A Poem
  by Kendra

To Be Published by ATI In Three Parts.
Here's Part I. (very long)

When you open your eyes
To the people who sleep
And sell you their life
As if we can keep going on...
Leading our lives divided
There’s comfort in silence I know
Who says you can’t be alone
With everyone who’s ever known
How full of hollow it’s grown
When we’ve risen up
Rose above
What is hate and what is love
They are the same
So is everything
And find the peace
That’s underneath
Tangled with chaos
And all the grief we feel
When we live our lives
Outside of life
The slumber that is my bride
Because our thoughts intertwined
Is not what you think is right
What is life?
What is life
If you don’t even try
But trying brings nothing in time
All along on the ride
Will you learn or be blind
Both may rip you away from divine
Crawling through life
You may never find what is yours
If you close up or take it all in
Who can ever win
Cut your losses and grin
And live while there’s life to live
Carve your path
Leave life intact
I want to be blind
But those reasons are mine
I don’t want to see outside
And lose the light that resides
In the words we often hide
Cause we have to prove
And have pride
And strive to be alive
 Atop all others
Is when
We fall into death again
Strangers you are my friends
We just haven’t talked yet
We just cancelled debts
That we all know we owe
Our mother said so
They gave us life
But not our free will
Something alive
That never stays still
And who says you’re here forever?
Chasing the youth
We’re born to lose
This "god" is in you
And what’s evil is too
Chasing the laughter that fades
When what’s inside you stays
Till you fall away
What will you think when you lay
Seconds away from change
And relearn what you’ve been played
And interpret in your own way
Why you’re here
What you’ll leave
For those to receive
Will you have nothing to give but
A house full of junk
You didn’t even need
But you worked
But not merely feed
But to feed your greed
And left a monumental funeral plot
A testament to how you bought
Everything that mattered to you
To show others what you could do
With those paper devils
That became all of you
Working for the sake of working
Making money so you can spend
Then make it all over again
Everything that seems flawed
But the beauty gets lost
Don’t love
Assume that you have won
Consume
Be near to
But don’t be close
Inhale like a ghost
Anything beyond your nose
Is something you’ll never know
No
No
Let it glow
The snakes chasing it’s tail
And he’s swallowed it whole
break the cycle
and save your tale
others might tell
pass it on down
procreation well it’s a step on the ladder...

like the sex
or the baby
look what you’re doing it for
is it so you can tell them when they see
they cannot change the world
and you see yourself in them...
or you see what you lost sight of
your child
your beacon of love to the world
not just another
who’ll live in this hole
nurture them
let them cut away
that is the path they will take
if your life turns out to be fake
and the see through the cracks
in all things
Do you
Don’t you
Reel in the coil
How is your filter?
Has it been soiled
You’ve been spoiled
But not right rotten
You write down
"stop it"
but it’s always the same topic
do be/don’t be
too myopic
is there
too broad
when it’s all connected
There’s light in generations
That can’t be stomped out
Because it’s passed on to people who know
When into place falls
All we’ve fallen from
Bring truth to your days
And thought to all the deeds
And angry optimism
Paves the path to inner needs
That are shared in all these souls
Of people ready to go
But stay while they can
So others can know
Anything that is worth anything
But what do we really need
That hasn’t been had
I am so glad
That I’m being had
In this world that’s a sham
Ride on wave while you can
This reality
Failing project as such
I only don’t care
Because I care too much
They say remain industrious
As the days solidify and fluster us
Who remains oblivious?
The ones who shut themselves up
No words in their shell without doors
Eyes aren’t even for feeling anymore
Just something we cast to the floor
When we’re ashamed.
Their lives without trust
There’s a cure for your sickness
It’s shutting up
And giving in
When generations before you
Tell you what you should do
Do they have more answers then you
It’s hard to admit
But they fell away too
Losing their youth
It’s not about greys
It’s about turning life
Into black and white
Look into eyes
When they pass you by
They’re calling out
But who is home
Inside your brain
You just look away
You don’t want to admit pain
You can sugar coat it again
Instead of bringing sweetness and comfort
To say you’re not alone
And this is growing up
Some never do
They really get stuck
In what society says is the path to good life
Educate, impregnate, purchase and die
And teach your children well
That they need to keep buying
So all will be well
There’ll be jobs for all
But no real sustenance
Just pennies saved to be re-spent
And feed the economy
And help turn out sludge
In the form of waste
In the form of hate
Of words that fall from our mouths,
As toxic as the space
On which we run this race
Nature knows its place
And has found ways
How?
I can’t say
How she survives
The passing of time
And pours through the cracks
Of our concrete gold mine-
We all want to say what we know
You’re growing up tall
But what has life shown
You and all your dreams
Sewing the seams
To let others be
This is what all music brings
Rhetoric
To cleanse and then-
How can you trust them
Is you can’t trust yourself
The circular cycles
That never find rest
Go and be
What you are best
Yourself
It’s underneath what you’ve been taught
They just want to show you’re there all along
Unless of course, they strung you along
To help you sing
Their very own song
But it’s in you
Because you’re a man
Just find it while you can
Slap the hand
Hold the hand
Whatever you think is real
May not be but there are no deals
To be made afterwards
After all
Unless of course there is
But there’s heaven on earth if you live
Death is your final way out
Of struggle and all the doubt
But live for the beauty and feed
>From the knowledge that gave us our greed
You want to breed
You feel you should plant your seed
Plant your life on the life of another
Plan your life for mistakes and error
And throw away the plans
You land where you land
When you fall away from the hand
And raise your fist and start again
Don’t be sorry for change
If you want to be living
Things can’t stay the same
Because they never do
But they always do
I would not say it if it wasn’t true
But words are just what we’ve been taught
Do you see cycles that rot
But rot brings life
When on carcasses and ignorance
You find life
Welcome the sickness in you
And do what you have to do
And live without regret
Expand you mind
All will be fine
In it’s inability to be fine
You find what you find
It’s not yours
Share yourself
 use your will
See others wills
Break down your walls
We tumble and fall
Because winter in our souls
Makes us realize the light
We all want our way
So that makes us fight
Never find peace while we might
And if we didn’t crack
How could we put together
The pieces of our lives
Forever whatever
Live within your means
See your mean...and your dreams
Elevate yourself
And get put down -
Living in the stars
With your feet on the ground
All I ask is what was found
When you looked inside yourself
If you felt you could drown
Because you ignored it
And thought all was sound
While In the salty seas
That are you and me
Vessels that give in
And take out
What we’re capable of
The animals shoved off the shore
That’s for sure
They knew what we were in for
When the floods came
There’s a lesson within
Do you sink or swim
Will you fall from your own self again
You’re thrashing in the sea
When you don’t see
And if you go under
You’ll see our mother
Is angry at father time
Because we’ve been here on relatively finite line
And millions of years of light
We’ve cancelled because we’re in the right
Insects carry on life
We’re so much bigger
But useless in the chain of life
We take and we take and we
Give only if we’ll receive
And mosquitoes
They make us bleed
And the mosquitoes feed
The forests
That were once full of trees
As nature tries to breathe
Life into all we’ve killed
The animal scat brings logic in fact
They ate what they needed
Gave a little back
To start the cycle again
We take it in
Maybe get fat
Flush away nutrients
And we can’t get them back
And we don’t care
We used our free will
To kill
And expanding your mass
But in life so temporary
What really lasts
Except our notions and thoughts
Processes and faults
Trials and doubts
Beauty without
Remorse for what others will think
Nuclear war
Is the rapture for sure
As men fight for power
At the cost of what’s pure
It’s happened in history before
To make the empires crumble
And bring the people back to the land
Cause people forgot they were only a man
Amongst other men
All are great
Try the upperhand
And seal our fate
What makes you want to be great
Or greater than the great I should say
Those who say what they say
And don’t try to throw it all away
The tower of babel
Is another tale
of man’s need
to be in the sky
When all the air is in his mind
Build it up
And rub it out
We’re high in the sky
With our temples of stone
Pillars for profit
Smokestacks that smother
And I wish I could speak the tongues of others
Just to know what they think of our purpose
We were made for tribal existence
Like animals
Like packs of wolves
Travelling around
And having just what we need
Life
We think it’s defined by what we can
Hold
We get sucked into mark downs
But we’ve been sold
Whoever denied that life wasn’t all frowns
A smile is just a frown upside down
Upset the cycles
And turn it around
I heard what goes around comes around
What do you perpetuate?
How you feel others are wrong?
What is your song?
You know the words
But can we hum along
Cause at the root of it all
We know the tune
But we add our own beats to create something new
To bring our own point of view
I how do we change the world
When we only care about ourselves
Absorbed by the suction
Admit it
Spit it all out
Taste life again
Your mouth
Admit you worry for others because how you would feel
If something happened
Then you are real
Admit things that show your place
See your ugliness
Before you find grace
All is the same
Maybe we’re just buying
Into something that’s new
In it’s antiquity
Just be re-spewn
If it didn’t matter
Words would not have fit
So easily together
When will we all be
A separate piece of one another
You are my brothers but you live your own life
I can’t control you
I can if you can’t control yourself
That is the danger of not being sound
Others around
Will try to pound
Themselves into you
The contradictions contained
In the world we’ve barely sustained
I could fight for this all day
I see this in the insane
The "sane" have become the lame
They are the meek who’ll inherit the earth
They’ll be left with their buildings
And jerks
And without all the small people
Who kept the earth running
Farming the land
You’ll have your paper trails
And your profits for what
 A life with no purpose
Or is it’s purpose to stop
This bullshit that is
Having people work in mines
To be given the shaft by all those fine
Uppercrust people who are sad
And sick
And it’s a not even a sickness worth revelling in
Keep raping the earth to run all your cars
As you travel on four wheels to nowhere that’s far
Know where you’ll be it’s not far
Crawling on all fours
Begging the forgiveness of this earth you have ruined
You are so arrogant you have assumed
There is no life outside of you
Are there other planets so capable of our productivity
Possibly just incapable of such stupidity
I only say it to see if you’ll look within
When did life lose it’s resonance
When will you lose and take hold of the innocence
Sink or swim?