Found Poetry

The ideas, the thoughts.
To him, they are more real than everything else.
To write is to embrace them
To send what we intended out into exile
And collect the letters written, into something true.
And whatever comes out of the basement of our minds
From that collection of random thoughts
Will lead us to something else entirely
And out of that family of letters
He writes his own story

Extra Five: an excerpt from a story I wrote.

The beast shuffled forward. leaning down to sniff the body of the fallen beast. Suddenly, his head jerked upward, and he let out a sharp hiss. Then he suddenly jolted forward, faster than anything the beasts had done before. Crow sidestepped, barely avoiding an outreaching claw, then swung his sword, lopping off an arm before swiftly spinning around to decapitate the thing. It’s body fell, and there was silence from the group. 

Behind him, Crow could still hear the sounds of the battle between the steel man and the people-beasts. Then, the crowd of beasts all rushed forward, hissing and clawing and mashing their teeth. 

For a split second, Crow hesitated. He couldn’t back up further, or he would get dangerously close to the group behind him. The only thing to do was push forward. So forward he pushed, furiously beginning to hack at the beasts around him. 

He faltered at first, quailing at so much bloodshed. But then something inside him took over. The same thing that had told him his name, or the name of his sword. He moved with deftness and grace, hacking away at the crowd of slavering monsters before him, trying to cut himself a path through and escape. He could feel the power of whatever lay inside him, letting him guide his blade strokes easily through the sea of bleeding, writhing limbs, sometimes cutting off the heads of multiple beasts at a time. 

But, whatever power he held was unrefined, for he soon began to take injuries. First a slash on his arm, which he ignored, then a stab in the shoulder, which made him falter. He slashed off the tail of one beast, then planted a foot on it’s back and shoved it forward, making a path through the crowd. He sprinted through, taking more cuts and slashing at everything that moved. With one final shove, he burst forth from the mass, only to stumble on the twitching corpse of a beast he had just downed. He landed heavily, then turned over, slashing with his blade to fend the writhing creatures off. 

Desperation filled him, as one of them slashed his left leg, and he cried out, knowing now that escape was unlikely. Just as he was about to give up, just as he realized that this was the end, he heard another sound. A sound that cut through the air, that pierced the hissing and screeching of the creatures. A voice. A human voice.

It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. 

...Anyways.

I find it hard to think today. My feet are too large, and my socks not enough. The headphones, usually so efficient in piping in raw inspiration, are clasped too tightly to my ears.

But anyways. 

My fingers continue to tap uselessly at the keyboard, attempting in their dull scratching to carve away the useless, pulpy excess of thought that surrounds me.

My thoughts are like gelatin, they fill up the space I float through.

And I slowly, slowly drown.

Lungs choking on excess aether, I crawl onward.

Like some small, withered creature in some deep, lightless undersea cave, whose very breath is the only form of propulsion he has. He has never known color, never known sound. The only light he knows is the luminescence of the predators hell-bent on swallowing him whole.

But anyways.

I was told to choose one word for this assignment. Choose one word, just one. 

"Well, then what?" says I.

"Well, then you write about it", says Nelson.

Writing? About words? Seriously. 

Look at it this way. Ask an artist, a painter, to paint about a color, and see how quickly he turns his chosen instrument of self expression upon you in a dazzling display of violence.

Ahem.

But anyways.

Perhaps I'm over thinking this. Words are simply words, after all. No one has ever done anything especially important or empowering with them.  No one has ever changed lives with words. They're nothing special. In fact, the simple actuality that the only possible way I could communicate the idea that words are nothing special to you is through words is proof that they are inconsequential. 

Oh wait. 

No, that pretty much makes them a big fucking deal. 

But, anyways. Nelson, this is impossible. How could I possibly take a single word, and the soul, the sole meaning behind a word, and incorporate it into an overarching theme of a single body of text of any varying length? Gods above, it's just not a task humans are able to accomplish.

But anyways.

Rock Out

You have just been given a direct order.
You know the drill.

Rock out like like your limbs are failing.. Like you got your friends, four controllers, and eighteen levels of nothin' but headshots.

 Like the colors you see are all that you want and need

Rock out like your mind has just been blown, and you have neither the time nor the patience to pick all the pieces off the wall behind you, so you fill that gaping void with as much soul as you can muster.

Rock out like you're in the middle of nowhere, and you've got enough decibel-powered ordnance to signal the coming apocalypse, but you don't care because God made the universe just so you could get through this next solo.
Rock out like Odin himself just came down from Valhalla, handed you a shield and a sword and told you to go kill some mutha ****in' frost giants.

Rock out like everyone else said rock was dead, but you know that legends never die, so rock out like Rock is just really, really hung over from last night's gig.
Rock out like you invented it, like Death himself is standing next you, tapping his watch. Rock out  like you're Jimmy, both Page and Hendrix, and you can't breathe unless you got a guitar in your twitching fingers.

Rock out like you see that girl. Then you see her boyfriend next to her. Like they're arguing. Like you see him lose his dumbass temper, and shove her to the ground. And, in that single, incandescent moment, as all the devils in your hands rub their newly awakened eyes, and every Rage Against the Machine song you've ever heard starts playing in your head, you lash out in glorious, blinding fury, and the avenging angel whistles in admiration.

Rock out like that ink under your skin means something.
Like you got a girl, a car,  a thousand dollars, and the weight of the world to push off your shoulders.
Like you don't have a girl, or a car, but dammit you still got the thousand, and twenty four hours to find either, or both.

Rock out like the love of your life has an hour, twelve minutes and thirty-five seconds to live, and nothing you do in your life after that time will mean as much.

Rock out like Heaven's dead, so you're gonna stand on it's grave and dance to it's favorite song.

Rock out like you are a steam powered, ironclad machine, constructed from the broken pieces of every dream you ever had, and you've got only open skies and falling ash to fly through.

Rock out like everyone you know is with you, and everyone else is dead set against.
But YOU DON'T CARE.

Because you've got headphones, pounding with the voices of those who came before, and you've got a heart, pouring out hope for those who will come after.
You know you're not a god.
But rock out like you are.