Balance (an acrostic poem)

Begin your journey with the blessing of desire

Always want to experience the adventure

Live in every moment along the way

And if something bad happens, remember the end goal

Never lose sight of that.  Get up, dust yourself off and continue

Can’t make it to the end?  Then find a new spot on the horizon and go

Equilibrium in all things, except in life experience.  There seize everything

 

Image: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/80000/velka/scales-of-justice.jpg

Candy (an acrostic poem)

Confectionery overload of monumental proportions

Anxious moment of will the flowers get there, or did I send the flowers

Not remembering to get reservations and now seeing lines

Doing all this work for a corporate sponsored holiday

Yet we still celebrate Valentine’s Day

 

Image: greenelibrary.info/assets/candy-hearts.jpg

Flowing Through Time

When you are young you run with reckless abandon everywhere.  There is always something new to see and experience.  The world is so huge, and you have so much energy that you want to explode to spread yourself across everything.  You are more energetic than the time that surrounds you.  Time moves so slowly that you wonder if you are ever going to get to a point where you can do what you want, when you want to.  It’s like you found a spring on a hot day, and you play in the spurting cool water of time.  It isn’t enough water to satisfy you; to cool you completely.  You just wish there was more time to allow you to be immersed.

You reach your twenties and thirties, and you have the energy to do those things and just enough experience to try to get the most for the energy you expend.  Satisfaction from each new encounter provides positive feedback, sending you to the next one.  You wade through a stream of time.  The water pools and runs around your legs, pulling you lightly along, but you are still master of your travel.  Time can tickle you, but your energy allows you to be in the moment, and time doesn’t sweep you past it before you let it.

Now you get older and your energy level begins to decrease more.  This is a gradual decrease, so you don’t notice it at first.  Life begins to pile things up on you.  Now not everything can get done in a day, week, or year.  Family, career, and me time cry for attention, but there isn’t enough energy left to buck time.  Time begins to grow faster, picking you out of the calm part of the river and edging you towards the middle.  You hear rapids approaching.  Do you swim for shore?  Do you try to find an eddy in time that you can float in to catch your breath?  Do you try to shoot the rapids?  Time is moving faster and faster, and soon you are ditching things overboard like goals and aspirations, bucket lists, people and places that are special to you just to keep afloat and not smashed upon the rocks of midlife crisis.

You make to retirement.  You manage to ride the river to the ocean and the waves crash you in towards shore.  You realize that time has won.  It was always going to.  Your acceptance of that allows you to just enjoy floating there, bobbing on each passing wave.  It becomes fun again to frolic in time, but you know one day you’re going to be stranded on that beach at the end of life, out of time and energy.  Time will still surge in and out, but your time to ride will be over.

Depression (a 100 word diatribe)

Emptying everything out of the depths of my soul, finding the places where sorrow pools, and I try to pump that out too.  The calming feel of numbness would make me “happy”, but yet it seems the more I pour that bitter water out, the more they fill up.  Is there an end to those salty depths?  I know the simple answer, but I am past simple answers.  Simple is Saccharin.  It is artificially sweet, leaving my emotional palate overloaded and underwhelmed.    The complex is too much for my mental state right now, so I am left in purgatory. Selah

A Frosty Kind of Life

Along the way on this trip called life I decided to hitchhike along the path less traveled.  I ended up using my legs far more than my thumb, which surprised me until I remembered I had chosen the path less traveled.  Of course there was less traffic along that path.  What was I thinking?  Now I find myself weeping, covered in a pile of leaves, thinking about the road more traveled.  At least on that road I would have had cell phone coverage.  Instead I am going to die here, lost and lonely.  Damn you, Frost and your inspiring words.

Brand Recognition (a 100 word story)

I wear your brands, but I am not proud of that.  As a matter of fact I feel beaten down, owned by “the man”, you.  I work for your every whim, worried that if I don’t represent you well that I will be whipped into shape.  These brands mark me in other’s eyes.  I am singled out in a crowd.  Everyone immediately knows what kind of person I am, all because of these brands that I wear.  Are you proud of what have created?  I am a human billboard; my flesh scared with your ownership, a free man no more.

Something Different

I usually save my haiku for my other blog (drivebyhaiku.wordpress.com), but I found a haiku I had sequestered away today and I can’t hold onto it till next year.  Since I was having a small bit of writer’s block tonight, not that I tried that hard, I decided to post it here.  I hope you enjoy.

 

Halloween costumes

Looking for a scary one

Maybe Ebola

 

Three Random Thoughts

I know how to bring on the zombie apocalypse.  It is not some virus or disease, just stop the production of caffeine.

 

Children are fun house mirrors that parents get to see their reflection in.  You can learn a lot about yourself in that reflection.

 

Knowledge might be power, but only if it is actually used.  Otherwise it is wasted potential and might as well be given away.  At least someone else could get use out of it.  That is why I am a teacher.