I love the world, and I’ve swam in life
I’ve tripped the light fantastic
And picked electric daisies from the sky.
I’ve felt true powerlessness in the beat
Of last breaths slipping away in my arms,
Or a human mind fighting like an animal
Against tainted perceptions of itself.

I fear, despite all I’ve felt before,
My shock of emotions remain a mystery
Irrational in every breathing sense.
Fingers touch me to the core
Precious loving stifles frantic breaths
Tender touches of lips come to stray
And can’t avoid the traps that steal away
To trammel in the roots of my quaking being.

I wish to say I’ll stop it some way
It is my dream to disentangle
This Gordian knot that beats with blood.
I can only wish as I work,
That you can love my fear
I have no where to go alone
So please stay with me and listen.
I’m too afraid to give my weakness voice,
But I’m on my knees to beg you, please,
Please stay here.
I untie this knot for you,
So please love my beating fear.

Which is not as kindly as Kindness
Is since I cannot say no to a talk
With future’s specter

Instead, begrudgingly, I entertain
In the dark drawing room of my mind
Where kindly without kindness Death
Helps himself to tea and I oblige
For an unknown time
Until, somehow
He leaves.

Am I the story
Of my journey?
Am I simply the dream
I’ve chased and changed?
Am I defined by my
Abilities or the things
I enjoy?

I am more than that
But no more than the world
And people around me

My story is like all others
In that it’s hundreds of other
Stories I have perservered through
Dreams fought for and achieved
Or dreams changing in the waking world
My story is many stories together
I could not possibly tell them all

What is important is how
We take these stories and grow
There is room for you to see
Yourself in my story
And just as I have taken
Inspiration from past stories
To create things in life
So shall you with all your stories
And all your inspiration too.

——

The above is the voiceover dialog of my film entry for the www.youtube.com/HP You-on-You contest, which has today been announced as a Semi-Finalist! You can visit the official video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRlfltwXq-8 or go to the contest site itself, click on “View + Vote”, and look for “Write it Like a Seagull” in this week’s top entries! To vote for it, all you have to do is click on the little, green Thumbs-up that pops up in the banner ad if you go to the video directly, or will be to the right of the video if you visit the contest page.  If you’d like, I’d greatly appreciate everyone who felt like linking the video to their friends, their blogs, facebooks, or twitters to encourage people to vote. You can also bookmark it, and vote daily if you enjoy it that much! My goal with the video was to illustrate the atmosphere of struggle, inspiration and hope as an artist in life, without ever directly saying, “I am an actor,” or “I am a writer,” or even “I am an artist.” My other goal was to create a video that my family both understood and enjoyed, which is a much harder task than you might imagine. As it is, my mother loves this, so it’s already successful for me on two levels!

Moving on to the Finalist round will give me access to the Finalist cash prize, which will be a strong help in replacing my car which was totalled out by my insurance company after hitting a deer. If I do move on to the Finalist round, I will naturally be promoting this video again for the Grand Prize, which will go a long way–if not ALL the way–in allowing me to get the Master’s degree I’ve been trying to save for. By being judged a Semi-Finalist, I have already won an HP Artist’s Edition laptop, so we can do this!

Thank you very much, and if nothing else, please enjoy my video!

For all the days of days
I’ve been trying to walk the road
The land gives way further to waste
I can’t accept this sight
That this is all there is

Why do I feel alone in my anger
That the world has fallen with ash
And buried all the dreams that were.
Why do I quell the rage within when I
Can only scream at rats and roaches
Who are unable to imagine better days
To come when they’ve found perfection.

I never thought
In all the days of days
That we’d return to a point
Where action based on hope
Was revolutionary action.

The voices are loud and everywhere
Repeating chants in a background roar
While the people in front of me scream
Words that are different every time
But come down to the simplistic queries:
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?!
YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG! WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN?!”

Yet when I try to get the meaning,
When I try to find my way off and escape
The parade is nothing but gibberish
I escape one vignette to crawl through
My regret and just climb onto another
Over and over again in repetition
I try to avoid the mistake of staying
But every time I try to go I end up back
In a different twist of the same screw

It never quits until I grow too tired to sleep
Upon which time I am far too tired to wake
I lie in bed staring at the sunlight squeezing
Past the blinds to mark up the ceiling and ask
“What am I doing here? What is there to listen to?”

At least if you can go out at night.
I used to cruise alongside the beach
No city stars but quiet ocean breezes
A way to focus before the lion’s share
Of work in light of tomorrow’s sun.

At least when I could go out at night
In the crisp, spring air of March.

Now in the foothills, barbed fences
And animals running loose all over.
Wild dogs and coyotes sniffing about
Out here in the wild, desert dark.

A crystal clear sky but no haven
In which to enjoy sparkling light

Nothing to do during the day either
Everyman’s choked of every dull cent
To lavish on unknown employees for
Oiling their business day with ease.
No room for the unknown in the day

Any bit of waste is a true loss today.
Nothing but pre-packaged guarantees

Only the right labels and warranties.
And where are we going in this nowhere
With people broken out of old packages
We are the unknown to these businesses,
The vast dark in which beasts lurk.

Maybe I will walk in the March dark
I’m a coyote in the light of this town

Lets walk in the starlit air tonight
Either way we’re desperate to survive

Lets play wild dogs in the sunlight
And bite the hands that abandoned us.

Nearly impossible to focus on
There was this earth-shattering
Noise aside from the boiling water
Screaming in the back of my head

While I thought about dying
Moments ago while preparing food

Abruptly, to be sure, a spring
Off this mortal coil, no polite
Shuffle at my age, with my health
It would be untimely to others

But what to say about dying
Is the same as asking about living

The only reason the thought comes
…Would it be any better at all
Any easier than finishing off days,
Weeks, months, years, decades…

I mainly fear all that I will,
When it comes time for me to die,

Will look back as the end inevitable
Comes despite resistance or regret
And realize in all that living done
It was the same as dying years ago

I do not want my life, as I live it
To be a struggle to hold deluded
Reasons against Death.

It is my very breath lost in the sky
And I stand on the edge of reality
There is no gravity in this world now
I am merely standing still between
The twinkling stars of the universe
And the endless sheet of blank plains

Above and all encompassing around me
My dreams dance, they dance, they dance
Like furious cables of wind tossing and
Dissipating their ethereal colors in
Pathways of formless inspiration

I stand on the edge of it all
My lungs burn for precious air
The cold stings every corner
I have no fire now
I have no spark
There is no warmth
My fuel is gone

I stand on the edge of two paths
I may crawl deep into the ground
To be embraced away in warmth
Or fall into the sky to burn
In trails of my escaped dreams
Two very different actions but
In the end what’s the difference.

Janet E. Rosebaum published the new article in Pediatrics evaluating how 17 year-old teenagers who say, “Listen, I’ll write my name down and take this stupid pledge if you shut up, leave me alone, and stop looking at me like I’m a whore,”  mysteriously and amazingly have sex by the age of 21, with a variable number of partners. The study itself reveals that students who have pledged for virginity are just as likely to have sex as students who receive the same sex education and have not pledged to virginity are. Furthermore, the study reveals that teenagers who do pledge to virginity are less likely to use a condom or practice actual safe sex than those  who don’t.

This aspect of the study is also creating an impact on not only sex education levels, but sex intelligence levels of students (education being the amount of facts a student knows, and intelligence being their ability to apply facts and other knowledge.) Preparing for a new study, researchers are noting that somehow students are lacking enough sexual intelligence to believe that saying, “No, I won’t” during Phys Ed., is enough preparation for when a libido says, “Oh, yes, you will!” For people who have lived between the ages where puberty ends and death, most are asking how anyone could allow a student to think that. “Look at the amount of literature that has been written about youthful proclivities towards sex,” says a concerned English teacher, “If Shakespeare knows that teenagers are going to make rash, sexual decisions even with the full weight of the Catholic church on them, why don’t we?”

“This is what we call a ‘sexual intelligence crisis’,” explains Professor Holbert of Berkeley. “Not just for the students, but for the people coming up with this information. This reveals a ‘Too cool for school’ mindset, but instead it’s more of a, ‘Too cool to be a raging ball of hormones’ mindset. Student’s need to be aware that if they put themselves in situations that can become sexually charged, they’re going to be idiot, raging balls of hormones and need to be able to handle their stupid decisions in the safest manner possible.”

There is opposition to the results. “The author inaccurately equates the holistic breadth of an abstinence education program to the one-time event of a virginity pledge,” says Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, “A pledge and an abstinence program are not synonymous.” This is an assumption that researchers must contend with. “We can’t say students who have taken the pledge have mentally ‘completed’ the program,” says sociologist Jennifer Whitberg, “I mean, at the point of being asked to take a pledge like that, most students realize the severe retardation of the curriculum, go through the motions of taking the pledge, and end up getting their information from a place that’s a little more grounded in reality; such as the guy they buy their pot from.” Of course, just because the students believe their new sources are grounded in reality, Whitberg adds “It doesn’t mean they are actually reliable.” Meanwhile, the students who don’t take the pledge may view themselves as challenging the program, so they “scrutinize it for what little, relevant information is available,” which allows them to discover that condoms do exist, and are useful.

Valerie Huber contends that the study reveals a later age at which students are becoming sexually active, which is not average for their peers. Of course, being that abstinence only programs are the only programs are allowed in public schools, research is now being done to discover what peers public school students may have that don’t receive the education. “This study looked only at individuals who have specific skills that are taught or reinforced in an abstinence program, so we are not at all surprised that they abstained about 4 years longer than their peers. This study simply reinforces the need to continue the skill building practices found in a typical abstinence-centered class,” Valerie Huber literally says.  Literally. No, there’s no joke here, that was actually said, and investigation is underway to discover what possible programs could be proposed for continued abstinence education among college aged and adult students that will not be laughed out of existence for trying to prevent pre-marital sex amongst people who live outside partental supervision, and are legally allowed to drink.

Parents who support the program are also thrilled with this prospect. “If my child is waiting until 20, or even at least 18 to have sex, instead of 17, well when he goes and has sex without a condom like these kids are likely to do, I can at least callously throw him out of my house without being charged with negligence!” says ecstatic mother, Tracey Smith.  ”21′s close,” says Matthew Rodriguez, “I’d rather have them off my health insurance when they start having sex, especially if it’s likely to be without condoms.”

The NAEA itself is expected to maintain its position. In its literature to parents, it states that it wants to safeguard children who are most likely not psychologically and emotionally developed enough to deal with the physical and emotional impacts of sex. “The program’s working if kids are waiting until they’re adults; in essence it’s doing its most basic goal,” says an efficiency analyst, “Even if when they do start having sex, they start having the most dangerous and riskiest sex because they mistakenly believe that condoms have a 44% failure rate due to the education they receive from the current materials out for abstinence only education, at least they’ll be 21, and that should make being diagnosed with HIV much easier for them.”

It’s all just a-dook a-dook a gobbledy-gook
I see so many people reading so many things
Yet of these things there’s no understanding
Hear them repeated and repeated until it’s all
A-dook a-dook
A-dook a-dook
A gobbledy-gook

Wonderful words a-dook a-dook a gobbledy-gook
To hear them chanted as you walk down the street
Legions of people speaking the same language
As ugly as it may sound to hear in perpetuity
A-dook a-dook
A-dook a-dook
A gobbledy-gook

Hear them say a-dook a-dook a gobbledy-gook
When they really sing a favorite song perhaps
It’s what comes out when you love something
You’ve no strength to believe in, it’s just
A-dook a-dook
A-dook a-dook
A gobbledy-gook

Every piece of life should question gobbledy-gook
As its sparkle comes not from gold minds of words
And squanders their meaning as it’s championed
For selfish causes as though Satan repeats the verse
A-dook a-dook
A-dook a-dook
A gobbledy-gook

No waste in writing a-dook a-dook a gobbledy-gook
If it’s what may be said by everyone anyway
For who should craft delicate articulation
Only to hear it repeated mindlessly as
A-dook a-dook
A-dook a-dook
A gobbledy-gook

So here I write a-dook a-dook a gobbledy-gook
So for at least one thing ever written there’s
No misinterpretation among the human nation
Because until we mean what we say it’s all just
A-dook a-dook
A-dook a-dook
A gobbledy, gobbledy-gook.