6 through 10 of 19

[6 through 10 of '19'. Don't think to much about it, don't think too little. Its vaguely specific and not at all realistic or literal. We're talking, if poems were paintings, this is a Pablo Picasso piece based off of a Dali idea, painted on a crowded bus that's driving down a mountain, swerving around pot holes and playing the radio too loud. What song is playing? You pick, my imagination ends here. Oh, and disclaimer: None of this was written under the influence of drugs. Promise. Thank you. -Theo]


6.
What if I died on my birthday?
Would I really die at all?
Would 19 be it?

Ta da!
That's it!
Two decades!
Almost! So close!
Too bad, so sad!
That's all folks!
You don't have to go home
but you can't stay here.

And then,
I go in the ground
or an ugly pot
or maybe I'll float
in the sea, mixed with purple sugar
and memories and cartoon strips
from friends and fans and both.
I’ll float and float and float...


7.
What are they going to say or do?
Will they win? Did it help?
Will they find the tapes?
Imagine someone threw everything out!
"Its just a poor man’s personal effects."
A poor man who lived his whole life
Doing nothing important
To or for
Anyone or anybody
And in the last few years,
He changed the world.
Oh boy!


8.
I’ll float under the golden bridge
and away and away and away
On my back, looking up
At the sky…

Like i did
As a kid
At Robert Moses beach
I would,
Until a big wave would come
Tackling me in an embrace
Leaving that Atlantic taste
Of salt, dirt and algae…


9.
That taste,
It kind of reminds me of my first NYC green tea,
college visits and applications celebrated
in this awfully dirty place midtown that
I never went to again.

I drank about half to be polite.
I was so much younger then, a year ago.
I'm not much older now, a year later.
And yet that's all it takes to change your life,
A year.
Or less.
Maybe more.

Depends on when you define
the starting point of change
and the final point, its completion.


10.
When does an inch begin and end?
Aren’t you always a little off?
How can you be precise?

If you’ve got 1, you could be holding 1.1 and not know it.
Or 1.01, or 1.001, or 1.0001, or 1.00001, or!
You could be holding exactly 1
and nobody believes you!
I'd hate that!

What if nothing is real?
Surprise! Nothing is.
Its not much of a surprise
if you’ve consider it before.

I bet that's why they
don't make movies
about it anymore.

5 of "19"

[Five pieces of my epic poem/long-ass poem 'Nineteen', and just a taste of the insane stream-of-conciousness writing that ensued. -Theo]


1.
Today’s the big day!
It doesn’t feel very big.

Look at me,
I’m presenting myself on this stepping stone
Give us a spin!
A whole 19 years old!

Do I say “all that?” or “that’s all?”
I’m not sure.


2.
It feels like it all started yesterday
...If yesterday started ages and ages ago

Or maybe its vice versa.
Maybe I’ll never know.


3.
Well, happy birthday!
Enjoy yourself!

Its really just another day.
What else is new, but you?
And the people younger then you.
And the people older then you!
And the people exactly your age!
Surely, that’s impossible.
Unless someone held a stopwatch
at the very moment you made
your first cry
as
your last foot
slipped out.
But
even that could be inaccurate
if he wasn’t looking,
or his hands were slow…


4.
In the grand scheme of everything,
We’re all new.

If you fit the entire life of the earth
on a 12 month calendar,
Humans have only existed for two minutes
And the dinosaurs died in September!
Imagine that…
So much for back to school...


5.
But even human existence is really big.
So is a millennia, and a century, and a decade.
A year can be big. A day can be big.
Today is big, right?

I wrote all that in a minute.
See? Even minutes are big.

But 525,599 minutes later
is another year.

Minutes feel small now.

Whether Accident or Intentional

[My first sonnet! I think you can call it that. My english professor always says writing free formed poems is like painting abstract - it doesn't mean you're a good artist, but it doesn't make you a bad one. Plenty of people say, "oh, I don't do realism, I paint abstract" when the truth is, they just can't. If you can paint the hard way, or write in a traditional form, you'll have a better knack for easy going open verse forms, and you'll actually be doing something when you paint abstract! What do you think? -Theo]


WHETHER ACCIDENT OR INTENTIONAL

What do you do when you wound animals?
Whether accident or intentional.
Do you bring to it a swifter short end?
Or wait and let it walk until its dead?
How can you put it out of misery?
Do you know its capacity to survive?
Since miracles happen so constantly
Yet it’d be sin to let the ‘thing’ just die.
You have in one way, or several others,
Ruined our chance of being together.
Will we walk down aisles until we die?
Or will I quit, Bringing a swift quick end?
Whether Accident or Intentional
We are two wounded animals.

Entry.

[This one's diving in the deep end. I feel it necessary to add - it's not written from the first person, so no worries. It's the point of view of a very close friend of mine, written after I first witnessed/learned of her daily night terrors first hand. Tough topic to cover through poetry, this is my shot at it. My only advice to anyone going through any kind of parental/spousal abuse: Talk! - Theo]


Entry.

My eyes have seen
enough as it is.
These tears, My heart
is water damaged.

Breaking an entry
inside your skeleton
Going through your things
without a warrant

Without permission, Without consent,
Without any mutual verbal agreement.
Without a care - how will these wounds scar?
I honestly haven’t planned that far

And now you know how it feels.

Didn’t you know,
You reap what you sow?

Karma caught you like you caught my arm
A tight hold, a strong grab that implies harm
The kinds that ruptures veins under the skin
So the next day you struggle to hide the bruises

Do you like
being on the other side?
Do you like
Having trouble sleeping at night?

Be honest,
I didn’t.
But I’ll admit,
I might sleep better covered in scars
Knowing you’re behind bars
Trying to sleep on a cold hard bed
Next to an inmate who fancies men

No diary entry has been enough
to soak up the tears and heal the wounds
I could use all 100 pages/200 sheets
But I would only need more paper by noon

No one thought, no one could predict
how you'd enter my mind and my thoughts, too
It wasn't as simple as picking up and leaving
and it wasn't as easy as just tattle-taleing.

I guess we'll never understand each other's sides
At least I have the upperhand for doing what was right

Irony is tragic and hard to understand
But behave and benefit from its plan.


Entry by Theo Martin
copyrighted 2009

You are the runny piece of cheese...

You are
The runny piece
Of cheese
On hot day
In August

Approximately
One hundred years ago
That dropped
The atom bomb
In Nagasaki
And Hiroshima,
Japan, and
Killed Millions
of Innocent
Men, Women,
and Children.
And you’re not even sorry.

Well,
Time flies when you’re ending the world,
One idea at a time.

copyrighted 2009 by Theo Martin.

(there's an idea behind this one. comment and maybe I'll deem you worthy of knowing it!)

Theo's Thoughts #3 :: Are we "born that gay"? It's a theoRy

[I found this article very interesting! Heres the first half of it, you can read the rest via the link. Hope you enjoy! Quote it for you next arguement with a 'phobe! -Theo]

Born that gayDo recent neurological studies prove once and for all that homosexuality is biological?
By Robert Burton
Sep. 12, 2008 As the accuracy and resolution of brain imaging improve, we can expect virtually all behavior to be shown to be associated with demonstrable brain changes. It shouldn't come as a surprise that imaging studies of sexual orientation are increasingly revealing anatomic and functional differences between "straight" and "gay" brains. But demonstrating such changes doesn't answer the age-old question of how much our sexual preferences are innate and how much they are fueled by environmental exposure, cultural norms and conscious personal choices.
One way to distinguish the effects of nature from nurture would be to look at brain regions believed by neuro-anatomists to be fully formed at birth and impervious to subsequent environmental effects, both physical and psychological. Focusing on such brain regions, a research team at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, headed by neuroscientist Ivanka Savic, obtained MRIs for 90 adult volunteers -- 25 straight men, 25 straight women, 20 gay men and 20 lesbians. Using the latest quantitative techniques for assessing cerebral symmetry and functional connections between various areas of brain, Savic was able to demonstrate highly statistically significant differences between straight and gay brains. Gay and lesbian brains more closely resembled the brains of straight volunteers of the opposite sex than the brains of heterosexual members of the same sex.
In their study, reported in the June 16, 2008, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Savic said, "This is the most robust measure so far of cerebral differences between homosexual and heterosexual subjects." Although Savic admits that her study cannot distinguish between genetic or prenatal intrauterine environmental changes, such as relative differences in sex hormone levels, her studies do suggest that our sexual preferences are, at least in large part, determined by the time of birth.
Not long after reading the study, I got a call from neurologist Jerome Goldstein, M.D., 67, once a fellow resident in the UCSF neurology training program. This fall, Goldstein, an internationally respected headache researcher and sometimes controversial gay activist, is giving a series of lectures on the innate biology of gayness. He was phoning to ask if I had seen the study and if I might write about the latest scientific evidence supporting the biology of gayness. I decided to interview him instead. Goldstein is compact, rapid-talking and constantly on the verge of impatience. Yet during our conversations he was subdued, confessional in tone, with frequent pauses to gather his thoughts; the seriousness of his concerns was palpable...

Read the rest of the article/interview here:
http://www.salon.com/env/mind_reader/2008/09/12/gay_neurology/index.html
It only gets more interesting!

Think about it!
Then, Email/comment with your thoughts, if you'd like to share.
theoreticalm220@aol.com

Peace and hope,
Theo

Theo's Thoughts #2: I might grow to hate technology someday...

Tonight, I flipped through some pictures a distant aunt of mine had scanned and uploaded on to her picasa. I suppose flipped wouldn't be the right word her, since there were no photo album pages. Clicked through?

Whichever. They were interestingly shuffled, and I enjoyed discovering two pictures next to each other where her and her husband sat in similar positions between both photos.

One picture was from last July.
You can see their fresh-from-the-obnoxiously-long-cruise tan in stunning color, taken by their outstandingly-expensive camera that they have no right owning since they can't use the word "focus" grammatically correct in a sentence. They both have similar short haircuts, but God Forbid you point that out, as males and females NEVER have the same hair cuts. (Tell that to my hick cousin's greasy mullet. She should hear this.)
My aunt's hair is growing in a little grey (she soon saw a hair salon which fixed all that) and my uncle's was also quite white. Their faces aged well, as much as they complain about it. They've got laughter wrinkles, not worry wrinkles or frown wrinkles, or looks-of-general-dislike wrinkles. Just the ones that stream down from your nose and around your mouth like tears of joy, and those crow's feet that ruffle at the edges of your eyes.
Both formed from smiling and squinting, respectively, as you often do when you laugh.
Or, when you have a sneeze stuck in your nose.
Regardless, you get it.

The other picture was much older, I want to say fifties? Sixties? They were teens. Perhaps young adults. No grey hair, no wrinkles, no stupid rub-it-in-your-face tan. They're young, and in love, and still have the same hair cuts, only its long, flat, and symmetrically parted. They look innocent and wide-eyed. Clear skinned and smooth-featured. At least, I think their skin is clear. Of course, this picture is black, white, and blurry.

Its not the camera man's fault, its the camera. It has that age old distortion to it. The 1960 equivalent of that fuzzy look 80's VHS has compared to 00's DVDs, so its a similar blur but twice as worse. And as I look at it, I can almost hear my Aunt saying,

"
Of course.
A good picture of me
taken with a crappy camera.
A beautiful point in my life
that came before all this
digital mega pixel its-on-your-phone

whatchamacallinits.
Great! Ha!
"

I think its kind of funny.
I mean, it is my baby picture, my toddler years, my childhood and young adulthood that I will be looking back on for the rest of my life, as it progresses. And as I look back at my older young adulthood, adulthood, and old age, I will revisit the most recent memories all the way to the earliest over and over again.

Irony:
As I do so, I will also be looking at pictures from the newest technology to the oldest form of photography that I have ever lived to see. And when I'm old and pictures are capture in multiple dimensions with perfect color and balance every time, I'll look back at these pictures from college of my friends and I at a height in our lives and say:

"

Damn.

High definition sucks.

Another good picture taken by a crappy camera.

What else is new?

"

Just some thoughts.

Appreciate what you've got before its gone!

And to quote those tacky Dove commercials,

love the skin your in!

It is hard to do sometimes, I know,

but its not exactly something we can afford to be bad at!

(No joke, plastic surgery is very expensive!)

:')

Peace and happiness,

Theo.