Silver Clouds

Silver Clouds

I am wasted potential.
People are dying and starving
but my troubles are on another plane –
I would rather starve and feel physical pain.
Because on top of our family issues,
I had been given a mission,
and I failed, now, twice.
If I were to succeed, I would abandon my brother,
my father, and all else who so easily know
that they can devour me.
Now everywhere I go, I will fall into this pelican pattern
for those who are not even my children
but can sniff me right out
and fool me with proclamations of undying love.
Did he finally see his devotion
from the side? I can't even muster
the force to be angry with his confessions of undying devotion,
yelling, “Bitch, shut the fuck up!
All I've ever wanted was to make your dreams come true!
For ten years I have loved you. You are my one true love.”
Why did I pick up the phone?
I never learn.
But he will not contact again
now that he's brought the visions plaguing him into the light
which they never withstand.
I can now see the background low self-worth
permeating everything, that has permeated
every decision – every friendship, every stepping over myself,
putting myself second – and somehow, no one could help me.
Did anybody see it? How could my dad not have had the insight?
He has no insight on his own, of what drives people.
And all of my art was based upon the visions I used
to give meaning to a life that was crushing,
blinding myself with poetry
to the state of my reality.
Why after 10 years do I continue to answer him?
It was a real mystery to him,
and now that I reread how many times I forgave him
or continued to talk to him after our fights,
it's a mystery to me, too.
But now I know it was because I didn't know better,
because I cultivated a hurtful denial,
because I still give chances to my mother
and tried so hard to understand where she came from,
to redeem a monster even the slightest, and in this vein maintained my worst connections.
This is why I see silver clouds –
I had to,
and convinced myself I don't mind getting rained on.
Droplets can transform the earth
into something beautiful –
no, something the world's never seen before!

Now I am 30
and only truly named my demon yesterday
held my darkness in my hands.
It wouldn't be so bad to be
at level ground if I did not believe
I had great potential,
something in me
that yearned to go all the way
while it burned brightest
but couldn't
because of the black hole that consumed us all,
set back us all by fifteen years
and will never get what she wanted anyway;
we will be good
but never as good as we could have been.
That is the world's most frequent motif.
For every star who left to light it,
caught a big wave,
(and I have caught two that fit but had to say no)
there are dozens of casualties
who never make their mark
who are no less people
who are cursed to remaining partial
and homely and plain
and humble and spiritual
content with the little things
I still despise.
Most of the world becomes unfair casualties,
and I hate to finally face that I am just one of them;
I still fight it,
fight for the time that passed me
that I myself was too fucked up in the head to take – a martyr
and there is no use in calling what happened by any other name;
like I said, I'm wasted potential,
not brave enough,
still writing adolescent poetry
so seriously.
I fight it still
and I am going on thirty
and I can already smell the reality that I might never see them all again,
that this may be our last goodbye,
that there is no justice in the world,
that love may come but it's too late
to change the world,
to only
buy a house
and be like everyone.

I wasn't born like my father; at seventeen
my greatest dream
was to hop a train and ride cross-country
and discover a new world through my point of view
cut fully from my parents – but I never could snip it
because I felt too selfish,
so I took
my father's values on instead;
of course they were only borrowed,
but my own never flowered:
freedom and optimism,
living off the land,
off a train,
taking things as they come,
no country no sense of clan
lies in me – no sense of enemy over there.
No yours or mine, no house divided,
little difference in family and strangers –
it is this he harped on most; what
am I to do with what I have become?
This is the seed that never flowered,
but which should have,
given network, given skills, and all that shit.
Pardon me for saying,
but it is one thing to make a mother
out of a caretaker's spirit,
and another to clip the wings of a born adventurer,
not to believe or see
the adventurer's spirit as something valid.
Don't you see!?
The adventurer's soul thrives most on youth –
he needs his youth
to come into his rightful age,
and if he cannot use it,
he will decay.
What's left to me is
to be chasing highs at thirty
when I know better already.
Even my father said yesterday,
that one person ruined so many lives,
thus confirming my worst suspicions about my state.
(But somehow could not have given the gift
of pushing me out – of freedom.
Love that gifts freedom,
not protection-possession,
is very, very rare indeed).