I used to think I knew everything...
I used to think I was
going to do everything...
I used to think I would
fall in love with someone
and spend the rest of my life with them...
I used to think I would
learn my lesson
and never again return
to that place that caged me
for so long like a prison -
but, as it turns out,
of course, I was wrong,
because here I am again
shackled to my memories of the past
and tormented by
what was never meant to be...
it's my own fault,
I was the one who opened the door
that said "DO NOT ENTER" on it -
but I just couldn't help myself
from wondering if who
and what I thought I had locked away
was still waiting to be found
on the other side.
I should have known better...
I should have stopped myself
from reawakening the power
of what I have struggled to put behind me...
I should have been stronger...
I should have talked myself
out of being who I am -
but, once again, I was weak.
Once again, everything feels complicated -
where before, not that long ago,
everything was finally
beginning to feel simple...
once again, I am a storm
of thoughts and emotions -
but not that long ago
I swore that I felt as if
I were truly at a place of peace...
once again, I have fallen hard
and I do not know how long
it will take me to rise
even so much as a little...
once again, I have been triggered
into a state of intoxication
because I dared to venture
to where I have been before
and from which I still wear the scars -
I just hope that I will find a way
to not drown under the dark waves
of the sea of unfulfilled dreams.
depression
My Poem “There is no tomorrow”
It is good to dream,
and it is good to be a dreamer...
it is good to believe,
and it is good to be a believer...
it is good to send out a message of hope
into the universe without knowing
if you will ever receive a reply...
it is good to make a list of things
you want to do and places
you want to visit before you can't...
we all wish that some things
could be different and that we could
somehow go back and change what happened;
however, we are not meant
to have the power of a god,
we are not meant to live beyond
the last day of our destined journey,
we are not meant to know everything -
but each and every one of us,
right this second, have something
that we have in common:
an opportunity to choose
where we will go next, why, and how.
The past is fixed, indellible,
and what happened before is what it is...
the present is where we find ourselves now -
and everybody knows that
there is something important they want to do,
there is somewhere that they want to be,
and, usually, it is doing something else
and being somewhere else
than where they are...
the future does not exist until it does -
and, for most people, the future
is so far away and so illusive
that they do not realise
they have arrived there
until they take a look around
and see how much things
and people have changed...
every day we are alive
we are travelling into the world to come -
and as we get older
each day seems to
pass us by faster and faster,
as if we have all unwittingly
always be the participants within a race.
In life, we all lose more than we gain;
but it is over the course of our life
that we get to experience
and witness moments like no other,
and there is no better time
than today, and right away,
to do what you want to do,
to go where you want to go,
and to be with whoever
wants to be with you -
because when it comes to
making a choice that will
effect your life forever
the present is all that matters,
because there is no tomorrow.
My Poem ’50 year-old Revolver’
I’m sitting here in my kitchen,
at the kitchen table,
with The Beatles’ “Revolver”
playing on my record-player
and a Smith&Wesson
lying next to my still cold bottle of beer…
the house is quiet…
I am sitting almost in complete darkness,
but for the light of the fluorescent-light above my head…
I am thinking about my life –
what happened to screw-up my world so bad…
I am planning by the end of the night
to end it all – and by that I mean
I plan to be dead…
I just can’t take the pain of the heart-break any longer –
I don’t have any-more fight left in me…
this isn’t the first night that I have sat like this
in the dark with a gun in front of me,
but tonight I know is the night
when the stetson of death
that I have been trying on now for a while just feels right.
I am a washed-cowboy…
I am a man planning to ride off
into the sunset and never come back…
I have seen sights and I have been through a lot
since I was a boy –
living without a daddy since I was five,
dropping our of school, making a living
doing what other people wanted me to do,
drinking myself under more tables than I can remember
in bars in each-and-every-one of the fifty states,
surviving a heart-attack…
loving, hurting, pretty-much earning a living
doing things that even I can’t find the words
capable of describing what has slowly but surely
earned me a one-way ticket to hell…
if my life has been a dream this entire time
it has been a nightmare from beginning to end…
my fate was already signed, sealed,
and delivered a long time ago –
there was never any question of how,
just the ultimate question of when?
I always loved The Beatles,
and I have done since I saw them
on Ed Sullivan in ’65 –
I used to wake up every morning for a year
with the words to “Good Day Sunshine”
echoing in my ears…
any-time that I was feeling low,
I would recite the lyrics to “Eleanor Rigby” in my head
and instantly I would smile and feel more alive…
I haven’t listened to a vinyl-copy
of a Beatles record since 1985 –
but over the years I have heard and listened
to The Beatles’ music wherever,
and in whichever town I came to rest,
and every time I did I would throwback
a glass of J.D. and relive the brief happy times
that I remember from my life.
Death is like the Taxman
that you spend your entire life
trying to hide and run from;
I have been seeing the signs leading me
to where I now sit all my life –
Here, There, and Everywhere –
and when the moment of me sitting here
with my Pa’s Revolver that he left for me,
and The Beatles album that I remember the most of all
playing and it’s songs echoing all around me,
now feels like the moment when I am
going to do no more For No One else but me –
and I Want To Tell You that at this moment
I know that nothing and no one
this time is going to stop me.
And then, I wake up…
And as I lift up my head,
and as I open my eyes again,
I look out my window and I see the sun rise…
and I feel a hand upon my shoulder,
and I hear a voice telling me that
Tomorrow Never Knows who any of us will be,
but God did not ever do anything for no reason
and that if I just hold on a little longer
I would one day be saved and find true peace.
I had always been a believer –
I even remember sitting across a table
and sharing a beer with the Devil-himself
in Vegas in September of 2001…
I have seen and I have heard people pray for their lives –
but God never once spoke to me directly:
but maybe he is now?
I have spent my entire life
running the roads and seeing every wonder
of color to be found in the United States of America –
but it wasn’t until the moment when I was woken up
and saved by the light that greeted me this morning,
after the life that I had been living ended,
and I decided to take my life into my own hands
and walk away from all that I had ever known –
leaving behind what I knew
had been holding me back like an anchor:
my old house, my record-player, my life,
and my daddy’s fully-loaded
50 year-old revolver.
Mark The Poet 