Language doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of fully expressing the depth of our intertwined experience “living” on this terrifyingly beautiful planet, or whatever it is you’d like to call whatever it is we happen to be doing here. Words are essentially dead: they are objectively-defined symbols that will never be able to accurately portray subjectively-defined thoughts and feelings.

There is far too much room for interpretation in the space between your heart and your mind.
There is far too much room for interpretation in the space between your soul and my soul.

Whenever you say a word, the infinite abstraction that you are trying to convey is conceived in your brain, where it has to travel through a treacherous labyrinth of passageways in order to descend to your larynx to be mysteriously transformed into arbitrary collections of sounds and syllables that subsequently depart from your lips like tiny undiscovered universes of you that then must traverse another entirely unique and equally impossible maze to reach MY brain, where I can FINALLY begin to process it in a futile attempt to decipher what exactly you or I or anyone ever means by saying anything any or all of the time. 

How much of ourselves do we lose in translation?

It is h o p e l e s s.
We Are But Cavemen Scribbling On Stone Tablets With Sticks Charred By The Inner Fire Of Only What We Know And Comprehend.
This is why I am so passionate about creating.
This is why I so passionately seek to push the boundaries of our methods of self-expression to their breaking point. 
I want to be heard.
I want to be understood.
I want to be known.
I think everyone does, but the majority of the population is too lazy and/or scared to really try.
Thus, they lose themselves.

We will lose our minds and sprint like wild animals through forests crunching leaves like bones underfoot freeing us from shape and definition by destroying outlines of bodily prisons as prisms of multicolored light dance betwixt the tops of trees, watchful sentinels and upside-down grenades, skinny men with green afros well grounded with wisdom gleaned from eons of experience whisper us secrets as they blow in the breeze.

We will grow thirsty and drink rapturously from every body of water until we drain all seven oceans and roll along the dusty bottoms like tumbleweeds through aquatic ghost towns searching for friendly critters to play cards with and kiss lying amidst blades of grass like butter knives of reality in a silent spring that we won’t chance to ruin with vibrations of uncertain vocal cords as we mimic the earth breathing and living and growing and dying between the seizures of the second hands of our internal clocks.

For a moment we will forget our names. 

As days die and colors experience identity crises in the sky in glorious eulogies of the life we cannot stop from slipping through our fingers, we will nail stakes to the clouds and pitch the universe as our tent just to kiss like the sun and the moon beneath blankets of perfect but temporary darkness. We will dance in the darkness to different genres of silence and trace with timid fingertips erratic lines connecting the most unlikely constellations that mirror the invisible lines joining the stars swimming in our eyes and the most obscure aspects of our lives. I will take the world and hang it around your neck to rest safely between your collarbones, and you will be so beautiful. 

We will return to bed before the sun evaporates our hard-earned peace of mind to whisper newspaper headlines in each other’s ears as small reminders that we still live on a planet full of miserable creatures that loathe themselves and disrespect one another, that we still have duties and responsibilities we must satisfy in order to survive this unforgiving reality, that nothing lasts forever, that attention is transient just like life, but that everything fleeting is beautiful and every sin gives love that much more meaning.

Pleasure is temporary but so is pain, everything awful atrophies and even evil decays like our dancing shadows as the sun sets in the evening, perhaps we should vow to flirt with what flits and flees from this realm of existence, anxiously, every day chancing to wake up a trillion times eternally returning to opaque statues of dust carved from inconsistencies wearing no masks or disguises whatsoever, telling our truths as we lie on the lawn and watch all ideas of each other evaporate with the morning dew as the sun assumes its rightful place in the sky, bright-eyed, we can learn each other anew every day and every day we can fall in love again and again and again and again and perhaps then and only then we can escape reality by in turn, embracing it with open arms and gaping mouths, crossing the chasm between our consciousnesses to mumble feelings into smiles and frowns, feelings that we will never attempt to contain within trite and empty words that lie in coffins interred alongside fossilized fragments of our souls produced by the perpetual pressure of our collective existence, a truly precious stone like the rare and multifaceted diamond that you are, the radiant jewel that I discovered underneath the subtlest reflections, the flawless gem that I refuse to condemn to death by attempting to define or by placing in glass boxes, but to be perfectly yransparent, you can observe me desperately clinging to the idea of you in the very back of my mind, and I would be content with forsaking all other should-be’s and supposed-to’s and lying on the ground for all of forever and looking at you at the exact point where I first found you, shining.

Time suddenly reverses and we watch together
as winds and rivers build mountains from dust
as islands sigh and sink back into the ocean like brooding leviathans
we erase what we wrote and forge forests from blank canvases
we excavate corpses like buried treasures born from the earth
we compress and collapse the last great cities into cravings for change

Time suddenly reverses and we watch together
as portals of Polaroid people and places become pointless pieces of paper
we disentangle our desires from the raveled ropes of rationalization
we dust off deserted dreams and unpack them from boxes in the attic
we set them out on display for everyone to know and to see

Time suddenly reverses and we watch together
as scientists discover new ways to delete technological innovations
as people strive to detach themselves from their material possessions
we admire how hard everyone is working to remove all the distractions
each person playing their part in order to get back to what really matters
everyone is trying so hard to become less

Time suddenly reverses and we watch together
as our moms and dads rise out of love and divorce with a handshake
as people evolve and devolve as they fade into and out of our lives
as everything continuously changes every day
for a moment we remember that life is rewinding
but then we forget

Time suddenly reverses and we watch together
as our wisdom evaporates and we learn how to trust
as we discover what it means to have faith in our inherent humanity
as people that fulfill roles in our lives remove knives from between our ribs
as adults become teenagers and
teenagers become children and
children become babies and
babies are forced back into their mothers’ wombs
in joyous celebrations of death

we become less educated, but that makes us happier
we begin to talk less but speak more
we begin to focus more on what we have and not on what we lack
we begin to tell one another how we really feel about each other
we begin to love more and hate less
we think, “everything is different, but everything is the same”

Time Suddenly Reverses And We Watch Together
As The Universe Is Sucked Up Through A Straw