Author Archives: Matt

DobbsHeadMed #1

Pale Blue Dot from Cassini image: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=52392, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4400327

Image: Pale Blue Dot from the Cassini Spacecraft, found on Wikipedia “Pale Blue Dot”

I thought about the centuries of collapse and rebuilding and maneuvering left in the power vacuum that was the Roman Empire. All these little peoples clamoring to control little plots of land slowly turning into nations wielding the power of the future evolved in the wake of cultural collapse. Little ripples on the surface of human civilization and our time on this world.

Each existence interacting with a timeline not of their own but belonging to the deepest moments of the universe itself. We clamor to adjust to every tectonic movement, world spinning gravity and ultraviolet waves adapted to over the course of billions of years of failed experiments that successfully selected long enough to exist for various lengths of time. Eventually remembering, dreaming, and inventing each little lifeform existing with their own unique ways to survive on a planet. A planet which dances around a star which flows around, with its hundreds of millions of glittering siblings, around a super massive black hole.

Here we are dude, breathing some more.

Focus on your breath. Be part of it all once again.

If I cared to pray.

I feel as lost as always but these days I wonder with a whole lot more gumption. This little life is as meaninglessly meaningful as you allow yourself to be. We all make an impact (with intention or unintentionally) and by the end of the day we must all live only with ourselves and how we’ve coerced our values and the words we’ve said into the deeds we’ve actually done.

 

When I do whisper into the infinite, “Let me be true to this existence. Please let me find lessons in struggle. Help me rise to be better than I was when I awoke. Help me become one who can challenge positively. Please allow my mind to seek lessons that open it in ways I couldn’t’ve obviously perceived. Please help me be able to protect that which I love and those that I feel attached. Let me forgive and give thanks to those who came before.”

 

In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

Augustodunum

Augustodunum was founded by the Roman emperor Augustus to serve as the tribal capital of the Aedui people, France

I love looking at maps. I find myself entranced by them, human infrastructure, art, patterns, visual history, what’s not to love?

I was looking at one of Augustodunum and it made me think that the city its self must have been a significant investment in land, labor, capital, technology, ect.to make that town happen in roman times. A little Rome in a foreign land for a foreign people and a hand full of Roman entrepreneurs and authoritarians. The changes the city was part of and home to had and impact that lasted untold generations on that area and history.

I found myself staring at the walls that surrounded the town and wondered how dangerous it must have been to identify as or with the Romans in the area around the city, especially outside the walls or in the surrounding boonies. Kind of like the Baghdad Green Zone or our little fire bases that dot Afghanistan. It must be dangerous to work with what’s perceived as the empire out in the sticks where the empire only rules when it is physically present.

I wonder who will occupy the walls and the mounds of mud when we have left in all the places we occupy. I wonder what they will think of us, I wonder what history will say. Will we be spoken of like Rome in myth and power, rises and falls, wars and control or will those who come after have other things to whisper and different things to say about us? How will we be remembered, what will out legacy be?

Knuckles

My fists belong in walls
knuckles cracked and bleeding.
Exposed bone tainted by pumping veins
recklessly repairing pieces of me
that were damaged intentionally.

My mind desires to be in the thick.
Adrenaline whispers rumors of enemies
that are about to pounce and penetrate
my defenses. Fight or flight against
chemical deceit, figments of an
injured mind and broken instinct.

Reason wrestles a flush of chemicals
grappling with phantoms for dominance,
controlled breathing and meditation
only makes me think of shooting.
I want to be left alone, like a hermit
with some cold lie of peace.

My non-violent solution is
damage my fists on non-sentient things

twist my weapons in on themselves,
can’t trust me not to be abusive so
I destroy them so as to never be used again,
except to brutalize my own
fucked up mentality.

Hindu Kush

The Hindu Kush Mountains, from Wikipedia

The Hindu Kush Mountains, from Wikipedia

Here is one of the first things I wrote that I was really proud of. I uploaded an audio/Visual of he work on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi5ProRjXM8 

Hindu Kush

 

Broken dreams and screaming cerebration

dismantle my convictions of yesteryear.

Spectres of a stalwart foundations whisper illusions

from across the chasm of history.

 

Ancient earth

crushed under the soles of boots,

as indomitable as a Macedonian phalanx

but its soil shifts surely as a routed charge.

 

Sealed in the timeworn mountains

is the blood of invaders

feeding nutrients to violet blooms.

 

Cracked creaking fortress walls

are the exposed strata

of remains from millennia of foreign occupations.

 

Nights illuminated only by stars labour,

Orion’s scowl and the night’s highway

lure hearts to the hearths of faraway home.

The pale pin light hewn sky

is the accomplice to self-examination.

 

Crippled will, worn away from

continuously crashing waves of resistance,

force even the strongest to weep,

to retreat to the confines of walls.

 

The justification of conquerors may change,

but those mountains stay the same.

Flags

All flags carry with them the shame and pride, glory and depravity carried by those individuals who marched under the flag’s shadows.
Let us not have flags represent who we are but let our deeds speak for themselves.
There is no nation, nor kingdom, nor belief or religion that’s not gilded in gold by the good they accomplished and covered in the blood of its past. All we create are human institutions and that in itself defines them as flawed.

Soulbreak

I wonder what soulbreak feels like.

Heartbreak is one helluva thing,

it can rip that heart straight out your chest,

leaving you bleeding and gasping for air,

just a pile of skin and bones

all splayed out in the open for vultures to pick at.

 

But heartbreak ain’t soulbreak.

I never want to feel it,

but I wonder what it feels like.

 

I’ve never lost someone I couldn’t quit.

I quit smoking a while back,

a few days later picked it up again.

On again off again diminishes my resilience,

exposes me like a wind-swept hill in a desert countryside,

constant fret over some chemical I need to be rid of

 

but, addiction ain’t soulbreak.

I never want to feel it,

but I wonder what it feels like.

 

Like the “lucky one” who didn’t die in a missile strike

you carry on like you just walked out of a bomb blast. Everything

is ravaged, all outside stimulus is padded, like experiencing life

in a sound proof room, pulsating to the beat of a heart, on adrenaline.

Love is a battlefield they say, but especially the dying part,

the end of something as cherished as life or love, that shit ain’t pretty.

 

But a battlefield ain’t soulbreak.

I never want to feel it,

but I wonder what it feels like.

 

I’ve seen it happen, in movies repeatedly

but only once in reality. Vanished love, leaving a vacuum

for despair and black anguish to flood in, to fill

a missing gap that use’ta be shaped like someone

you cherished even more than yourself. The soul breaks

when you emotionally realize your love, the love, is over.

 

Nothing of what I’ve experienced has been soulbreak.

I never want to feel it,

I’ve seen what it feels like.

 

Luckily, for those that don’t put a gun in their mouth

and pull that tempting trigger, life moves forward

shit gets better, and best of all, them godforsaken memories

that broke your soul will fade. Keep on, one foot

in front of the other, you will find something new

to shove into your chest right next to your heart, that you

can cherish, like no other.

 
 

Post-script

Remembering the tears flood from your eyes and your terrific bemoaning

sends my soul into a rout to this day. I stood in front of you, exposed as

the coward I truly am, for I was frozen and left stuttering in your time of need.

I see you stripped before my eyes as a hero for courageously feeling

without any question of recompense from your other.

Your tears shame me, for I am afraid of a feeling, a feeling you marched into

 

Without question.

 

We never really recover our past in devastating moments. Our shattered hearts

and minds, assumptions and souls just get patched together again only to

resemble the structure that it was once before. But shit breakin’

ain’t always a bad thing. One piece of yourself has already been broken,

might as well smash some others, more likely than not it was shaped by

someone else in your past, then you can rebuild in your own image.

It

Breathing Earth

Sometimes I feel like I get it, some lyrical ‘it’ that few but the dying understand. It whispers at the periphery, it calls to me and makes me feel uneasy sometimes. Othertimes it makes me feel at home, I guess it just depends on which day’s perspective of it we’re talking about.

Right now sitting where I do I remember when I first got it. At first it hurt, over the years it broke me in but eventually it just felt like a well placed callus that you eventually come to appreciate. Sure it’s rough and sometimes it hurts but most of the time, if I notice it at all, it pads me and reminds me of the journey and the places I’ve seen and people cherished.

It’s inevitable you know. I see people flee from it and try to pretend it’s not there but it’s ever present and it could happen at anytime. Why not pursue happiness and fulfillment while you can? It’s just around the corner and every second past this one is just bonus round.

I Wanted to Know

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Here is one I’ve been working on instead of studying for finals.

 

I Wanted to Know

 

As a child I dreamt of being someone.

Searching for a semblance of what it all means

wishing to be a part of some bigger human history.

 

Grasping at the lives of the dead,

striving to see the secrets of their silence.

 

When I was young I longed to be in love.

Desired to be consumed by burning passions,

is joys and sorrows, ins and outs, ups and downs

 

I yearned to feel that thing so many sought

to help make this thing seem worthwhile.

 

I always wanted to know what poets seem to.

I sought it love

but in this life I live

its the struggles I wish to be free of.

 

Poetry isn’t love, it’s release.

This page can have my pain,

I’ll hold love for me

and those that share the same.

Meaning and Purpose

Meat Suit

Meat Suit

The meaning: I am a biological entity that’s a natural bi-product of the world and universe in which I exist. We humans literally are “a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The meaning of my life is to experience the ability to perceive and the interaction with that perception’s ramifications, also known as experience. My meaning is the experience of this limited life that I get to live. I get to think and live, the meaning is the experience.

The purpose: “The purpose of life is a life with a purpose.” A fundamental question must be asked by those seeking purpose, “What is important?” Your family, your community, your planet? Pursue purpose purposefully, enjoy happiness when it is found in the oddest of places but pursue purpose fully. Open you eyes and see, open your mind and see further.

There are no gods, no kings, no masters in choosing what you do, just influences by other humans and interaction with human systems or human interaction with natural systems. We are cogs of change, for good and for evil, we are pieces of bigger systems likes individuals in a family or a group in a polity or a nation in a geopolitical system (or an individual in a world system). We are each others destinies but we are distracted and blinded by control and influence mechanisms, like entertainment or archaic ideas of control. We live in a world built on thousands of years of grinding and constant societal change and evolution, most of us blindly moving through life without much context of our civilization’s experience and the way in which it’s past affects us.

We stand on the precipice of the future unfolding. Those that live are at the crest of a continually crashing wave of time. Our time is unfolding before our eyes and it’s us that wield this thing, this destiny of us together. The future of human life use to be controlled by others, thought by many that some better version of humanity was steering and guiding us and leading the rest of us like some controlling architect of an unknowable universe guiding our species into the future. But those days are dead, exposed to reality, the ideas of a day far gone.

We, alone in our environment (local, planetary, cosmologically) guide the sway of destiny with billions of others together, we are living in a revelation, the fruit of knowledge that whispers to us that we are the captains of our life the masters of our ships of destiny. The fruit of the tree of knowledge has been bitten long ago and our eyes slowly throughout time opened to a reality that has been unfolding. We are small, incomprehensibly so but we are free within our biological and technological limitations, we are free much like the cap of the pyramid is free of its base. Our foundations, our yesterdays guide us (sorry I started typing, but this feels like a different argument and different tangent).

If we are free to create our futures, what do you wish to create? What world would you help to build?

If we are constrained by our history what should we be seeking to subvert? If we are products of our birth what should we see in ourselves that our patriarchs are unable to tell us? If we are born of nation-states then what portions of our own history are being obfuscated? Where do I exist within the current system? Can I move out of the current paradigm? These have been (are) a few of my questions, good luck in finding yours. Always remember answers are speed bumps to more honed questions.