In With The New

By the time I reached the end of my driveway, the darkness had developed a personality disorder. It wasn't a threatening one, more like the mildly amused squint of an aging bartender who’d seen a thousand and one would-be false prophets confuse barroom bravado with spiritual awakenings. No; the darkness wasn’t judging me exactly; it was just taking notes.

The words followed behind me at a distance, having barely survived an ill-advised brutal fight with each other in a blackberry thicket well over a year or so ago. They limped along with a stuttering swagger. Some were missing their serifs. Others had acquired a few questionable vices. A couple of them were even bleeding punctuation all over the damn place, and insisting it was merely a stylistic choice based on syntax alone. Still, after everything, they argued amongst each about their meaning. About grammar, tone, intention, and everything else you could imagine when it comes to any standard literary argument between a bunch of words.

Meanwhile the message itself, fresh off a lightning-laced joyride through a cosmos of misplaced timing and purpose, hovered just out of sight like a thunderstorm debating whether the terra incognito of my soul deserved revelation, catastrophe, or a dangerous equation of both.

I allowed the wounded words to follow me into my house.

Because there is no dignity in trying to outmaneuver your own stubborn vocabulary. It always knows where you sleep.

Inside, I poured myself whatever amber grained concoction was closest to the cabinet door. I wanted something honest with no botanical backstory, no artisanal sob story, just a little kick of relaxing warmth and conviction. I sat at the desk where my unfinished thoughts always go to masquerade themselves as hibernating. The fire inside the hearth of my soul crackled with the confidence of something that knows it could become a blaze at any moment, if only the rest of the words in my head would shut the fuck up long enough for my heart to take notice.

That’s when it hit me.

The retreat was never really closed.

It was hibernating.

And so was I.

The old mindset hadn’t stormed off in protest. It hadn’t failed. It had simply burned through its creative fuel supply due to the toxicity of the world around me. It had run itself ragged trying to make sense of everything, of the pestering grief, of making art that isn’t artificially insemanated, and of trying to create poetic intimacy on a timetable governed by algorithms, shadow bans, and the relentless expectation of being palatable to those who do and don’t know me, at all times.

It hadn’t been shut down from frailty or weakness, but for the sheer fact that it was just saving up its creative energy, and on the lighter note that the electricity bill had become staggering in the past year or so since dipshit took over, to say the least.

But when the new mindset does finally take over. It won't be flashy. Nor will it share repetitive poetry for content’’s sake, It’s not taking over to make friends, or followers, or to be fake for that matter. It’s taking over to make the liars cringe, while the truth puts on it's boxing gloves.

It will not need a manifesto, catchy slogan or a logo.

It will be patient. It will be kind. It will be wild. Much like myself, unless someone tries to fuck with my feelings, and then all hell could very well break loose.

Who knows?

It also understands that nothing worth keeping responds well to force. Not our creative approach. Not people. And especially not the truth, which bruises easily and sulks when you try to dress it up as fantasy for the sake of having company in a world built on loneliness and lies. Which mind you, is why the truth is putting it's boxing gloves as we speak.

Somewhere in between the second sip and the third, the words had finally crawled up the stairs, and stumbled into the standing room only bar of my mentality, like regular patrons who nevertheless knew exactly where to sit. They arranged themselves loosely. They didn't have clenched fists, their wounds finally tended to.

They just sat there like exhausted syllables waiting to find out which vowel they might someday court in the poetic land of milk and honey.

Just outside the door, the message still sat astride upon its high horse, soul crossed, fingers laced in the reins, hooves giddily tapping against the sidewalk with a newfound purpose.

“Alright,” I said, mostly to the words that were now rearranging the electrical wires within my mentality. “You win. What do we do now?”

The words, as always, declined to comment. They rarely know how to explain themselves these days. They simply exist. And by existing, it clarified everything.

The shuttered retreat, the disappearing poetry, the petty skirmishes between sentence structures, and the wilderness hikes through my own creative psyche, hell, even the moonlight above my head that you could practically chew on if you weren’t too embarrassed by the sincerity of my last name. None of it had anything to with anything except listening to the silence long enough for something real to wander into my heart on its own without having to compete with anything....

Outside, the land of the free, continued its favorite hobby: shouting at itself, dismantling ideals in the name of political greed and so-called government efficiency, while the so-called poets sit back and do nothing for the sake of their own image and feeding the algorithm all their data. Yes indeed to ignore it, was to be compliant. And here we are, overlooking cruelty for our own convictions, while humanity reinvents its personality every election cycle. A nation of uncensored words beating each other senseless with antique ideologies forged in the fire-and-brimstone data factories of tech and industry.

All the while, the message kept galloping endless laps around my mind on a horse called lightning.

Same circus. Different clowns. I thought out loud to myself, but enough about all that for now.

I finished my four fingers of watered down whiskey, tended to the fire in my heart, and let the unsaid words curl up wherever they land, whether it be my chest, my gut, or just my quiet place, which is here.

By morning though they’d probably start fighting again. Or flirting? Who the fuck knows?

Or even trying to sell themselves as something they weren’t, with a pitch so hollow you could see right through it if you bothered to listen to the silence long enough.

Everything, as not much advertised these days, is fine and dandy in my life. Even hunky-dory, since my creative side is feeling generous with it's honesty.

The retreat will open back up when it is ready, which will be soon. The thaw will come, as it slowly has already began too. The new mindset will assume control quietly, without a press release or a pauper’s parade.

For a while though, the silence and the disappearing that ensure did feel like the most radical luxury a tired creative man like myself could afford.

So I took a long steaming shower in that silence, then I went outside and tackled the message off it's high horse before politely dragging it by the ass upstairs to tuck it in for the evening. And then carried my happy ass to bed to dream a little weird poetic dream of a few romantic words all about her...

Because life is weird, and so is writing;)

Till the next time,

Ryan Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZYrshwwVzc

Ryan Love