Oh, Nine

A year ago I sat in this same crotchety old, worn leather monstrosity of a chair, with petty dilemmas fly-buzzing my innocent self into a cataclysmic oblivion of self-pity and loathing. I was a lost soul. I had just arrived back from a dream’s completion, a goals satiation, and in turn was faced with the reality that it was never enough to quell the wild things within me. Three hundred and sixty five day have passed since then. Most of them were lackluster and monontous; grinding my soul to a fine dust of mundanity, yet I persevered and arrived at the glimmer of glory that wavered within grasp. Education again imbues me with the wonderment of knowledge and challenge; heart remains stoically intact, never allowing a crack in the dam; and finally, the metamorphosis within, that sultry demon of passion and logic at constant eternal war in the purgatory of my soul, ah those incendiary bedfellows still fight for domain, for that is a fight that shall never abate.

The temptation of the 0-9 ends on this night. A child grown up not in the “eighties or nineties”, but rather what? The ten’s? The two-thousands? None of these wonky titles gives proper prominence to the decade of tumultuous living me and my generation have endured. Wreathed in the battle scars of experience, weighing heavy hearts with our penchant for rampant technological abuse, we are a spoiled, gifted, and world-changing group that rings in the “teens” of the two-thousands with an endless potential. We are the gateway to something greater, the conduit for change in this ever-shifting variable of life. As often as we berate ourselves with our beauty(for being great is condemned to vanity), we must not stay stagnant in the ashes of our failures, but rather rise into the inferno of a bleak, yet endlessly rectifiable future. I remain in these pious poet hours; half-dimmed room, and the hospital light screen reflecting my fervent, spectral visage— somewhere a skewed intellect is brewing, and finding an outlet in these words.

A year ago I was a mess of lost expectations, yet I can surmise that ‘10 shall be a more fruitful harvest for this soul. The love game is becoming clearer– illuminating its magnus opus inch by succulent inch in preparation of some ultimate epiphany. These renegade wants and needs shall continue to blur into incoherence, fueling on the manic search for desire's companion– somewhere out there our tune of loneliness is coming to an end... for the river of our dreams leads to the same pulsating pool of Amor. It won’t last forever, these infernal plights of mine, whether it be in ‘10 or ‘21, one of these forsaken years shall deem itself appropriate. I’ll meet you half-way, in this taciturn steadfastness to never relinquish control, you’ll slip in unawares one of these days and unwind it all. Never proclaiming to understand, just knowing the inexhaustible authenticity of beauty... of challenging every sentence and move I make...of never accepting anything less than the best from me...somewhere out there your seething as I do, in our failed attempts to reconcile the missing fragment. Until then the veil is lowering to a diversity of thoughts and experiences(may I not blind myself from the earnest viscera of true nirvana).

So oh nine, you treated me well, abused me some, but ultimately slapped me around enough to inject some clarity into my pompous notions of grandiosity. For that I thank you, and subsequently hate you, alas our love/hate relationship stays in tact. Oh ten, you flighty bitch, on the eve of your arrival I imagine I’ll be a similar catastrophe to the previous year, only a shade wiser, a year older, and considerably more scarred in experience. A cheers to that then; to the inevitable rollicking river of time taking another year, and brining us all along for the ride.