Rarely do the present and past selves get along.
There is nothing I love about the self I was years ago, and nothing of the me now could the past self find redemptive.

You're getting the gist, I guess. Or maybe you're forcing words to conform like the normal human being might. The differences between past and present are slight, but the future changes us more than we've ever been ready for. It's a step out into the then that becomes now. How is no longer a question, just a statement made to indicate this predicament can't go on.

Someone came up to me on the street, held out a hand and told me that I should take a chance - that stranger-danger was really fear on steroids and that we had more to fear from androids invading this place than anything we might make to hurt each other. I took his hand and time be passing maybe lasting I found a lover, hidden in a man who wanted to be a boy.

Once upon a time there was a rhyme that reached all the children, and I was the one who couldn't listen because I was too busy telling tales that others heard and failed to understand. Failed to not believe - the child who ran away from home to escape the droning monotony of family life and fell into a dream world instead. Living there, everyone I knew was either dead or dying, and there was nothing I couldn't do (except for flying; wings are banned below, doncha know?)

Sage wisdom says not to approach the world of the living once you've died, but words of wise men have always lied where I've been concerned. I learned early on that bending the truth works well enough to get along when the song's on repeat. I touch what bits of reality you haven't forgotten yet, and I weave my wings out of words that I've heard others refuse to say - the day I find a word I can't use I'll give up my wings to literary misuses.

What you don't know is that one day I'll be down in the underworld for a playdate with Hades, and maybe then I'll fuck up the security system, just for fun. Cerberus likes honey cakes, but doused with opium and he'll be flaky as a guard at best. And Sisphyus' slavery might be cut short early if the mountain accidentally plateaued. Or if someone introduced machinery into the scenery. I'm willing to come storming in to break the chains that keep them from gaining the freedom they don't deserve.

I met a boy who said he couldn't win - said he was nothing but a sinner who could walk in daylight when he chose. A boy who claimed the devil kept a corner office reserved for when he arose from the deepest circles of hell, ready to retire to the mired conditions of below. I still don't believe him - not about sin or sinners, because he's still a beginner in life, even if he knows more than me. See, I've done, touched more places in people than I've yet to be held accountable for, brought down for. I know the taste of wrong, and the way bad notes jar a perfect song, and I still haven't found those in my wild child, yet. But don't tell him. He likes to think he's all that.

There's no one who knows the taste of cold metal like I do - no one who drew on the canvas of skin the same way I did and could say it wasn't painful. Wasn't wonderful. .
That there wasn't something hidden within that made up for the sin that collected on this doorstep, that was hidden in step, in time, in rhyming nature with the nurturing fools that cared enough to use and use and run. (The way the sun does, dontcha know?) And even though I think I've learned from the boy who came around, the one who shook up this part of town, I'm still in classes on occasion, taking over what Ive failed to take in. I'm still learning the offbeatness, and the sweetness of sorrow scented bleeding. Hey, be a doll. Pass the bandaids - it's still seeping.


Even god debates that sometimes, though. She’s one of those who just can’t seem to be content with anything less—more—than the status quo. (But the status is NOT quo, is it? Just visit the downtown slums sometime and have a moment of peace and quiet with the bums who still talk to the thirteenth air molecule to the right; it’s a sight more sane than any other place I’ve been.) She’s been hitting up the reasons and the seasons and pretty soon she’ll be back home in bombshell fashion, with a last minute cry of victory as if she’s gotten something done. God must be a masochist because she made the world with free choice, and once given a voice the human race couldn’t help but deface her, and tell all these lies that maybe she’s just a man in disguise. They don’t call the world mother earth for nothing, but this god we won’t pray to has given way to a vision of derision and disillusion so deep that even children aren’t given to belief anymore. And now for god, even waking up is a chore, sometimes. When the dawn rises... You know each day has new surprises, but what’s it like for god, when she knows the ins and outs of every word that’ll ever be said, and the life cycles of everyone who isn’t quite dead yet. There’s nothing to wait for when you know the end, and it’s so damn near, but the young tragedies who walk the earth can’t even hear it coming.