Procrastination

A conceited delusion of empowerment through temporary satisfaction, resultant in later strain;
an unintended feeling of humanness.

Dimanche

Misty air envelops each movement
Skipping carefully from tile to tile
Choosing the lesser of the ice bricks
   on the way out
Substitute steam and towels for morning attire

Turn the knob and wait, for the turbulence to begin
Hissing and clanking--a morning monster awakens
Elegantly pause the picture to reset the playlist
   that fills the room with drums and strings
Dancing with the speakers, the coffeepot rises
   to tempo with the beat
Shaking and whistling, screaming perfection
A fresh cup joins the scene, along with a glint
   of bright winter dawning
Aromas of comfort, joined with circadian serenity

Disembodiment

[Three years old. This poem started a need to write]

Cackling winds and rustling leaves motion past the portal to an external world,

            Awakening the inner mongrel from its child-like slumber,

            Tearing each sentiment from its coupling utopia

Remove myself from this relaxing, recumbent rest

Make no haste warming bony fingers over 2 putrid smelling candles—as preparation for the trial

that lies ahead

Ease into these instances; …freeze, rather, seize them for yourself—

Amidst the solemn outer atmosphere a Corvidae shrieks out,

            Alerting the day of its eminent dominance

So I glare out into its hellish glass eyes and…, it plummets from the tree—dead

            With sudden relief

And I transpire—again

14 times oblivion will shroud my maniacal mind…today

Tomorrow never arrives, a Penrose triangle remains uniquely impossible, and

            …time stands still on Thursday

Yearning to shatter the mold that is every day routine, you march to the front line with Dreams

and Emotions and Collective spirits at your back, only to see the enemy—Father Time,

Mother Nature, the Angel of Death, and Cousin Chaos

Defeated without contact, yet all is left intact

you drag yourself out from under the mattress of misery

Post dinner party, you host a Ménage à trois with neighbor palliative and sister loneliness.

Longing to live like King, Gandhi, or even Churchill

            we adapt idiosyncrasies of addict musicians, ditsy celebrities, and spineless politicians

but denial claws up through the fissures in modern autonomy and the cannons blast their

defensive projectiles, separating the boys from men and the ideal from reality

Thus far, nothing that can’t be replaced has perished, no one that grows distant sits missed,

            and nowhere recently traveled prevails in our memories 

[This poem, I feel, fits in with my previous position on my writings, described further in "my attempt at a stream of consciousness". A view in which, as I see it now, is an attempt to be able to simplistically write something profound by first beginning with the opposite--shallow words and meaningless phrases from which greater depth 'appears' by use of my highfalutin vocabulary and disconnected imagery.]

Chem Poem

Au-en  BaNa₂(s)  Ar,

now  I  LaC  K.

Golden bananas are gone,

now I lack potassium

Perpetual Host

Locked away in a cell, wallpapered with Star Wars posters and thick eggnog paint

A jail from which I could travel freely as commander of the keys, a perpetual host

in my own home. Frequent visitors come and go; friends seeking enjoyment,

peers of pleasure and mirth. Pleased, they stay for a spell, and oft remain past welcome

Guests of mine: eat and drink and laugh; annoyed when I tire of entertaining.

Companions with minute awareness of the ticking clocks of their placation limits

Personal relaxation is their boredom—never content with a company of one

Chef, tutor, housemaid; bro, teammate, weekend chaperon

Trapped among all too familiar strangers

Overrun with no place to seek refuge, or peace of mind

These festive giants wander back to apartments and beds more comforting then

recessed couches and stale basement air,

only to return again—freshened, and energized to restart the cycle

and interrupt their uninteresting lives,

confining me to a cage, built by walls but fortified with ignorant friendship

smothering the source of satisfaction

A hideaway turns to quicksand and solace becomes a distant dream

Infographing

just a black cloud inside my head; a tumbleweed of thoughts

.coming to terms with satellite friends and routine perspectives

re-cycling through the cataloged index cards of personalities,

finding those stored deep away, from past scholastic ages.

each multi faced complex, illusionist, and trite disposition,

revealed after sophomoric levels of education.

gone to this place, for other reasons, but intent to leave behind such singularities

reached the doors and pushed past the gates

  to social pyramids and woven networks

infographically, each persona can be placed and linked to the expected groups.

interesting are those familiar facades of facetiousness and fraudulent natures

each exists, and forever will, in an ambient plane of coinhabitants

while internally mapping and organizing each uniquely common character,

  curiosity levels surface.

in a society--or yet, an atmosphere clustered around higher learning--

  individuality becomes scarce.

like an outfit, many customize their potential attributes by role modeling

  and selectively shopping

for the piece of another, found to be most enticing.

a desire--not for discovery of the overall tessellation,

  but for unearthing the true selves--sprouts.

following a checklist and slowly building to the culmination of reducing people to a phrase:

    blithe, childish phony;  

    narcissistic douchebag;  

    independent, submissive flirt;

mentally linking each characteristic trait to the owner,

realization occurs. that, aside from the few translucent masks most see through, 

few people identify

and categorize the true essence of a person.

A fragment

[One from the past...]

in yesterday's world i died and woke up this morning. everything progresses, uninterrupted

and forevermore. life doesn’t seem to break out from the television-esque framework

until you find that “time-stopper” and soulful embrace of happiness. holding on—just breathing in, and

out—to the peace feels more than satisfying; but then, of course, self-pity seeps through the pores.

i've tried to cleanse the cracks and lie back; somehow, though, stress manages to chain

itself to my wrist. burdened in a sea of similarity, it pains me that i cannot openly express

these feelings to another. for one, claiming that i have such problems leads some [of those persons

left over in the pool of people who show a potential interest] to instinctively argue that they:

have it worse; know what I’m talking about; and (continuing in this line of psychological

order) --because it's insignificant to them--that [my 'problems'] are no big deal.       

now seems an ideal time to clarify that i have no expectations of the reader to follow this

thought but to even actually understand it, because if that were possible for them (you?,

someone,...) then my whole stream would relate to the sole topic i've been passionately

condemning for being so...   and for another, how the minority of those remaining take it

upon themselves to act like they care, implore themselves as help, then completely give up

when i proclaim my 'fine'-state-of-mind; thus assuming that i either: am fine (you missed my

serious sarcasm) or that am lying and just wish no help. one such thing i desire is that someone won't

choose one of many options and, rather, pursue a mysterious, unidentified possibility and seize the

opportunity to care about something unselfish. anyway, maybe my problems are just so.

they could just be an over-exaggeration of nothing more than a commonality that i construe as an

unfathomable wrong so that i too may suffer internally and have an explanation to this perpetual

dissatisfaction.

Staring; Up

Staring up, holding a conversation with a light fixture.  Sharing your thoughts while it lets you read it. How the light from the windows nearby casts perfect shadows, completely opposite the highlighted arcs. Thinking, not thinking at all, just looking for insight. The moment when you feel yourself go. On the edge of consciousness and sleep. Unable to tell when it will set in. you continue to keep focus, maintain eye contact. Then your focus dims. You start blinking more than usual. Your mind wanders because you let it, you know you couldn’t leash it if you wanted. You are past that point now,  drifting. Supremely ephemeral, all surrounding events. Only you, and your thoughts—thoughts about nothing, about you thinking about thinking, about conversations of you explaining yourself and what you are trying to do here to people who very well will never come by or ask such things; but you digress, and speculate, creating a dream reality of all the possible scenarios that can fit into your brief schedule. And suddenly those thoughts aren’t thoughts anymore. For they aren’t controlled by a thinker—they hold the power. What once was your seed, your brain-child is now the puppeteer, allowing you to go on believing that your thoughts are still your own. Your eyes get heavier, blood slowly fills your head, as it lies flat and un-elevated on a communal couch. One second—or so you estimate, because time is irrelevant and undeterminable when left to the solitude of one’s own psyche, regardless of how tranquil this place actually fares in comparison to the often immeasurably hectic life of social reality. For so often the mind is a more chaotic place, largely more bustling with overlapping paths of individual identities. So then, here you are, for I once was. Lying down, staring up. Feeling yourself fall asleep, not knowing when it happen, only that it is inevitable. Several times you catch yourself, opening your eyes wider to make sure that the image—which by now has burned itself into your brain is really the light that you see and not a memory—for when you no longer see it, but picture it, you are gone. Your eyes are shut and dark. Your mind has wandered too far.  But you haven’t reached that point yet, you’re still lying there snapping yourself back every chance your get. You try to resist it. So that you will know when it actually come about. You want to catch it in the act, but for that to happen, you must be vigilant, and awake.  And there it goes again, some distant part of your brain triggers a thought, one you did not initiate. And this thought is the start of a dream.  Not quite but similar. It happened, your eyes clouded over and  you transition from thinking about thinking and seeing a light housing on the ceiling to thinking you see the same light—a trick of misdirection—and seeing your thoughts as actions ever so seamlessly. Eyes closed, head slightly throbbing from your general choice of positions to begin this session, and your mind is gone.  

Until a noise, a door slam, footsteps, any sound—and not one you might expect—snaps you back and you’re awake; lost with no memory of how you drifted off and how your wandered so aimlessly astray. Because now you see the light again, still dark, because no one feared to walk past and turn the switch on as you lie there staring at the ceiling. And you wonder, how it happened, and how you could have thought that first stray thought that triggered this event. But you can’t. memories are unreliable. Especially when you are on the verge of sleep. So you say to yourself that you will replicate the entire scenario, start from scratch and be more aware this time. But you can’t. you are too awake now. That brief sleep, probably no more than a few seconds, set you into a relaxed state. Rejuvenated and refreshed when your finally snapped back. It’s over, a lost opportunity, blown because you spent it napping in a state of subconscious. And now you have a headache, from all the blood slowly accumulating in your skull. Fitting, because as you look out the window you see a grey sky and a grayer world. 

let's elaborate on how i feel about minute elaboration

It’s funny how true certain statements you make actually are; for example when I previously mentioned that I tend to interject other thoughts in order to refrain from losing them from my memory and consequently I often forget the original train of thought I had started. Well, seemingly this will always be true as in the second paragraph of my last entry it happened. I had mentioned the irony of how few read my writing and meant to also discuss the flip side of those who do but became fixed on a new thought. So as a continuation of the paragraph that was intended to be longer than 3 sentences (excluding the massive sub-thought in the middle), I shall pick up with where I left off—not that you care or can do anything about it.

Not to create a negative connotation of myself, there are people who do read my work and comment. Those who read and do not leave any indication of having read it cannot be included since I am neither a mind reader nor cyber geek who can track IP addresses and pinpoint who viewed what and when in relation to my Facebook¹. So, I continue, yet again, with the first reflection. Those who comment comment insufficiently. Feedback is exactly just; I don’t want or even care to know your opinion of my work. Nonetheless, that is also completely untrue. A remark that says ‘wow, that’s deep’ or ‘I really like this one’ with no elaboration or explanation of those opinions holds little value in my eyes. But likewise comments do support my poetic intent—that is, to assume an enlightened and profoundly methodical insight on personal attitudes. Though it never works so perfectly, it usually winds up as a fabrication of collective ideas that give the impression of being philosophical by its unclear analogies and heightened language. I know how a poem should look and sound and that is why I can write them. I can twist the simplest of feelings into complex stanzas that underneath are shallow, hollow suggestions of thought. They say we are our best critiques. Well I don’t refute that; conversely, I wish to protect my authenticity as a writer despite my declaration of falsities, because in my fabrication of inflated imagery there lies intent, meaning, and execution of style. So if those don’t constitute enough as poetry, then your perception is skewed. The imaginary ideas which I present² are totally real and felt/thought at the time being written or else they would cease to exist in words [on paper] (electronic paper). Essentially, I needn’t explain myself to you any further. Quite frankly, having done so much thus far makes me feel like id been trying to lecture a bunch of five year old children, who lack the attention span or intellect to comprehend no matter how many times I repeat myself.

My strongest desire (in a current sense) is to be critiqued and analyzed, probed and experimented upon, identified and destroyed of credibility and the unjustly self acquired placement upon a pedestal. That is what I truly hope for when I write, not responses like “I really enjoy your work”, which means “I like it or at least say I do because I’m somehow jealous that you can create such great writing and I can barely rhyme but I really don’t understand it at all”. I merely, simply request for an equal to study me (straightforwardly my poetry but more so a deep hope for actually analyzing me as a person). What would truly be great is if someone was far beyond that of adroit observations and ultimately understood me or provided some aspect that I have not been able to consider when I ponder the question of my self-identity. But I will just as soon settle for some attempt at critique and feedback.

¹ I want to take this footnote to stress what a big waste of time Facebook truly is. I suppose I am just not with it when it comes to social networking or any sense of social up-keeping for that matter. Possibly my dislike for the site has to do with my lack of need for it. I have a few close friends and beyond that there are friendly associations [that rarely go further than outside of school] and then acquaintances. So given those social levels, it seems odd and unnecessary to “friend” those people who I won’t talk to anyways and neither would they consider the same. Additionally, there is so much needlessness on Facebook. Aside from photo sharing and info relaying between groups or clubs, I don’t need or care to know about your personal life, or that the new Facebook layout sucks, or even some of the mindless postings people have.

² Read “PRE-sent” not “pres-ENT”. Necessary to point out because it correlates perfectly to one of my pet peeves—when people pronounce words wrong, mainly when they enunciate the other word in the heteronym set. One particular example that sticks out is someone who says “pro-CESS” when referring to someone “PRO-cess”[ing] someplace.

my attempt at a stream of consciousness

I don’t know how to write about myself and my experiences, only those things which I pretend to feel. Poetry, as one may call it—though I feel it is justifiably an overstatement in the least—seems to be that such outlet. It has become for me a safety net of undisclosed feelings overtly expressed for the world to read and consequently acknowledge that there lies some deeper meaning or torment within. I write to pose as a writer. a poem becomes a new identity of self evaluation and unleashed emotions that spurt forth the words that so cleverly disguise that which I feel, wish I felt, and write about—as if the words and, more so, myself, were being psychoanalyzed by experts whose sole desire was to help solve the mystery that is Shaun Henry—those things which I neither feel nor of which I truly have an authoritative stance to say I feel. So, in bare essence, I write in hopes that one (someone, in fact anyone) may read and assume [a fairly well educated] opinion based on the false impressions that I offer like free samples in a supermarket. However, ironically, hardly anyone ever explores my works and so my attempts at recreating my identity by altogether presenting a different façade fail miserably with the words that form them. In a roundabout way, I have said nothing pertinent. My intent [here in this paragraph] was to describe that what I write is not untruth but a preconceived perversion of ideas and thoughts constructed into a structure of deeper meaning and mysticism achieved by ambiguous words, implicational phrases, and clichéd statements that serve no purpose other than to give air to such intellectual reactions by the reader. That is not to say that I do not hold any or all of the emotions and feelings when I write. I just write so to assume a more developed influence on the subject matter and to vaguely, yet vividly detail the narration in my writing. So no, I would not consider my works (and I say works loosely because otherwise I would leave impressions that what I write is notable in an academically superior sense) poetry. Maybe they could be classified as poems in the least sense, as they are poems by the arbitrary definition of a poem, but not poetry. The inspiration, cultivation and creation of each of my writings are poetry in itself. The craftsmanship in its laughably paradoxical exhibition is poetry. The message is merely nonexistent if not totally feigned, over exaggerated, and partially presented, but those are the things for which I am driven to write. I enjoy the painstaking effort at fully forming an idea or emotion into an executable stream of phrases and coherent logic that all over has a “poetic” shape and reasonable cohesion.

The pitiful--inthaticanonlyhopepitywouldbethecommonfeelinghere--thing is that my writings are overlooked and generally unread, granted they are only posted on (1) my “blog¹” and (2) on Facebook². I know not the reasoning behind this as trying to analyze reasons for individual discretion would be quite lengthy. I could do it and noticing (the noticing being only done be me as I’m writing because quite frankly for someone to pick up on this point—that I interrupted midthought³—would be too high of an expectation. However, I am not condescending or implying that to pick up on such a thought is impossible, merely unlikely, especially considering I hardly understand my thought process without trying to pinpoint its schematics in a disorganized paragraph such as this one becauseitisdifficulttomap without using a flowchart of some sort—and I am not doing so, evident if you regard the fact that I am writing a narrative of sorts. Apologies for the overall chaos of this writing style. I will eventually find my rhythm and perfect a more followable style. Nonetheless, in my defense, I am writing my thoughts and it seems rational to write them as they are being thought. And now back to the other half of the sentence that I started many lines ago…) how I haven’t dismissed thought, clear in that I felt it important enough to include (this last part inserted for those who hadn’t noticed what I had but now can understand what I thought^4,5); maybe in the next installment of “purging my vaulted psyche” will I discuss my beliefs as to why certain people make certain choices concerning whether to read a note I post of Facebook or not.

¹ I put “blog” in quotation marks, as such, because I personally believe that it does not fulfill the criteria of my envisioning of the definition of a blog. Though, it serves the purpose of a blog less the personal stories and unnecessarily long critiques of trivial culture references. If not semi obvious that was partially how I perceive how the content of blogs constitutes. Additionally, my blog is bland and depraved of nothing but my poetic writings (presently speaking, as this entire synopsis of the ONLT THING I COULD THINK OF TO WRITE ABOUT, when I actually wanted to write about my life buteverthingelseistartedtotypeimmediatelysucked, is going to be posted—and probably is—if this is being read, for the first time, other than by myself as I type, by someone).

² Second [implied but still very needed to be stated], I note that I felt an unavoidable urge to capitalize the ‘f’ in Facebook—an urge I imagine most other order compulsive users, who aren’t also some of the idiots I have seen Facebook (now a verb), also are stricken by.

³ I tend to do that—interject other thoughts mid-thought—very frequently, even in regular conversation. Otherwise, and I have proven it to myself, I will forget the second thought that fit perfectly, in some instances, in the middle of the first conversation. Likewise, in my attempts at trying to refrain from forgetting my additional inputs, I forget the original topic of conversation. In short, asides are distracting but I do them anyway.

⁴ I hope.

⁵ Sometimes I lose myself as well and it is just best to move on. Nothing you have read is that important and worth rereading just to try and understand. Plus, it would be easier to ask me what I meant; me being a terrible teacher, you would wind up further confused and more pissed.