I haven't written any poetry for a good while now. The words simply refuse to come, the ideas are amateur, and the direction of my thoughts is a ship in a hurricane.

My experiences are too fumbled with profound meaning and meaningless frivolities interwoven into one cocoon mass that I've forgotten how to dissect. I've fallen in love, halfway, twice, and not a thing of it mattered. I've made friends and then given them up, because I forgot how to keep them, how to hold a good conversation, how to be selfless for a moment. I've felt exhilarating joy and fallen flat on my nose.

But, nothing I write seems to make any sense at all, nor do I find myself pithy, wise, or innovative enough.

Still self-confident and relatively content, I find myself drifting into cold, gray obscurity. The world of pseudo black and white is breaking the words on the page into scattering infinitesimal pieces before I even have a solid chance to try to find them.

I am without poetry but full of banter. My depths are failing me. The mud, the oil, the black is rising and in the process confining and concealing the things that I'm searching for: the love, the hope, the meaning that I seek to find.

I heard some students laughing at the word "pursuit" today and it broke my heart.

Anne Frank, Moses, Paul
Augustine, Maya Angelou
Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg

the poor and insecure girl from the Philippines that uses it to cope with the brutality of our collective existence

a face is just a face
and our eyes are windows to
our souls