Proud

(Mar 29th, 3:33PM, bus)

Teetering between casual and true

I've held the world in vain contempt

A mess of burden and flawed opinion

Unjust, a vortex of decay

negates each attempt that we may

present to change our existence.

And mankind, a frustrating kind.

Confused am I, for to be part of it, I feel

equitimely relief and shame.

So capable, dutiful, wonderful,

egotistical, frightened, and false.

A being with vast possibilities

so often squandered and tossed.

Plagued with hopeless imperfection,

the world was unworthy of my affection

and I reserved it for the few,

for the realm of the pure and true,

convinced that no one knew

a worthy way to live.

My mind sneered at those

who poured their soul out to the world

for what good is any task

when the results don't ever last?

So I attempted, lone and proud,

to discard what illusions I'd

unwittingly caught during my journey

of this annoying so-called Life.

So I built up a strict membrane

between the outside and my brain

insistent that my processes

pure and abstract remain.

Mathematician by accident,

my axioms were my soul.

Ignored the fleeting and mundane,

believed no facts but my own.

The world was my laboratory

my mind its skeptic servant

Trapped in the instinct of survival,

resigned to test until the end.

And indeed I built a system

of custom, personal truths.

Consistent, complete, heartfelt facts

The solipsist admired his work.

Then in the nature of the world,

Time and life failed to stop or peak

and I became a sole recluse

in my pure mental abode.

Ununderstood, ununderstandable,

my haughty self would not share

its beauty to an unworthy world.

And Loneliness struck

as it always had.

Comfortable in my achievement

unable to dismiss it anymore

as the fault of an incomplete model.

The sentiment was real and wild

and neither my truths nor my inferences

managed to prove it away.

For a perfect glass tower does not last

in a world of perpetual change

nor in a proud bag of flesh

who, vain, attempted to build

a system that justified and praised

his pride and his solitude,

and disguised his own fragile image,
his shameful truth,

that he was really only

afraid.

Of chance and whim

of failure, of surprise.

Of disknowing the answer

of not being the best

of being only another

dot in the canvas

of an ugly, ruined world.

But the world is not smooth glass

and neither is my nature.

We are flesh, bone, blood, dirt,

air, light, sounds, vibration,

gas, thoughts, heat, waves,

joy, fear, words, tears,

breath, death, shouts, and love,

a chaotic prodigy of creation.

We are explorers of possibility

free threads in an immense space.

It's a fairly mighty concept,

which we anyhow must face.

Bold or afraid.