dead meat

there was an old gaunt man sitting at the corner of wellbrooks and jackson avenue at the coffee shop there. his dark brown and seamy skin hung like a over-sized canvas trench coat as he sat back in the wrot iron lawn chair eying the newspaper muttering the important headlines out loud. "Good sir" i said. No response. "Good sir, excuse me, tell me how do you do it? how do you continue to lumber on after there is nothing left". He looked up from his reading lowered the 99 cent polarized aviator sunglasses and said "by the cups of coffee". He was an idealist. I figured that most people have to reconcile their inadequacies one way or another--they have to legitimize their shameless attempt at life one way or another. i suppose i could do the same. it has been twenty one years and little hole cluttered with problems that i have to mourn over seems to be widening everyday. its when i look into myself that the self-destruction begins. the convoluted logics become that much more complex and confusing leading only to a reunion with the happy hollow of friendly ghosts and the basement on the circle i had called a home only but last year--i was hardly alive then. that was the year i stopped believing in God, i stopped believing in man, i stopped believing in anything. everyday was just a continuation of the somber saga that sapped motivation to even breathe from me. heaven seemed so close then. almost like it grows closer now. i suppose all the time i borrowed finds its way back to God anyhow. still it remains another summer with a blank slate of opportunity. i believe as i have written in the philosophy of spiders and lemmings that life spirals forward always coming back across the essential missed pieces to reintegrate them into our attempt at life. all the more we think we know in actuality we know quite little as the future spirals are ambiguous comprehensive permutations of the current one albeit with the potential to improve. music haunts me so. i fell for a girl this past spring. though the feelings are separated by an ocean and my incompetent brain. i suppose she doesnt know of my past--the one i am trying to forget. the 4 years of the basement on the circle. but tomorrow is a new day and a better opportunity to walk forward and command your fate. the past does not make you who you are, neither does the future both are only half certainties i suppose its who you are and what you do today that matters. the old man at the coffee shop knew that much, take each day every breath as a gift i suppose he would say, attempt life each day and just for that day with the future in mind but not controlling it. i suppose i am rediscovering what it is to be human again. though growing up i never understood it in the same way the old man did.