God What I Wouldn’t Give For Some Non-Reality
Hysterical.
Naked.
Laughing.
I need some healing.
Give me air, give me space, falling sun, wrapped in fire, dragging the sky to silence. That’s what I need.
The quiet night, with stars like pinpricks in a black sheet, just to shake it apart with music and chaos, until it falls, until the sun’s morning burns this infinite black, and its silhouette ghost slowly travels past the cars and trees, that we call shadows.
I won’t need sleep.
I’ll let the cool air fill me up, wind my gears to walk a little longer.
We will run around with paint, neon paint, cover this canvas grey city.
People would stare with bodily confusion, because we stain their streets with difference.
That turmoil. That confusion that makes us angry, that tears our sureness into pieces; lovely uncertainty, you consume the best of us, and shy from the worst.
Throw light in the night, as they explode we cry out, chasing away sanity for another sweet minute.
Children under July lights; we live forever in those seconds.
What I need is to escape for a while, to steal myself away with beauty.
Reminder of portraits; the scenes I paint in my head; my convinced truth, and the wonder of the world I dare not let slip from my hope.
Run from all my tomorrows for a couple hours, until responsibilities creep back in under the door frame and through the floor boards, and dance in the halls of my mind.
All I need is love.
Everything In Nothing
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.” –William Butler Yeats
I’m not sure where my mind was, somewhere in a haze of mid-day heat and dancing thoughts. I rambled beautiful nonsense from my lack of focus and I let this undefined expression become a broken lesson of my life. My guitar hummed in and out of my conscious calming me like the rhythm of waves. I played the observer to the people that passed. They were average, the everyday backdrop: its beautiful languages and diversity of the downtown scene. There was one man juxtaposed beside the determined paces of businessmen, mothers, and energy high youth.
He was black and in the latter half of his life. His afro was graying, and his eyes silver black punch holes in a sea of yellow. He wore a worn grey hoody that was far too small, and beatnik pants. He moved slowly, fighting gravity, and I wondered whether he knew why he felt compelled to get closer to me, or if he even knew where he was. He was a few feet from me when he stopped. He wouldn’t make eye contact. His eyes only shifted from vivid hallucinations to reality and back again. His clothes were permeated with weeks of lost motivation, stains of less conventional mattresses, and drug use; a cracked cast of childhood ambition. Breaking the silence I said something like, “Hey man. How are you?” He didn’t respond. I kept strumming chords and we didn’t speak. He finally mumbled in a slurred but sure tone, ” Look at me . . .” he slightly paused “I got nothing left.” No words had ever seemed so heavy, so soaked with sorrow and meaning. I thought for a few moments in a surreal culture shock, trying to examine where I go from here, and what to say, or how I feel. Chaos consumed my mind until my intuition spoke for me, “You’re wrong. Things are as bad as you choose to make it. You gotta find what you need, but you’ll be alright.” Now I can’t say I even completely agree with what I said, life is more complicated then to wrap it up into a sentence or two, but it seemed that in that moment, it was what could be said. Once again the sounds of this downtown street and the guitar smeared into static. He repeated the end of my comment to himself moving his mouth as if he was chewing on my words. Then just as he had come softly and humbly, he left. He didn’t say goodbye, and he never looked at me. He walked past the car I had been sitting on and passed under glaring parking garage lights. The dusk sky masked him darker after each yellow fluorescent; after every couple of feet, until he was gone, until this man who had nothing, was nothing.
I see him now and again. I saw him trekking down the train tracks with burnt skin and a dog once. Another time he was a she, with long knotted up hair and light skin; years of smoking roughed up her exterior, but she never made it past high school in her ambition. I hear footsteps in the rain, and look to pull the traveler from the storm, but my visions blurred by weather, and water washes the tracks by morning.
Dashuhua
An event happens every year in a small locality in China called Dashuhua; literally meaning, “Beating flowers into the trees.” The tradition is to melt down all the rusted and old metal scattered about the villages and hurl it at massive wooden walls creating an explosion of hot sparks that light up the night like fireworks. Creating beauty out of rust.
Does it break?
Stretched like hot taffy panes of iron until one too many words travel in creviced etches, splitting like pulled rubber, dark lines of sudden movements on parchment, chasing away the smooth flawlessness of his mind, snapping it.
Or can it be mended?
Taken up with care to send it into hellfire, to nirvana, to unhinge and become one again in massive metal pots.
This is what I see, desperation in his eyes, a sense of death powdered about the room, shaking off his auburn hair and lifting off the ground while his feet smack the concrete as his body contorts violently.
He will never see someone again, he will never caress a hand, trace the colors of his someone’s eyes, love with the same innocence.
Pain succumbs to loss; loss succumbs to time, and becomes idle pieces.
I want to fix him.
To place the shards back, but these withered roses still hold on to bitterness, pricking the fingers of those who care. He is too scarred to return to how he was.
For him I beat flowers in the trees, so that other can see the rust of sorrow thrown to mark beauty on the bark.
—-
Zach Grove lives in the hills of Charlottesville, Virginia, as he has for all of his life. He is an artist, writer and musician. He is 20 years old attending college, and like so many people before him, he is trying to make sense of the world through writing. He is not a good dancer nor can do much with watercolor. He comes from a long line of middle-class white people (which probably explains the dancing). More importantly he is profoundly captivated by human experience, which is reflected in his writing, which he hopes to incorporate in his work after college; bringing together environmental engineering and art as a means for human progress.
