This is no trip down some highschool textbook.
There’s no confusing marginalia scribbled sideways,
No convoluted verbiage staring some backwards poet straight in the face
No
It’s just the point where you gotta kick back
Because sometimes
I need a breather.

I need a breather like Donald Trump needs a new hairdo
I need a breather like your little siblings need shutup pills
I need a breather like the way a 67 year old man with an asthma problem left stranded on the street by his all-too-well-off daughters
Needs community healthcare

Because I don’t want to live my life giving broken gifts to broken down old two-shifters working extreme hours so they can afford self-prescriptions to shellac the pain of working full time
Make it shine old man, I will be sailing the sea of metaphors, exhaling visions, growing life from the soil of experience to watch it sprout conception.
I will foster new dreams and shelter them from psychological Darwinism. I am the strongest. I will survive. I am not guilty of giving blindfolds out to the public so it’s not my responsibility to uncover your eyes.

But if I do

Please don’t be afraid to dream.

Don’t be afraid to close your eyes and see the mountains like they used to be
or how blind we’re trying to become. Don’t be afraid to lose yourself in a moment because each moment is really all we have and can ever hope to achieve. There is nothing more special than being the moment your mother father brother sister girlfriend boyfriend good friend old friend amigo amico remembers when its their turn to die.

Except, perhaps, being the dream some kid wants to be when he’s still alive.

So it’s from these dreams I’m gonna piece together a collage, step back, and finally see who I am.

I know I’m not some Shakespearian sonnet personified for the masses.
I’m a patriarch of moleskin plastered bipedal locomotion.
I’m twelve different types of commitment freak trying to finish one devotion
I’m not nervous up on stage, why would I be? I’ve been subject to ICU spotlights that could read right through me and they just stared and stared.

I’m scared.

I’m scared that a little known voice projecting possibilities at the great wall of potential can’t scale the steeple he built out of expectations framed in the first stanza. I’m scared that a little boy trained in nouns, verbs and reverbs can’t read between the echoes. I’m scared

That three birds and a cowboy can redefine the American dream to mean

Oil

Guilt

And wal-mart.

I’m scared that 32 people are dead in Virginia and chaos theory
Can blame it on the wings a butterfly.

I’m scared

That some of you will leave this room feeling nothing but the pressure
Of two palms plastered against silly putty cheeks.
But physics doesn’t care.

Physics doesn’t know if you’re listening or not, physics doesn’t change; it doesn’t play by our rules. Physics refuses to be caged up by our definitions.

Maybe we should be a little more like physics.

I’ve always thought it wise to listen to those you wish to be, and then disregard them immediately. After all, I’ve never met a man who came around twice and I have very little chance at being the last baseball player to bat .400.

The physics of it just aren’t in my favor.

There is one thing though…

Physics will tell you that for every action there is a solid and calculable consequence

And somewhere, carried by an updraft lifted off of the Yangtze River, a bright blue butterfly dances

Unaware

And I’m scared.