Flash Fiction – “Every other Soldier” – 300 words – 9/28/2022

She tells my pain to wait. As if water can fall after I’ve twisted a knob to a faucet. This heart, twisted, knotted in its infinite veins, spread like tree roots to an age of a tree that has already fallen.

These eyes have gained flashes. All those empty rooms, filled with one more hollow scream for measured ceilings. They were meant for a measureless sky. They were with rain dances performed in minds that waited until their own bouquets had wilted, pleading for raindrops when needing sunlight.

What can I requisition for a love that falls behind? Whose bullet can I dodge when an ending has been written, on pages soaked with tears that never quenched me? Not one word spilled will bring relief. Not one sigh can flip my story’s back cover closed. For I cannot close these eyes, without seeing her world on fire.

Entertained by laughter. Saved by madness. These hands tremble under this weight of an absence I hold close with all those phantoms. Their limbs pass through, with their path to embrace me finding a different way. How does she know this? Telling me that a pain must wait, for another day that will end another life. A noose already creeps up my shoulders. A hand has already turned my body around to face those fuses, those sparks, able to ignite a future to be identical with my history. I want to hear her words, from a different mouth. I wish to see her tears be lifted from a different well, without such contamination.

I walk on, having clouds overhead with rays of light aiming light like sniper rifles for both sides of my temples. To both sides where forgiveness can come, or it can be repressed, when we pray with a sadness, inside, to never revive, or we beg for it to be blanketed with soil above those dead.

Poetry Collection (Tears and Later Years) – Poem 1/100 – “Pull your Pale Flag”

Wide letters.
We were holding on,
while recognizing.
Those shapes. These marks.
They have stuck like glue
to these gray haunts
in the washing blue.

Worded. Remembered.
Burning ships that tag along.
Fated nooses
that hold up bottled necks.

Stored messages for the sea.
Stored letters that go unseen.

Who shall hear our screams?
Who shall worship our stars,
put out near firelight
where we ignite another rose?

Lost ship in a storm, motioning on.
Burns on, trickling our ashes close.
Rediscovered scenery
on a page no one, but us,
remembered.

We pause, once more,
to glance into empty eyes.
Cold glares consumed in flares.

We read one more letter,
before shedding our sadness
overboard.

Another message
scrawled into a pale flag.
That same ship,
pulling its pale flag
same as a blank page.

Who had realized?
We had relived.
We are revived,
in memories that survive.

Psychology – “Why Mental Illness Symptoms do not Return from Tapering off Medication” – 2/8/2022

“It’s as though those mental health symptoms were never there, and you were on a drug that tapped into the placebo effect. You were experiencing a hard time. You were desperate. You reached out, and what you brought back was relief in a bottle with a special child’s lock on it. The cap. When you opened it, your reality was never a thing to experience. You gave full trust to those who were never interested in you, only what is wrong with you.”

– Modern Romanticism

They always say this:

Your Bipolar, Schizophrenic, Schizoaffective, ADD, ADHD, OCD, PTSD, Depression, Anxiety… “might return if you truly wish to go through with getting off this medication.”

They say this, the NP’s, the Psychiatrists, and Psychologists, though none of them comprehend the red flags. How can a person who studies the mind not realize what affects the mind? They offered you a bottle with what you believed, in your heart, was a cure to your traumas, among all other mental afflictions. The red flags, being the very essence in not being able to understand reality. Not understanding reality is the place of mental illness. Being lost in darkness is the place of depression. Being afraid of the future is the place of anxiety. Then, since such is the case, those red flags consist of not being able to tell apart the differences in these symptoms. Whether the symptoms of withdrawal to getting away from what has been perceived to be a reality of a cure, to the symptoms of mental illness that was understood to be an absence of reality; the realities are always there, as our nihilistic endeavor to deny them only places us further lost.

If symptoms to withdrawal is the same as the symptoms to mental illness, what absence of reality is different? The answer is these realities are the same. A medicated individual has withdrawn from the craving for something out of their desperate design, to then have the same mindset for craving something perhaps more recognizable. Even if the latter has been perceived as more “recognizable”, the former had shown an exact amount of perception to recognition as the latter. The former scenario showed the mentally ill individual comprehending life from a perception of pain. Then, the perception of pain was made into a sameness of an exact scenario through the latter, where that individual has perceived themselves being dragged apart from reality.

Withdrawal symptoms and mental illness symptoms are the same, though the prescribers won’t note that. They will not give the warning to their patients that tapering from the medication will bring on the same symptoms as their mental illness. Perhaps the reason for this is to not confuse the patient on reality. If reality is shown to them that the medication is truly an addiction, they might comprehend that their own refusal to acknowledge themselves, not merely what is wrong with themselves, has been what began the mental spiral. As reality is meant to be a depiction of what is real, factors such as pain are alongside this. However, mental illness is known to have symptoms of pain related to the patient’s absent perception of reality. If life experiences pain for what is real, then how can mental illness be a part of this? As in, how can mental illness be a real thing to an individual experiencing it? Moreover, this is the same relation in wanting to extract the perceived need of a medication, also a reality to the patient for its intent as a cure, to whoever might believe their mental illness has been a reality for them.

Having those withdrawal symptoms as the same symptoms as mental illness shows that both are the absence of a perception to reality. If a patient underwent symptoms of Schizophrenia, Bipolar, etc., then such pain belonged to an absence of reality. The same pain is applied to withdrawing from the medication, one that was perceived to be the gateway to reality for the individual as they thought of such as a cure to what was real as their agony. All this is meant to state that there is no reality besides the individual, not to what is wrong with the individual. All absences are the place for mental illness, though as a practitioner to their patient will find that a resource, such as medication, could replace what is missing to said patient, there will be from this only a prolonged miscomprehension of reality.

Poem – “Which Direction is Right?” – Modern Romanticism – 1/25/2022

Off track,
behind the times
of everyone else’s smiles.

Fill me with blue,
remind me of the sea.
Elevate me with the moon
while the sun goes to sleep.
I can run around,
toss around
while the earth jogs its mile.

Into November,
where eyes can remember
the speech that told a pattern
in the leaves.
The fallen, scattered.
As those swept within
were against the grain,
were sun-blocked,
were in pain.

A pair of lips
brought me clues.
A set of arms
carried me warmth.
I fled into the sunrise to replace it,
to answer to the eclipse.

What road do I follow?
Which path will not appear
so ruined and shallow?

Poem – “To a Heart you Ignore” – Romanticism – 6/3/2021

Tame the position
Of one beast who bottled
His sunshine in the hourglass,
While time kept us frozen
To observe the past.

You were to the world
All it aimed to ignore,
All death desired
To give birth to,
Upon the murky shore.

You live
To keep singing
Your pain, for the wilderness
Where isolation grows heaviest
Upon leaves made of your disease.

Why choose to forget?
Why choose to regret
The simple moments
That mattered more
Than any field with which
Your tremoring hands burned?

I loved among the apocalypse.
I showered the content of a heart,
As the world gave gifts of meteors,
Pleasant in the nighttime terrors.
I stoked what would remain,
As you led on, in pain.

Deep beneath your feet,
A heart lays shattered, in crystal dust.
Can you see your reflection
In each wasted fragment?

Poem – “Stillness in your Veins” – Romanticism – 6/3/2021

Open heart
To the petty gusts
Brought forth
From the heartbroken surge,
To the relief that divides
The heart from grief.

There is water in your veins,
Bleeding out for the pain
We both were singing for,
Beneath the immaculate bedsheets.
With faces heavy in the weariness,
While eyes shower grace
Upon hands made of metal.

I choose to hold you
Out of all other options,
For one last time to dip these feet
In the everlasting scar.

I walk among
Your life, for one fairytale
Moment in the damned
Meadows of your mind.

While cradles hold
Infant and winter’s cold,
I turn towards the summer
With a message
Contained in the few droplets
Left, to escape for.

Poem – “Each Tear to Hide” – Romanticism – 5/28/2021

Among the waves,
Tears collect, to recede
From the glass,
From the mirror’s boundary
Frosted by breath,
Frozen through
In the silence of death.

Among all
Countless beats of a heart,
Veins will shatter
Along with
Each moment to matter.

While eyes hide
Behind the tear-stained hands,
While one wilted form
Cannot stand
Upon a barren shore.

Unable to see,
Unable to breathe
A second more,
While the afterlife
Closes upon me.

Naked in the winter,
Clothed in the summer,
Smiles are the panic
As truth is the fallen leaf.

Quote – “As Pain Forces you to Grow” – 2/9/2021

“Do not keep your hold upon the droplets. For they are meant to water the roots. Do not let anger, through the fear that burns what is dead within yourself, consume the wilderness meant to thrive. As pain may be the thorns, everything beautiful is the rose. You might find the stem unwieldable, as a tightened grasp will hurt. Let it. Let the blood stream down the long rope of green. Then, let your tears let spread the roots, at your feet.”

– Modern Romanticism

Quote – “The Man who Cries” – 2/5/2021

“No man will cry over sentimentality. He will, however, weep when the boulder during the present, buries him further into the earth. The guilt, harbored upon his shoulders, docked as a ship within his heart, overloaded with the cargo of self-disappointment, offers him the curse of blame for what he could not protect. Competence is, to a man, his own pride. As he kneels over the ruin of what was once so beautiful, so gorgeous, there comes an innate sense of remorse to swallow his senses, and to ever be the last understandable thing to come embrace him.”

– Modern Romanticism

Philosophy – “The Differences Between Love and Trust” – 2/3/2021

“What comes first? Love or trust? It must be love, because we cannot trust everyone.”

– Modern Romanticism

Does one know why the person commits suicide? It is objectively an act of self-punishment. Since it is that both love and death are gifts, due to that life cannot see when either will arrive, the person who commits suicide has chosen death for what punishment is, as opposite from forgiveness. A depressed person cannot understand how to forgive themselves. Were they to figure out how to do so, they’d be cleansed of every fault they know of themselves, to begin, once again. Life can predict its own self, being life. Though, life cannot predict love nor death. As in, life can perhaps predict when someone else will arrive, though it cannot predict the things no one knows when will come. It would be that the person who decides to end their life by their hand, knows themselves, comprehends what their preference is, as they need no one else to gift that punishment.

We state to a person, whom we know, that we will not “spoil the surprise” of their birthday present. That is a sameness to the reference of “prediction” for life knowing life, and then of one person knowing another for their preferences. Though, being of everything related to a gift, is always in what is not expected to arrive. Though, we are comforted by how we know, ourselves, that the gifting person knows us, to know our preferences. As another example by way of the preference, two lovers, during a session of sexual intercourse, comprehend easily what satisfies the other. These lovers know each other. They have learned the other’s flaws, to have accepted them. They have learned what brings pleasure, to have introduced it.

Trust is built. Same with skills. Same with respect. Knowledge is built or accumulated, because “to know” resides upon “to trust” in the same manner. The way humans are limited is not by how they love nor by how they die, though by how they live. Preciousness unto life is a sure mentality that protects those who are deemed by love to not die, as we shield the beating heart. However, through our naivety, comfort enables us to believe that a person, whom we love, cannot ever die. We forget that they might die, due to the comfort that love brings. It is through love that protects life, while it is through death that punishes the life that had no protection nor a way to forgive what was a fault.

We cling to who loves us, because of how they know us, and because they have seen our faults. Any person who has trusted another, cannot forget what they have seen. For of love, and then of trust, there is nothing more incapable to drain from our memory, than of who was once nothing in our lives. Of them becoming a form of significance, was only because we have seen what would not be revealed to anyone else. Of the things seen, are of faults now trusted within our memory bank to never misuse. It is because they were presumably placed in proper hands. If love came from nowhere, then it is the same for the earth we stand upon. What builds, is trust, is the life as the support that keeps another standing upon that earth, to keep walking. To keep their life moving forward, is only ever in the representation for who knows another, comprehends that faults cannot be what brings death of its unending gift of punishment.

Poem – “Reversing Tears” – Romanticism – 1/30/2021

Track your swum miles
Back to the reliving love,
Watered by the storms
We drew our arms through,
Together,

Keeping smiles on the pages
We turn,
Together, in a hold.

We hold history
Ever on page one,
Finding love in unending tears
Backtracked on the first mile
We ever sought to cross.

Oh, love,
Keep smiling
With waters to your naked heart
Leaning in reverse,
Falling upward.

Beauty
Closes curtains,
Nestled thus in the bed,
Not the coffin,
As coins drop from your cheeks,
Chancing this love,
Startled of you,
The bird from above.

We gamble
Forever, by the side
Of ever-growing storms,
Purging our happiness
For a time.

We bleed
To collect Heaven’s raindrops,
Arranging a smile upon a portrait,
Keeping truth decadent,
Precious and believed.

Romantic Dialogue – “How I Never Gave up” – 1/21/2021

A: Oh, beloved. Was I always your only mistake?

B: As just the very one who abandoned me, the only regret who has come to be both truest and most false.

A: You regret so much, of so much abandonment, though I led you through your darkest trials.

B: You led me, to then bring me towards my ruin.

A: Was I too much?

B: You were enough, though it became enough for me to take no more of it.

A: The abandonment?

B: You loved, though you abandoned me when the tasks were done, when the darkness was over. When you did leave, the darkness returned. You led me towards that, though I never did the same unto you.

A: Was it because you never led me?

B: It was because I always trusted you.

A: I’ll not ever give up. I was merely a man without anymore purpose. It was not the darkness to make fade, that ever gave me purpose. It was to embrace the light, being you, that I held onto. I wanted you. I needed you. I bled the darkness away, so that I might find you, the light. What was I? Never your light. I seemed to have only erased the darkness, to become it, myself.

B: If you’ll never give up, then why did you give me up?

A: I make excuses. It is why.

B: What is your excuse?

A: To never see myself, in the reflection. I saw you, and only ever you. All was for your sake. All was never for mine. I make excuses.

B: These are your excuses?

A: These are my pains, that I suppose you won’t comprehend.