Comfort Dismays

To undress with the eyes
Is one of the agonies I ought to despise
And so often do, until my comfort dismays
And any attempt then to avoid such a haze
Will place my head into an impossible maze
And set my soul and my heart ablaze.
And so perhaps though the volley of lies
I would dare to let the deception then die
And undress her with much more than my eyes.

Tires

Send me down that road
Past the cross between one and the other
Where the cell service ensures I will never linger
And the sky is wide and bright
Not with the specks of useless stars
But the whole of the city.

Chill me to the bone with the endless memories
Friend after friend, lover after faceless lover
The deepest moments held in this city
Shushed like a secret among the trees
And the high-speed concrete's tendency
To take you wherever you heart desires.

Remind me of the times of innocence
That once derived from the lakes and ponds
But instead leaked themselves out
In the gas stations and coffeeshops
That dare to house the intellecut
Of the few of us left among the fires.

Lay my machine out among the speed
And I will give new meaning to eighty
As I see between the concrete and grass
That God watches this night, and others
While the sun goes down on another day
And my life drowns into the city.

Lost

It is hard to articulate whether
We should consider ourselves immature
Or certain
Perhaps lonely
But never, ever
Unfeeling

It is harder still to pinpoint
The spot at which
The nape of her neck
Mixes with the alarm bell in my head
And the uneasy feeling that someday
The world will actually grow up.

But the absolute hardest
Is the vision of perfection:
Romance and magic all blurred together
In a musical and literary climax
Entirely feasible
But never, ever

Found.

A Truth

"The soul of a man under Socialism"*
Is the same as a man that would try
To take the great namesake of nationalism
And turn it all into a lie.

*Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Park

Somewhere between

The perfection of the weather
The money-soaked trees
The fluorine of the water
The young girl’s birthday party
The rows of shiny cars
The standardized sandwiches
The innocence of the children
The flat arch of the hill
The whir of technology, yet
The unnatural quiet

I see a prison.

Intellectually-charged environments

I am blessed with a very high-variety undergraduate experience. Professors from all kinds of abstract and concrete fields participate in my education, and as much as I sometimes lack the mental fortitude to take all the information offered to me to heart, I am immensely glad that, in many of these classrooms, I am blissfully stimulated.

Unfortunately, the issue with being fully engaged is rarely the teacher itself, but my own inhibitions. If we trace the root of this academic stumbling block of sorts, I find myself with the need to articulate what I may have finally confirmed to myself as what I will now call an intellectually hostile environment.

An academically hostile environment does not specifically imply rivalries or inter-personality conflict, though these are certainly contributing factors. A more impersonal and egocentric complex is what I consistently see, especially in classrooms of equal intellect level, and especially among talented peers as well as myself. Quite simply, it is the discomfort that results from sharing information or opinions when the pupil in question carries full knowledge of the intellectual ‘competition’ occurring during any kind of forum setting (often a classroom). It is a fear of appearing unworthy or unfitting within the environment itself.

Conversely, an intellectually stable environment would be descriptive of a classroom or social network in which the inhabitants tend to recognize an intellectual-or-otherwise hierarchy. The equal ground of competition is often absent from these environments, and the resulting displacement between those who excel and those that do not often focuses the conceptual classroom upon the material being covered and not the power struggle of individuals. An intellectually impertinent environment, similarly, does not demand an intellectual mode of input, and may instead rely more upon work ethic and other atypical factors to determine social standing. These environments tend also to be more comfortable to all participants.

I suppose the perfect classroom environment, through this formula, would be one that embraces cultural, intellectual, and artistic diversity. A natural pecking order forms, everybody feels satisfied and fulfilled, perhaps. This not to mention the typical notion that diversity already provides large quantities of benefit in the form of additionally-diverse talents and knowledges.

An individualist, supporting an integrated classroom setting? My painful elitist tendencies are setting off gigantic alarm bells. Regardless, I have defined an environment that has plagued me in some situations for the better part of four years. That will suffice for now.

I despise this thought.

Truly, I do not appreciate in myself the fact that this may well be a portion of the truth. However, I would prefer to serve myself the honesty of replicating it, rather than living with it within me and not at least exhibiting a portion of the thought itself.

Everybody needs an enemy.

Enemy does not necessarily mean a sworn adversary-combatant, nor a rumorous and spiteful competitor. Enemy simply means a complex by which to keep one’s self sharp and engaged. And If this is the sadistic truth, then somebody ought to be disgusted, upset, or unhappy with your bubble of consciousness at all times in order to keep you sane and sound.

I most certainly do not aim this explanation at anybody specific in my life. I never would. The universality of the statement itself holds more water than any person-to-person accusation could ever bear. I merely ask the nameless reader to consider the reinforcement statement that, I certainly hope, makes my thought true.

How much less weight would that which you hold dear carry if the world around you was not in constant pursuit of destroying it?

As usual, pardon my tendency to over-poeticize the nature of our world. Just as Huxley so aptly stated in the twentieth century, I do most certainly hope this world is another world’s hell. To take the best parts of this world with me and leave the rest behind- it is my most perfect confirmation of my most fundamental deism.