Rumination 14

Keep saying things over and over until they come true, or you delude yourself into believing them. Keep telling yourself that running in place is fine. That as long as you’re working and “moving” your fatigue and lethargy can’t catch up to you. As long as you don’t think about what what’s wrong it can’t hurt you.

Why think about the things you can’t change anyway?

After all, the things you can’t change are many.

Maybe starting over for me was easier because everything else was shrouded in the obscurity of nothingness. Or…is that another lie I tell myself to keep going?

It’s not easy to leave behind written words and created words. To never speak of them again. To remind myself they never were.

Starting over is hard. Starting over can break you. Make you wake in the morning with cold sweats over deadlines and ultimatums that never mattered. Where are those consequences now that it’s done? Is nothingness my just reward?

Jumping off the pedestal is harder. All of the praise and genuflection is impossible relinquish. What if it’s never found again? What if this is the end? What if I become another insignificant cog in the machine of the world.

You we’re always insignificant. A cog in the machine does its work and the wheels turn.

Only when the cog is gone and the machine breaks down does it learn its value. Does this insignificant cog’s value become apparent.

There is nothing wrong with insignificance.

Maybe if I say it enough…I’ll believe it.

Stay good and keep transmitting.

-A. Sandhu 2015

November 9, 2015 0

NaNoWriMo Project Poem: "Ballad of the Second Queen"

Won’t you wait a moment?
Or will I have to face
The dawn alone?

I’m holding on to thorns
Of what could be
While you clutch at velvet petals
Of a past fading to dust.

You’re singing in melodies
-With someone else.
While I perform verses
-Lost behind your choruses

So blinded by your pain
Your hurt
And your guilt
You won’t let anyone else in.

I keep offering a false paradise
Paradise I cannot give
There is a lonely song being sung
By someone I barely know

Yet every night
I listen for it here.
What is this hope since I heard it?
Will there be any when it’s gone?

Sing a song of fleeting romances
Hoping you’ll know you’re not alone.
Sometimes love is only for the moment
Blessed are those whose moments collide.

I’ll sing louder still
Hoping our moments catch each other on the fall
Or you’ll be here alone
Singing the lonely song I’ve wrought upon the world.

I’ll keep listening
For a paradise mine to take
A lonely song being sung
By someone I want to know.

Knowing that a moment
Is better than nothing at all.

-AJ Sandhu 2015

November 7, 2015 0

Another Better Me

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” -Soren Kierkegaard

All of the work I do today is for her; the better me waiting at the end of this labor. A far off waif on the horizon that can be an ideal I see myself as to justify my procrastination, my lethargy. “What will be, will be,” Because it is so much more comfortable to think “destiny” has a route set for me. As if what I do or don’t do today doesn’t really affect that far off better version of me.
Sometimes, like in these moments of rumination, I am hyper aware my ideal cannot be without the work I can’t seem to put in. Other, clearer times I’m able to grasp that she will be me as I am now, because I have stagnated.
No longer bound by fear, but by inaction.
I’m going through the motions of a changing life, but not actually doing much to change it. I’m screaming loudly to avoid toiling in silence. And I am writing admissions because I need to get these words somewhere that I am accountable for them.
Even as I stand here and scream, “All I want cannot be!” there is that part of me that sees her; the other better me. The one waiting on the horizon to read carefully the harried words of the younger stranger she once was; trying to glean how she came to be where she is.
I need to do more and I need to do it now.
I need to do it alone.
Scream into the void until it starts to scream back.

Stay good and keep transmitting.

-AJ Sandhu

November 1, 2015 0