I Wish I Knew The World Was Grey

I wish I knew the world was grey
The night a turning lantern held by a string
A whisper the ocean
The cry of a moonlit night
The damp streets pounded into the earth,
Suffocating its worn out lungs
The wolf cry of a vagabond
The tear, a pompous shade of black
The capitalists around me laugh
As I fall down on my back
The streets are crawling, crawling
Forever towards me
And I can't escape their neon glow
And they carry, carry me far away
To places I never wished to know

From Rags

Do these clothes, or rags
Make you think
I am enlightened
Or clued into a deeper part of life?

If anything, I want you to know
That I can rip them off,
And still be the same person

If anything, I want you to know
I'm just as lost as you are

I just want you to know
You can run, jump, live please
And learn

But it's not the hat, it's how you wear it
It's not your burden, it's how you bear it.

Untitled

I want to devote my time to education
Rather than school
I want to jump and fall
To see what I can learn
To devote my time to honesty
The truth of life
To see the best minds of my generation
Even if they are destroyed by madness
They are after the same things I am
They are mostly soul
Detached from the their sacred heartbeat
The idea of the soul
Is the cancer of the body
For one destroys themselves to find it
For death to yourself
Is the ultimate enlightenment
Which is finally, truth.

Chemicals

I’m in a coffee shop. It was a particularly good day to be in a coffee shop because it was a snow day. Good coffee, good food, and a good book. High school is a good place to be in life sometimes because there still are snow days. You don’t have to go to work on those days yet because you don’t need money.

I was deep into the book I was reading when I heard a voice. It was an energetic kind of voice that seemed to demand one’s attention. I looked up. I found myself immediately attracted to the girl who belonged to the voice. I had that feeling when a little flutter begins in your heart and an unsettling in your stomach begins.

Don’t get me wrong; it was not “love at first sight” as some call it. I don’t believe in any initial feeling being called love. Love is more of a long term, self-sacrificing thing. I think people that believe in love at first sight over-indulge in their sentimental nature.

As this girl ordered her drink and sat down, I could not help but steal the occasional glance. She was, in fact, beautiful. She was short with dark hair. She looked almost Italian.

 What was strange is that there was nothing in particular to attract me to her. She was pretty. But, I see a number of pretty girls on any particular day. Maybe if she came in on a different day, or in a different way, I would not have noticed her. I wonder, sometimes, if people’s chemicals can just match at the glance of an eye. It really makes no other sense. I don’t know her, she doesn’t know me. But when I look at her, something leaps that demands my attention, and demands my action. Maybe the same thing happens when she looks at me. That can happens sometimes. Sometimes the chemicals are one sided, but sometimes they aren’t. That’s magic, if you ask me.

The girl got up and walked out the door with her friends. Maybe one day I will see her again under different circumstances. A circumstance where I can easily talk to her or find out about her. Maybe I will never see her again. For some reason, I think I will.

College Prep

“Hey! Logan right? Have a seat.” The lady motioned to a chair next to her desk.

“You probably know why I called you down. I just wanted to take some time today, talk about future plans and colleges you might be interested in. It shouldn’t take that long. Let me just find a copy of your transcript.” She shuffled through some files in a drawer by the desk.

“Here it is.” She said, handing it to me.

I focused my eyes in and out of the paper. I didn’t know what a transcript meant. Then I realized I was holding a copy of my grades in each class for every year I’ve been in high school. At the end of each year’s grade was my GPA. At the very end of the paper was my total GPA for my 9^th, 10^th, and 11^th grade years. It said I made an eighty three point five GPA. Not terrible.

“What do you want to major in?”

“Well…I want to be a writer,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“I want to be a writer.”

She seemed to mull that statement over in her mind for a bit. “Well I’m sure we can find something for you.”

She reached under her desk and grabbed a huge volume with both her hands, picked it up, and slammed it down on the desk.

“If you like to write, you will probably want to major in something like journalism or communications, and minor in writing. That will broaden your scope with potential jobs coming out of college and into the job field. Also, not many colleges around here offer writing as a major. Do you have any specific area you want to go to college?”

“Ummm, Oregon? Or maybe I’ll stay around here. I don’t know if I could pay for the tuition if I go out of the state.”

“Ok. Let me see here.”

She opened the volume, and ran her finger down a page with a large list of majors on it. She got to Journalism/ Communications, and flipped the volume to the page number it said. I saw her pass the “Writing” section of the volume while getting to Journalism/ Communications. She started writing on a slip of paper, with her finger still running up and down the page.

“With that GPA, here are some potential colleges you can get in to that offer the major you want. Oh, and the one there on the bottom is in Oregon, if you want to look in to it.”

I looked at the slip. They were average colleges. For my average grades. My sister actually went to one of them.

I walked out of the office, saying thank you with patronizing smiles she wasn’t aware of. She shut her office door, and all the papers she gave me found their way into the nearest waste basket.

Monologue

I am the good kid. The one that never gets in trouble. The one that studies late into the night. I am the kid that drives the speed limit, who only drinks alcohol when his dad lets him take a sip. I grew up in a cookie cutter suburban neighborhood. All the kids played together in those days. At least the kids in my neighborhood.

The kid across the street is my friend, or, was my friend. When I was little, I mean. Stamped on the forehead as a rebel now. When did that start? Was it in fifth grade when he told Mrs. McLanahan to go to hell? Was it in middle school, when he crushed up smarties and pretended to snort them like cocaine, and got suspended for two days? He’s a real smart, bright kid. Even if he has a bad attitude, he never harmed a soul. Hilarious too. Just all around fun guy to be around. I couldn’t have found a better person to grow up with, if I tried. And he lived right across the street before I moved to that bigger house. He's about ten minutes away now. Buuuut we stopped hanging out. Why is that? It’s not like he’s a different person. In fact, he probably changes the least out of anybody I’ve ever met. He doesn’t strive, if you know what I mean. He merely is. Who has that kind of ability? Just to be, when the world is telling you to be more. I’ve gotten caught up in that, I’d say, the “be more.” But he doesn’t. When I think about it, in my sixteen years of knowing him, have I ever actually seen him smoke pot? Why does everyone tell me that he does? If I ask him, he would most likely just chuckle and write it off as to say, “Would you be my friend anyway? Be my friend just to be my friend, even if the label and rumors came with it?” He definitely doesn’t need me though. He has far more friends than I, and I don’t need him either. I don’t fit in with his friends. He doesn’t fit in with mine; but he would take me in. He would let me hang out with him and his more popular friends, because he knows me, and likes me for who I am. How often do you find someone that truly knows you? If I meet someone tomorrow, will they, or can they, ever know me like a person I grew up with? Someone who has been with me through all the stages leading up to adulthood? We used to always find interesting things to do together. We don’t need friends, but life is better with them. And that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? We can choose our friends, not because we need them but because we like them. I don’t want to miss my chance for a friend. I’m going to call him. Tomorrow maybe. After school. We can walk to the pharmacy down the street for a candy bar like old times. We have a lot to catch up on. Wouldn’t that be nice. Yeah I’ll text him. I’ll text him “Hi.”

In The Gray

Black and white my world was drawn
Black and white the world began
Or was it just white?
No knowledge of black

Black and white
Are oil and water
Black and white
Are fire and ice

But the bane of man
Cooked deep in the bowls of earth
By the dark one
Unnatural it crawled
From the depths

And older I grew
Confused I became

When I discovered
The Gray