Tired Friend

Tired friend

Idling the evening traffic together

Our elbows smudge the driver’s door window

Scratching habitually at dry scalps

Quietly anxious

-hailey-

and so it is.

Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

-”The Unbearable Lightness Of Being”

 

And that’s just it. 
We can recognize certain times in our lives when we have the fear of giving in, succumbing – simply because that is the very thing, at that moment, that we long to do the most. And honestly, why not? If there is no further to fall than down to our worst fears, then does not the fight end? The struggle for the “something higher”? Then the fears become the reality, we can resign ourselves to them, thereby avoiding the future, potential disappointment of never reaching the loftier goal.

The fears become, ultimately, more of a friend than the foe. We live constantly, days on end, with our fears; they become part of our daily, habitual thoughts, they visit us in our slumber. We know them. The ambitions, dreams, and longings become more and more unfamiliar as, perhaps, they are not something we have before experienced and we have nothing to which to compare them, no jumping-off-point from which to say, ‘I know this road, I’ve walked this floor, ‘ by which we could know for certain that, at the end of that road, lay our dreams. Thus, our fears become the comfort. We don’t know how we would survive without them. After all, if not for our fears, would the ambitions and desires even exist? In the absence of our fears, would we have something from which to run, consequently giving us a goal toward which to press forward?

It’s that lump in the throat, it’s the passing of the day through the fingers, it’s the stone-cold grasp of reality on the thoughts that lends itself to nothing else but the recurring horror that this, that which is sought, does not, in fact, exist.

The wrong road has been taken, somewhere a wrong turn presented itself as more attractive than the alternative, and now, here, the only result is that of finding that, in spite of desperately seeking to leave our fears down below us, thrashing with all our might against the current carrying us downward, we have merely come to find that we have, instead, calmly walked up to Fear’s front door and knocked. 

 

-L

Sippin’ on the Hater-ade

I tried to channel some of that David Hailey “I’m moving to Hawaii bitches!-screw civilization-screw the man” righteous anger.

————–
I’m afraid
we’ve been played.
While the others sprayed
about money made
on the wall street parade
with the stocks they trade
we were left to wade
through the masquerade.

And on this crusade
we could not dissuade
big brother’s financial aid.
Those cats managed to evade
our blockade.
Now when all is surveyed
of the lives laid
waste in the tirade,
those who betrayed
were merely displayed
at a promenade
to persuade
us that the congressional brigade
had rendered first-aid
but the knife blade
had filleted
to the bone.

And more dreams decayed
in the latest charade
and the best laid
plans are sometimes frayed
because all that glitters is not gold.

-zack-