Weight of Guilt

I’m dreaming of a life
A life that might not exist
But maybe if I dream it enough
I can come close…I can come close..

Is ambition alone enough?
How many countless words discarded
Before settling close enough?

Always a whim away
We tell ourselves
Like a memory gate to yesterday
Regaled by the lies around me.

The illusion that time passes around us
That we’ll be fine when the morning comes
A false heartache of the mind
Justified sickness we can ignore.

What is this weight
I can’t seem to shake?
Should it have been me
For the ignorance to take?

I’m drowning in days,
Days that never seem to pass.
Treading on in hope
For the moment I look back.

Maybe I can do this?
Seems like I can live this?
With just a memory on my mind.

-AJ Sandhu 2015
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Peddler of Dreams

She’s peddling, peddling dreams
By the seashore
She’s showing you, showing you things
You’d always suspected
But never known for sure
Saying the words you’d only heard in your mind.
She’s a wanderer,
Simple dreamer,
A soul led on a whim
She’ll be gone before the day breaks
Leaving only your dreams in her wake.
But she’s infected you to the core,
From just a look your way,
You don’t remember anything from before.
Because she’s peddling, peddling dreams
By the seashore
She’s showing you, showing you things
You’d always suspected
But never known for sure.
Saying the words you’d only heard in your mind.
She’s a wanderer
Simple dreamer
A soul led on a whim
She’ll never tell you what it takes
To keep her
But she’s a whim away

When you need her.

-AJ Sandhu
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Paradise

You asked for another voice in the silence

Cause it was deafening in your mind
But in the sounds you heard
No words could be found.

Far up above me
Slower than my mortal coil;
Though faster than I’d ever understand,
Are galaxies colliding
With lives I’ll never know

It doesn’t mean I don’t want to
Just a consequence of this life
Born to die only when
We start to understand

If I could hold you though the darkness
We’d shine a light so bright
I’d have to deal with 
The shadows that we’d cast.

How can I hold something I’ve never had?
What is this unspoken understanding
Between two worlds hell-bent on colliding?

What the sun wouldn’t give
For a moment in the darkness
Only caving when her life is ending

I’m done with shallow words
Of what we should be
Lead me like inescapable darkness
Leads the light.

I’m here for the morning
Ever burning for moon’s light
Reflecting but never returning

I’m on the verge of surrender
Giving up on paradise
I never knew I had.

Is this the tragedy of our lives?
To fade away only when
We learn how to live?

I’ll hold on
To this precipice of hope
That maybe one day
A paradise will be mine
To hold again.
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Disconnect

There is refuge in unwritten words still draped in the golden glow of magical possibility. A story in the mind is perfection, untainted by the imperfect words needed to craft reality.
How many wonderful worlds become contaminated by the disconnect between mind and hand? I can regale you with a dozen or more imaginings perfect and pure, until tested by the litmus of reality.
I’ve written before of ideas that ravage through like aches; stories that so thoroughly disconnected me from reality, I awoke weeping over the banal mundanities of a world without magic.
I create so I can escape from what I cannot control.
Finding release in my mind from what I cannot yet be free of in reality.
So consumed by the worlds over which I reign, I forget to paint them with the brush of truth. Falling to traps of perfect heroes without consequence. Heroes always in the right place at the right time with the right words. Never a moment, or even days, too late. Never human.
Doing so would acknowledge the faults I see in reality.
Sometimes words aren’t enough. No apologies or validation strong enough to ease the hurt. Sometimes you can be and are too late. If I refuse to show such human error in what I write, how can I expect to change reality?
It complicates the narrative, but I’ve been running from complication all of my life. If my escapes don’t teach me to cope, nothing will.
My characters, like myself and the people I’ve chosen to surround myself with, cannot put out all of the fires; cannot contain all of the damage. But we can learn to repair that which is in our power.

So can the people in my mind, if I would just give them the chance. 


Stay good and keep transmitting.
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UPDATE

Blogging Sundays will be back this Sunday and I will try to create a backlog of posts so I can have this up and regular again. Thank you all for your support, it means the world to me. 
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Vice of a Million Faces

When do people blur into numbers? Where exactly is the tipping point that turns good intentions into could-have-beens?
There is a limit to how many individuals one human can imagine. Call it a flaw in our evolution. Never in our history have we needed to comprehend the value of numbers greater than those in our physical proximity.
It stands to reason, the smaller our personal circles, the less we understand. Simply “growing” these circles cannot prepare us for the sheer number of people there are. Cannot stop us from categorizing and labeling in ways that strip the individual from the digit.
There is no cure for that.
It compounds itself exponentially when those massive numbers, an unfathomable group, declares itself a collective, or is declared such. A collective is easier to imagine than a million faces. Easier to control.
And simultaneously, harder to live up to.
Especially when this group is yours. Parades the name you chose for yourself as it’s moniker of community. How does a person become an idea?
What was done to those millions of faces is done to you by them.
The leader, the only measure for a group, becomes a symbol.
Unfortunately, humans are fallible. Humans can’t be symbols.
If you want to change the world, you have to wander it. In silent acts of kindness and courage. In whispered rumors and gossip.

A thief in the night will do more for change than a good person in the sun’s light.

Stay good and keep transmitting.

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Rumination 13

Constrained and managed lives are difficult to lead. Entire industries are built around the projection and public cultivation of image. The higher you go, the greater the spin. Eventually your individuality, your humanity is stripped away and only a caricature of a person remains. You find yourself defending the idea of what you should be.
You don’t know why you don’t want to give it up.
The faster the ascent; the more basic the idea.
It doesn’t have time to form. No chance to cultivate in heartbreaking anonymity. Its black and white; no range to be a vice you can live with. Anything that flies in the way, any small indiscretion is an attack on the image itself. It starts to suffocate.
So, how do you escape? How do you stop hiding in front of the world?
You don’t.
If you want out, you have to burn it to the ground. Even if it is everything you have ever built over the course of your consciousness. Your whole life.
Even if it burns you in the process.
Start a fire and raze the foundation.
Then on the blackened ground where your life used to shine, build it again. Slower this time. Of your own volition. Take the old lessons. The immature missteps, learn from them.
Move forward.
Sometimes the life you should save is your own.

-Stay good and keep transmitting. 
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Catharsis

This should be Rumination 13, but hey, like much else in my life; we all know how that will go.

I will start by admitting I don’t exercise this catharsis as much as I used to; unfortunately, there have come to be a greater number of eyes on these places than before. I would chalk it up to anxiety, however, even I remember those days before, when this space was more frequented than ever. 

So, let’s dive in.

I’m in a rather strange place. A few interesting turns of events have somehow dropped me into the midst of people I never knew about and somehow now do. More personal attacks have put upon me choices I have dreaded for longer than I remember. The last eight months have dredged up memories I would rather leave in the past.

Until a few months ago, I would have called this the worst year of my life, no matter how adamantly I attempted to salvage it.

I can’t now. Too much has happened. To call it the worst would mean there was nothing to be learned from the fires burning around me. To label it so would be giving the world too little credit. And blatantly denying the fact there are four whole years of my life lost to God knows what, because I just CAN’T REMEMBER.

I have met, in this three quarter done year, the strongest and hardest working people I will ever know. I have met people who’ve told me that a stranger has given them a bit of happiness. I’ve re-introduced myself to everyone that once knew me. Lost something and someone I’d held very dear, but didn’t treat as if they were dear to me. Lost something I hated and, for some reason, feel it’s void more strongly than anything else.

I opined about two pink totes and a suitcase. Begged for the chance to live without ties to anyone or thing. Labored over my life’s work. Now I’m sitting at a keyboard struggling my way through a rumination that would have once taken maybe twenty minutes.

I’m still excited. I’m still crazy enough to believe I can do those wonderful and crazy things I’ve always imagined. I know I can’t do them alone. But I know that if I keep screaming into the void long enough, someone out there will hear me. And one voice will become two, until the voices become so deafening that I won’t need to scream anymore.

See, wanders like me, we’re temporary. We show up to tell you the tide can be changed, but you do the changing; in the process you change us. We’re not the leaders, those are born among you.

So, until next time, stay good and keep transmitting.
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Cosmic Perspective

Everything we know about anything has been discovered on this giant rocky space bucket. It orbits a massive ball of fire; located on one of the outer arms of a galaxy filled with them. All held together by a point of density so great even light cannot escape.

But it isn’t the only one.

We are one of many, lighting the infinite void of SpaceTime. And we know all of this because a speck of dust dared to defy gravity and look up.

Our first act was that of defiance.

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This Game

I’ve got this little black dress
A dollar to my name
Some hope in my pocket
And I’m here to play this game
Won’t be bound by
Ghosts of our memories
Won’t be held back by
Things we used to be
(we used to be)
I’ve got this tattered black dress
A few pennies to my name.
A drop of hope in my pocket
When’d you change the rules to this game?
You can wake up
In a different bed every morning
You can tell me
It’s the play of the rich
(But shame for the poor)
Now I’ve got this torn black dress
Not a penny to my name
Spent the hope in my pocket
But at least I’ve won your game.
I’m done now
Cause I can see
People like me
Shouldn’t speak!
(I was never one of you)
I’ve got this new black dress
Don’t need the dollars that you gave
Gathering some hope in my pockets
So no one else will have to play this game.
-A.J. Sandhu 14-June-2015
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