This was the first time I'd seen you, I was maybe ten years old. You took off those hand knit mitts, revealing hands, waxy sheen from the cold. There's not a scrap of leather in your elaborate outfit, and I can tell from the state of your skin that the thought of meat makes you sick. It looks like you've been around longer than your age shows, with the way you sat down around everyone like they were people you already know. Your scarf unwound around your face so slow, the flecks of snow melting around your mouth and nose, so you laugh. Because you feel that shift of energy. From resting on your face to running down it without losing anything. That energy was contagious. The way you drew together water and your heart like a mother and father meant to be together since the start of their lives. Your watery heart flowing around like husbands and wives exhale a silent confidence. That life is alright and love exists despite the evidence. You wiped the water from your face, and kicked the snow off your boots. Diamond shaped clumps of ice falling from the soles and the grooves. Next came off your hat, and I was pleasantly surprised that any small piece of cloth could ever hold that untamedness inside. Again you just laugh, regardless of surroundings, and you pat it down. Something struck you suddenly, and for the first time, you frown. Not in negativity, but curiosity as you turn around. You could feel me staring, we locked eyes, and I looked down. Pretending for that instant our eyes never met, like that feeling of scaring away a deer carelessly, I felt regret. But you weren't timid like a faun, or frightened like a cat, or prepared to be embarrassed with reactions like oats scattered, no. You were the bird who looks down in confidence. Perceptive enough to know no human hand could reach you up on your branch. But you were a ground level limb. With leaves and aged bark as an excuse for skin. No pleasantries of social procedures expected. You sit with love and refuse to neglect the neglected. Your low lying bowers just the right height for children's grasp so they can climb to the bird's nest and see the sunset at last. You elevate people. So they can love the world within. You're like a brass looking glass that someone painted in the picture. And yet you sit here. You don't waste words on speeches or books so people can preach and look about you. Hold you up and adore you, no. You're like a shoe in the door of twenty first century mannerisms. A quiet bacteria around the organisms that no one expected to eat the other bugs in the dish. To protect with love and wish that the world feels the same. And even though it won't mean a thing, I feel the same as you. I was changed by you. Your earthy tones and dried out hair. I stared. Like a child does at an ascending balloon. Like the moths try to come close to the moon. But I'm not carried by jet streams. No frail wings necessitate ascension. There's no tension in your pose. I wish I could let that much go. Your laugh was poetry in prose, and you rose. Walked right up to me in my baseball jacket. You held out a card, your expression said, 'Take it.' And on that page were words worth reading. You walked away a miracle to me, and left my heart searing.

Your jawline was firm, at least enough to come to terms with your lying. I sat there watching you act despite the choking on the knots your stomach is tying. It's not use at this point to deny the ways in which I disappoint and strive to find the words to keep us alive and afloat for just one more day. We're like little fish who blow bubbles when we have nothing left to say. Twirling to the surface, spinning, and made of nothing but air. Like a grandfather clock patiently waiting for death in his favorite chair. Like him, I'm not as much a builder as I am a man with gasoline and a fire's flicker in my eyes, set upon you it would seem. Though I'll never be a voice of reason, I'm not as much a voice of doubt. Because doubt just whispers endlessly while I need to shout to be heard. My lessons won't quietly be learned. So I'd prefer it if you'd just stop and take in air. While it might seem your dissatisfaction needs to be shared, it doesn't. If this is what your judgment feels like, then death is just and older cousin. Because as much as it hurts to see my intentions in shambles, I'd rather thinks of the things you are to me instead of what I wasn't. Because I wasn't secure. And when things get bad again, oh, I'll bite that flashing lure. Let it take me up to where my friends are mad that I fought them. Where my intentions can't hide anymore at a murky bottom, safe from the leering eyes of people, who, to my surprise, might just have given me a chance.

I tried to find my voice, I truly did, but, instead of that, I found the eyes of a scared kid. I saw the corners and the angles of a girlish frame. I saw a crooked back, but I'm not ashamed. This is who I am, and I hope that you believe it. When I say that I'm not hiding from myself or logic. Because truthfully, I shouldn't be proud. I spit when I talk, and I talk far too loud. And my voice scratches and croaks like my cheap violin. No liquor can smooth it, no drink is my rosin. I haven't been able to find something that's been given to me my whole life. Faith in a God whose love is for me, but I'm so self-obsessed that I still question everything. But there are questions with answers not spelled out like letters make words, so simple, no. Our own answers are better. There's no arbitrary truths to this life, but I kept imploring those ever-watering eyes in the mirror thinking, "You need solid ground. A solipsistic belief you can claim as safely found." But there's no surety in this world, and certainly not in my brain. If I cut myself open, I'd find all the same bits that make up an anatomy. Kidneys, capillaries, a heart and a spleen. And when I die, I'll either get buried or set fire. A chest full of flies, or ashes in the sky. No matter how important my own life seems now, someday, somehow, what I am leaves the ground. And that gives me comfort. Not like the kid who is shocked to find that no matter how vibrant his paints, they'll always mix to make brown. We're all like that mix of water and expressive intentions. Made of vibrant ideas, but chained to this human condition. I know you want to be different, but you should probably move past that. No matter how much that thing in your chest resembles a bird, you're still trapped. So let's find ourselves. Naive or not, but without expectation of being not easily forgot. We're back to square one of living that uselessness that once we fought.

As far are you're concerned, I'm just a pillar of words spoken to the world, for the most part unheard. But I don't really care all that much to be understood, it's not something I'd feel comfortable asking out of you. But I would not be surprised if other so-called artists out there would nervously chew their nails or try and fix their hair. Fretting because the world just doesn't 'get' them, yet to remain a proper artist, it's not proper to let them. It's best to be incoherent with all your linguistics, and write a thousand songs despite being entirely solipsistic. If you haven't guessed already, I don't really have a grasp of art. I see it as a word like love, worthless when pulled apart. Because art doesn't exist without a speaker and a listener, the speaker is shouted nearly hoarse, and the listener's a fidgiter. Because all they think about is how they want it for their own, the canvasses splattered indigo or the imagery held by the poem. In a realistic sense, they all want the fame. The world to praise them for this page cooked up in their brains. They'd be so quick to say their muse comes from the heart. They're right, it's pumping, throbbing, it's blood soaked art. The closest thing I can say is that it comes from the veins, spiderweb trails that pump life just the same. Because the trails that harbour each of the innumerable limbs are the same trails that linked mom and dad, she and him. Art is the blood pumping under our skin, sometimes thick and throbbing, sometimes scary thin. But it's what holds us together and fuels us through our days, though some art packed with dirt and plaque that's hard to wash away.

I can rewrite history so far as it only applies to me. This subjectivity is a sick ubiquity. For as long as I keep my thoughts on the inside and don't confide, it doesn't matter where belief resides. It can be a brambled bush of thoughts, a vortex. Made by meaning in my own private cortex. So I can be correct and say I'm always right, because I define the truth in me, no matter what the light and how it shines on in angles both flattering and not. From the top, I can scarcely see the object is full of rot. If the logic at the core is found to have a fatal flaw, then who's to claim it's not our minds that have been crippled since the start? It's frightening, right? We have this pre-conception of space and time so the world fits in the lines of what we know. But take those blinders off for perspective's sake and we can't even comprehend where senses or memories go. Because time ceases to exist or displace us, not to mention the utter lack of dimensions. We're caught in this frame of seeing through pre-programmed eyes, seeing shapes and lines existing where they might not otherwise.

I see sixteen levels, each story is five windows across, and about one in every three has a man on the balcony looking lost. And even from a distance like this, I can see that in some sorts, the option of falling from that ledge gives them comfort. But the building beside it doesn't have any balconies, and for that matter, people, as far as I can see. They're ghosts behind glass, they're tigers in cages, though not half as bold, or in the mildest sense, courageous. Each of their security windows is blinded like an oracle. Shuttered like their hearts so they're entirely inimplorable. And beneath their gaze, the streets down below, with people wandering like strangers, like sons in their father's clothes. They want to feel like they're slightly more important than the thousand other faces they'd promptly ignore, so well, well. They're like dogs, in the sense that they only care about seeing extensions of themselves, and at a drop of a hat, will find the world pretentious. Like walking dogs that only stop to find other dogs, we're wading though a culture and social setting so waterlogged. Like damp fur, that discomfort in touching it. Knowing it'll come off on your hands and stick. This city feels in a sense like a sick pet. With fur coming off in sad clumps, but he doesn't know he's sick yet. I once had to watch my dog swell like it was pregnant, but he was a boy, and it was cancer, so we sent him to the vet to see what we could do. The best option was to put him down in a day or two. Is that the same prescription for the world? In a sick way, I hope so. Because severing the sick will always be the best way that I know.

Not as much in coexistence as causality, two things often can't exist without the other. Like life and death, being and not, like a child creates the mother. You can hardly claim to be a sea when not locked in by land, keeping in mind the ebbing waves that break apart the shores which understand that salt water and old wood are likes blood and bloated marrow. That the ripples caressing the mossy rocks hardly ever attract stares, no. A poetic, photographic, artistic view is usually what it takes to be displayed to you. In a form that exists within a frame, but my eyes only see about one hundred ninety degrees, so I guess it'll still be the same. I just want you to listen. To the frogs which glide across the rocks that glisten. Smell, the Hells in which the mushrooms grow and dwell in decay. A sense of death and rot surprisingly okay. An end to which the means are fit to spend time admiring. With a thousand synapses firing, connect the dots. Pop your joints and their locks. Walk without music. Talk without abusing it. The stock phrases and replies without trying to avoid contrived lying. Not because you're hiding your day wasn't okay, but because tact dictates that as this apathy cultivates, you can't manipulate a casual passing of friends that should end in laughing. Empty. Hollow. For the conversation won't go unless you follow this explicit script. Of 'Shut up and give it nothing'. You don't have friends, you have audiences. To talk at, and not talk to. You'd love to if you had motivation, but you don't. You have far too many reservations. Because you know a heart spilt to you would be a burden of two charts. Running both up and down, but as far as you communicate, the blankness eats the slate.

Like an animal unbound with curiosity, I'm easy to trap, easy to trick. Prone to believe in things that don't exist because I'm hopeful. Seeing the world painted dull, I so desperately want something, anything to fill the hole where there used to be wonder. Like a child woken in dream at the climax by the suns beams. Quick to extrapolate from the remembered bits, but I'm much less quick to forget it. I'm holding on. Because the proximity of the naive at one point was annoying. Happily unthinking their problems while I tried to dislodge them. But their certainty in whatever beliefs is somewhat intoxicating. Their ability to blindly accept so much at one time is tempting. You tell me to loosen up, but believe it or not, this is me attempting. So for a moment or two, I neglect to argue. I don't want to push my inescapable doubt on you, because I know for certain what it's done to me. Caught halfway between that sense of knowing better and the history of being forced apart because I won't let it go. Even when I'm not certain, I'll assert that I know. I've come to hate books for their being so set in stone while my own thoughts are prone to dissapation like snow. "I know." Those two words heard daily. Because we'd all rather see our own sinking ships as sailing.

He pulled off the highway, told his family to stay in the car as he left, but we followed anyway. Through a forest, he cut a trail, and about halfway through, it became apparent he didn't know the way. But as much to his surprise as mine, he found his destination. A clearing with a thick tree, his expression fascination. Carved into the wood some thirty years ago were three sets of initials, hard to see around the things that have grown. It felt for a second like my brother and I were the moss, growing over something he clearly had lost down the way. Maybe the other initials kept it closer to their homes than he did, and in a sense, it's true. He moved away to change his life and hold his kids, unlike the others who stayed somewhere I've come to consider a home, though provinces away, and seldom have I flown for the sake of feeling whole again. Instead, I'm seeing relatives I don't want to offend by saying they're nothing compared to the air. Prairies may have hidden beauties, but it can't compete with the energy there in the East. Whatever is in there air is humming poems as it's hooking like my father's knife did in the tree when he was young. I just wish people considered more the hooks buried deep in everyone.