the few who live in darkness
Fight with all your power.
You are stronger than the black
Though it may be on the constant attack
You can and you will push it back.
Tomorrow it may cause pain
And come again, and again.
But this problem can be solved.
You must find your Brutal Resolve.