A cough can rattle my chest -and it looks like it's going to get worse, for a week or two.
Causing me to think of all those old romantics, torn apart by TB.

Punctuation, or over doing it for emphases, makes me feel poetic at times.
I've been writing lately, and loving it -but wish I was doing more of it.

I am optimistic of my future, a warm blanket when I am alone at night.
Working with children causes me to want them for my own
-An oddity for a single, 20 year old, boy.
Waiting for my future wife
Like a long distant phone call
In this too, I am optimistic, again, an oddity.

A week ago I felt the snap of Beat Poetry's jazz percussion.
This week I feel tired -and in love-
I value my friends all the greater.

Dave Cope introduced me to Gertrude Stein.
I have never before seen someone write without pain.

At the end of this early October day

Tonight I am tired, and putting off homework to write instead. A near tie, it lags just behind talking with my close friends and dearly loved ones as the foremost action I can take in order to screw my head on strait.
Tonight I am tired, and already logged well over my due 20 hours at the church, and am beginning to fall behind in my school work -tomorrow I shall leave my internship with the Children's ministry early, and play a game of catch up with the classes I am doing poorly in.
Just last year I learned the pleasure of being a good student for the first time. To see my grades hurt now is salt in the eyes and teeth gritted tight.
Tonight we had our first Discovery Village Family Experience (DVFX) of the year. I had a speaking role this time round, and felt the thrills that only theater can afford. Oh, how I miss the medium of acting.
My food will go bad before I can eat it, and somehow this fills me with melancholy. Simultaneously, my battered victim of a wallet only affords the food within my kitchen. Tonight, my stomach is forced to do with cold refried beans; the ones from the can. Somehow this feels a fitting retribution for those suffering from hunger in other worlds.
Nate, the 25 year old who lives in the basement's apartment, is going through a break-up. His typically sunny disposition is soiled and gray. He talks loudly and can be heard through the floorboards at night. He's been drinking too much lately. I realize this is the result of finding your identity in your relationships. It causes me to wonder how I unwittingly seek an empty fulfillment in my own ways. A few obvious answers come to mind.
I am writing a piece of work for my creative writing class. It is a collection of short-short stories, "micro fiction" is the term, I've been told. I am extremely proud of my work. In all my years of reading good and great literature, I feel an extreme sense of accomplishment to think that something, anything, I could ever produce on my own would ever be considered half-way decent by my own standards. Again, I am proud.
But I feel as though I cannot share it with my family, but more so with my father, whom I honor above every other human, and who loves a good book like warm blanket.
What I have written...
It's dirty. And crass. And dark, and at parts disturbing. But it is also autobiographical, and so accurate to my thoughts and feelings, and revealing. Like taking off your clothes in front of a crowd of people who know you and showing them your body as much different than they thought it'd be -with scars and stains from nights they never knew you'd lived.

In all this, I am happy. Life is being lived in a manner I do not think I have grasped it thightly before. I wring it -and it is mine.

"Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes"

I've been listening to that song lately; the one by Paul Simon. "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes." It's carefree and ethnic in the way he does in "Goodbye Rosie,"
and can never fail to serve as a pick-me-up.
"Diamonds" is about a rich girl and a poor boy and how they "end up sleeping in a doorway." Eventually the boy learns to walk with diamonds on the souls of his shoes too, thus "curing these walking blues."
I like to think the song is about learning to live in a state of contentment with the world -and love being the vehicle to help you arrive at that mindset.
And the other day, as I was running into CC, and the skies were gray and it was cold and of the first of the true days of fall, I saw there, on the steps, just in front of the great sets of double doors, a girl curled up and sleeping on the lap of her boy. He was awake and staring out and stroking her hair.
I've seen them a couple of times before, but never without the other. The boy's face is impassive, and looks for all the world like a slightly Asian version of John Lennon behind his small round glasses. The girls face is round, beautiful, and innocent. I have never heard either of them speak.
Curled up in that doorway, they felt in love -both in the way of the very young and the very old, simultaneously.
Sometimes I'm tempted to listen to those who say we can cure this disease that ails man with love alone.
But then I remember that very few people have the capacity to hate with the intensity that former lovers and family members possess. Look at the headlines. Only in extreme circumstances does a brutally murdered victim not know their attacker. Ex boyfriends and husbands. Spouses. Siblings. Step children.
But I'd still like to believe in something as optimistic as love, or the idea of finding peace in the company of another. The fact that we are indeed capable of saving ourselves with our goodness.

But what is "good?" Can you define it by a universal standard?
What happened to the idea of morality? Ethics? These are honest questions.

The other day I actually got in an argument over the sanctity of human life. It was in philosophy class, of all places. It was easily the most worked up I've been in a while; and it truly felt good inside to have a belief actually worth fighting for.
Life is not cheap. The mind body and soul of another human being is no trivial matter. Is it so hard to reach within ourselves and find decency and respect for our fellow man? This is a question apart from my religion.
Relativism cannot give an answer. It cannot cure what ails us. It is watching our house on fire from the front lawn as our children and spouse burn inside with all of our possessions. It is a young man's luxury to hold it in contempt as I do.
But that alone does nothing to heal.
Stitch up our split skin. Our puncture wounds. Our hammered faces.


What can you do?