vulture

You can't keep living on a dopamine chase.

Nothing grows there. 

No amount of rain known to humankind can make the desert an ocean again overnight. 

Ocean. Life. Coolness. Lakes. Like...

You can search for as long as you wait

only to be as soon hungry as you were last full. 

For a word. A look. A wonder. For the end of this hunger.

Your eyes wide to the world. Heart open like book pages. Stories of success. Stories with the end, you have memorized. 

There are memories of the last happy high that survive. 

May you feel a third of that in the next page.

You can't keep trekking barefoot on burning, scorpion-filled sand. 

Don't ask when, who, what you'll be happiest. 

Your feet will only be stung. Red, swollen, barely scabbing.

What does one do in deserts if one does not move? If one does not search? 

Then one... shrivels? while one waits? 

Or do the burnings and stings of the search transform one's feet? New callouses. Adding heat resistance to numb your memory and next ache.

There is a memory, of when things were wonderful, but it is only a repainting as you trek. A metallic, shimmery mirage keeping you hungry.

How the heart aches, only when it strays from happiness.

How well the memory works, when it strays from the capability of making new ones.

How far one strays in the search for happiness. 

Happiness is not in a hormone. Is not dopamine. 

Happiness was never all that worth it. It's not that big a deal. 

No deal. 

Not real. 

Just a transaction, perhaps, between the world and yourself, where you make sure to take the most, leave with the best deal.

Of course, that's not true. 

Happiness is a part of something? A part of that last first-scoop-of-ice-cream memory. A part of whatever shit. Whatever. Add whatever nice memory you've got here.

I've already found the answer before. On purpose, I've just circled around it like vultures over carrion. For what purpose? I make myself laugh. Because, well, frankly... it's a lot easier to mess up finding the quickest route to dopamine than it is aiming the arrow at myself. At my own self-progress.

The bush is already beaten. The sun burns. The vulture circles.

I only dry up, shrivel and shrivel, from living and re-living the same truth.

I can't find happiness. I can't make it. I can't make anything that isn't far from being unreal. 

I don't know what I'm spewing here, but the thoughts are heading somewhere. 

The point is, I can't keep doing what I'm doing. 

I can't keep a hunger like this.

I've got to stop flying over dead bodies. 

I don't want to die feeling like a sad bean that has wasted her time finding something the easy way that in its easiness, always is the wrong way.

The better way for me is through it. No more circling. A cut. Across paper and memory. 

I want it to rip. 

I want to aim the arrow and shoot a straight. Keep things simple. Keep my eyes on the target, in the heat, feet scalding as I remember water. 

I remember water.

If the arrow is straight and I keep my eyes on the target, I hope I find myself just as I am reminded of myself. 

        A vulture is diving somewhere right now.

The water I had been searching for was always in my blood. 

        The vulture can only feast when it stops circling.

I imagine that arrow piercing my back. How it traveled across the globe, 360, from myself to myself, painting my back a red flower blossom. I fall where I am. The gasp that escapes is a mantra to time where I could have been.

Spewing nonsense on my knees about wasting my time and how silly I am. That I didn't. Simply, I didn't think to remember myself. I didn't want to.

But the water, may it be everywhere. Just as I remembered. Escaping from my back and cooling my skin for the first time on that desert night. 

I hope in the morning, I wake up. White shirt now crispy and maroon. That I walk on, never forgetting that I do have what I should have remembered much, much earlier, to save the many reincarnations I was as a vulture -- circling around the same damn problems.

Circling, seeing the truth, and still flying as if blind. I keep true to the inertia of the circle, and unlike a vulture, I don't brave the dive. My carrion decays below me.

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omg dear reader! this poem was like so out of the blue. I have no idea what happened. it started out so different from how it ended. I forgot every rule. I just went on, throwing everything around for a little bit, like this game I once really liked playing in my film class, OctoDad. 

I'm sorry for the bloody imagery. 

also, no cannibalism intended in the end. i was trying to say something loud in a basic form. heh.

i am being weird right now. i

am so

weird right now. feeling weirddddd~ 

I'm sober. 

And the whole arrow imagery, I am perfectly okay and would never hurt myself, but in the middle of writing this, I randomly clung onto the imagery of the arrow. And... heh. Yo, I promise I'm good. I'm making too many "I'm good" promises lately, haha, but they're all true. Dang.