Oh, Huge Brain, You’re So Funny

Oh, brilliant, weighty, substantial, substantive, clever brain, why won’t you let me sleep?  That’s a rhetorical question of course, but I’m sure you already knew it– you’re kind of smart like that!  :O)

I used to question you, oh wonder of wonders, conqueror of doubt, and multi-tasker extraordinaire–as to why despite your massive intelligence and seeming all-knowingness, you chose to process such awesome amounts of information so very close to bedtime, rendering me helpless, a mere observer to your jaw-dropping information crunching power, power so intense as to be akin only perhaps to the world’s most blazingly speedy supercomputers daisy-chained together and plugged into God’s own power strip and by the man himself I might add!

But now I know better.  I know you are just too powerful, oversized, smart, amazing, gifted, and full of the types of knowledge that gives the most revered and inspired philosophers boy-like wet dreams each and every night—you just can’t contain yourself, can you?!?

You’re so funny, Brain.

The Tortured Artist, the Tortured We

They say about the tortured artist that there is a link between the art and the mania, the art and depression.  A toxic fuel coarsening through veins exhilarated but eroding quick.

Would they trade it in if they had the chance?  Burn clean and long, not dark and fast?  Would some steal back from the brink, push violently against their demons and sacrifice what could be their only chance at greatness?  Trash it for some safe, sterilized version of happiness?

And if genius entails depression, requires it of the otherwise meek and average, and if we find ourselves depressed, could the converse be true, could it entail genius? Or is there a middle ground, a godforsaken hell of a place where one can recognize the great, catch its fleeting glimpse, feel for just a moment the thrill of life’s defining, dangerous edges, but where we also know inside we can never retreat and fully leave the normal world behind, nor can we keep the faith required to let loose and really live, whether it means living or dying?

In My Daydream

In my daydream

I walked among the animals

I was a fire fightin’ monkey kingin’

Count of cash

The devil defied me

Then took a look

and shriveled at the challenge

Ain’t Nobody taking my life today

I roamed my decaying kingdom

Streets of asphalt and addiction

I peddled pride to the pusher

And evil to the elegant

I was looking for evidence of a plan

I found it in brownstone

I found it in all the little pieces of garbage

Laid out thoughtful and careless

Thrown in the street

Someone else’s memories

I was a schemer

A fucked-up master dreamer

With plans to rule the world

And turn it into all the things

That spin in my mind

They do it all the time

With reckless disregard

With relentless conviction

As for my fellow men

The white warlock

The black butcher

The asian animal

The Hispanic heretic

The native nihilist

Gather them up

Put them in a jar

Shake it with violence

And pour it out

What you will find

Is evidence of my plan

I walk between this world and that

I spin the world and make it real