Our Naked Souls

by Justin Wetch

  Into violent swells,

  I don’t miss the chaos

  The way I thought

  I would.

  I find joy in the balance,

  And rest in the serenity

  Of peace at last.

  Here is love without jealousy,

  Passion without anger,

  And hope without anxiety.

  The monsoons have subsided,

  The seasons have changed,

  And I’m all the better for it.

  Chapter Four

  Cosmic

  Minds

  Chance

  Created by chance,

  We dance in the flames,

  Our existence uncertain,

  Our place among the stars

  Hanging by a thread.

  Looking up at the cosmos,

  We wonder:

  If we blink the wrong way,

  Would it all vanish in an instant?

  You Were Always Like That

  I think about the way you would lean over me to stare out the plane window if you were here with me. You would give the beautiful city lights, set against the vast sea of darkness, all of the attention they deserve, enjoying it this time as much as if it were your first. You were always like that, you know. Hungry to devour all of the small gifts life offered. You were not the type to sit back, jaded and exasperated by any kind of experience. Even the remarkable duality of soaring through the air unrestrained by the bounds of the earth, set against the drudgery of the human beings packed like sardines in a tin can, could not dampen your spirit.

  It’s times like these when I miss you the most.

  Projection

  To create art

  Is to project your soul

  Into the physical world,

  To be seen and judged by all,

  Open and vulnerable.

  Art has the audacity

  To proclaim,

  “I have the right

  To be who I am.”

  Nostalgia

  They will romanticize us,

  Yearning for the supposed simplicity of our time,

  Mythologizing our artists and musicians, our philosophers,

  Adoring the way we see the world

  As if we were not human beings just like them,

  Fallible and uncertain,

  Making it up as we went along.

  Ode to Silence

  I have had quite enough of music;

  Every song begins to sound the same.

  Instead I prefer the music of silence,

  Which is always the same, yet always feels different.

  There is the silence of the morning

  With the freshness of rain just past,

  There is the silence near the sea

  Colored bluish green like the water,

  There is the silence of a sunny day

  Cascading down with gentle joy,

  And there is the silence of the night

  Which hushes creation into slumber.

  Among all these silences, the most beautiful

  Is the one within your own soul,

  Which makes all the other silences

  Much more beautiful still.

  Summation

  We are not merely the sum of our

  Sunsets and sunrises.

  We are not the math of the rotations

  Of planets, moons, and stars.

  The pacing of mankind’s calendar

  Is not the thudding heartbeat

  Of your story.

  We can be free of the iron shackles

  Of patterns that dictate our lives.

  We are alive, we are free, we are

  Human.

  A Beautiful Abstraction

  What a beautiful abstraction, music is.

  It serves no purpose for our survival,

  And yet, here it is;

  It transcends utility,

  Existing for the sake of its beauty.

  Music proves to us

  That life can be more

  Than survival.

  Talking About the Weather

  Someone once told me

  That interesting people

  Don’t talk about the weather,

  But I don’t think that’s

  Quite true.

  It is the most

  Interesting topic of all

  Because no one is ever

  Talking about the weather

  When they

  Talk about the weather.

  A husband and wife are walking in a park.

  “I want to save our marriage,”

  He says with a “Nice day, isn’t it?”

  “Too late—my heart has moved on,”

  She says with a nod and “Uh huh.”

  An old couple sits together on a bench.

  “If it ends today, it was worth it with you,”

  She says with a “Cold out, isn’t it?”

  “I have no regrets, not a single one,”

  He says with a “Here, take my jacket.”

  Sometimes the most beautiful gems

  Are buried deep in ordinary-looking rocks

  Disguised with many others

  On an ocean shore

  Stretching miles in the distance.

  Sometimes the most beautiful I-love-yous

  Are buried in ordinary conversation

  And disguised as trivial comments.

  Tell me you love me,

  Show me you care,

  Come talk about the weather.

  The Purpose of Poetry

  What is the purpose of poetry?

  If it is merely self-expression,

  It is literary self-indulgence

  And the reader is unnecessary;

  If it is to comfort the reader,

  Then it becomes little more

  Than empty pandering;

  If it is to be relatable,

  It must be watered down

  Into vague clichés.

  What, then,

  Is the purpose of poetry?

  I think perhaps

  Poetry exists

  To rise above function

  And elevate the sights of our souls

  Beyond the horizon

  Toward hope.

  Rain

  We are engaged in a glorious collaboration,

  You and I,

  The author and the reader.

  If a poem calls for rain, and I write it so,

  It does not rain unless you allow it.

  If I intend the rain to cleanse the soul

  But you are a flower in thirst of rain,

  Then together we have created

  Something different—

  A moment that belongs to the two of us alone,

  For no two readings are the same.

  Infinite Worlds

  There are so many worlds

  That exist in the universes

  Of our minds.

  We could never travel to all of them

  And learn their secrets

  Even if we had many lifetimes to do so.

  According to multiverse theory

  Every possible universe

  Exists—

  Every fictional world

  Thought up by brilliant writers

  Actually exists

  In reality.

  I like to imagine

  That writers don’t create these worlds—

  We merely discover them

  As the ethereal tendrils of our minds

  Reach across univer
ses.

  By the same token

  Every dream and nightmare

  We’ve ever had

  Is also a real world;

  Perhaps our minds are like televisions

  Flipping through universes like channels

  Performing inter-dimensional travel

  In our sleep.

  Perhaps creativity

  Is just the ability

  To journey through worlds

  And perhaps we are not dreamers

  But travelers.

  Psychonaut

  I remember the feeling of ego death

  When I was no longer myself,

  No longer anyone, in fact—

  Just an outside observer

  Of the greater consciousness,

  Like an astronaut

  Floating peacefully through space,

  Watching the earth

  From a distance.

  I was so far away, yet unafraid,

  Simultaneously part of it all

  But not one specific part.

  I was the whole of it,

  While not being the only one

  Who was everything at once.

  Emerging from a Dream

  I take joy in the simplest things:

  In the alignment of the moon

  With the tips of the trees,

  In the jolt of reverie

  Emerging from a dream,

  In the sweet scent of pine

  In the early summer’s breeze,

  And in the first tint of yellow

  That tinges autumn’s leaves.

  The greatest synecdoche

  Is to exist in our beautiful world

  In solace and harmony.

  Breathe in the Warm Air

  I had almost forgotten that the world could be colorful and bright. I’d spent so much time looking down at windswept concrete and staring at decayed leaves drifting away in the wind that the very idea of summer had lapsed from my memory. Then everything came back to life, freed at last from the unyielding, clenched arms of winter.

  Life is a force that pushes and pulls back, receding like an ocean tide when conditions are bleak and coming back in when the time is right. It hibernates when it must and thrives when it can. It has no path forward, no desire, no force of will—it only exists when it can exist.

  And so it goes on, lighting up the drab scene like a Christmas light taken out of storage—flickering and unsure at first, then with full force. Beauty arises from cold crypts, and blue sky shows through the clouds like water showing through cracked ice. This is the beauty of the season, the beauty of color coming back to life. Nature takes a breath and exhales beauty.

  Tone

  The greatest harmony

  At the end of the universe

  Will be achieved

  When all of mathematics and physics

  Is unified down to the last detail

  Into one great, simple theory.

  Then, as soon as the universe

  Has fulfilled its desire

  To understand itself

  Through intelligent beings,

  It will collapse completely

  Into some novel form;

  A single auditory tone.

  And this one tone joins

  An infinity of others,

  Creating a full audio spectrum:

  The music of the multiverse.

  Art Becomes Complete

  I struggle with the realization that the lyrics of the greatest of songs are often composed of clichés. Somehow, when put to music, these simple lines become the most incredible emotional experiences.

  This has shown me that great art does not exist in a vacuum. Art becomes great not when it is scrawled onto paper, but when it is imprinted from that paper into the soul of the observer.

  Art becomes complete when it moves entirely from the mind of the creator into the mind of the audience.

  Immortal

  Time may progress

  In our limited consciousness,

  But moments never die,

  Which means

  Moments will always exist

  From when we were alive;

  And so we cannot truly die—

  We are immortal.

  Blot Out the Stars

  I held my hands up in the air

  Against the jet-black night sky.

  I dipped my fingers

  Into that endless ink

  And blotted out the stars,

  Forming constellations

  That belonged only to me

  In that moment.

  But the moon came again

  Out from behind the clouds,

  And an artist I was

  No longer.

  Lightning

  It seems day by day that nothing changes

  Until one night you wake up

  At four in the morning,

  Sitting up straight in your bed,

  Suddenly seeing things clearly and

  Wondering where the past decade went,

  Wondering where everything went wrong.

  Change is a funny thing;

  It sneaks up on you

  As unexpected as a stroke of lightning,

  In a flash, ensuring that the world

  Is not quite the same

  As it once was.

  Become Less

  The greatest lesson

  Psychedelics taught me

  Was that the ego

  Only brings you pain.

  The more you are able

  To starve your ego

  Into submission

  The happier you will be,

  As you will become less

  And yet

  Feel all the more

  At peace.

  Broad Strokes

  Life makes a cruel mockery

  Out of all our good intentions.

  Love turns to heartbreak

  Friendship turns to animosity

  Peace turns to hatred

  And life turns to death.

  We are painted in broad strokes

  By everything

  We wish we had the power

  To not be.

  Art Gallery of the Soul

  Different windows, different lenses,

  They all point inward.

  I am afraid that at this point

  You know me better than I know myself.

  I don’t know if that’s a bad thing;

  I suppose I could refine the edges

  Or hold back the colors,

  But what would be the point of that?

  Shattered glass and black sands,

  Run them through your fingers.

  Collect them piece by piece;

  The only thing it ever meant

  Was “I am.”

  Let It Be So

  If I must have their derision

  To speak my mind,

  Let it be so.

  If I must accept hatred

  To set the souls of strangers aflame,

  Let it be so.

  If I must offend sensibilities

  To stand for what I believe,

  Let it be so.

  A lighthouse does not fear the waves

  Or care for their opinions;

  It is in the business of guiding ships.

  Iris

  I often wonder what stories

  Are hidden away in black holes.

  All the light held captive

  In that mysterious orb—

  What secrets are stored away

  In
that cosmic iris?

  Perhaps alien empires spanning galaxies

  Stories of love and conquest

  Horrors and atrocities

  The birth of the universe

  And questions of god and man,

  All locked away in that blackness,

  Trapped by the laws of the universe

  As if god had sealed away

  All the forbidden knowledge of existence,

  Never to be uncovered.

  These stories can never be unlocked,

  And such a tempting fruit

  Begs to be plucked

  But promises death

  In return.

  Saturation

  I didn’t notice until I stumbled upon an old photograph—and suddenly, there was a bridge between that past moment and the present. I looked across it and marveled at the saturated colors, the vibrant light, the air dripping with possibility and creativity.

  I grieved for that moment like it was a lost loved one. I mourned the beauty of it as I returned to the present, the walls themselves seeming to hang loosely like decaying flesh on bone. This was a dark, grotesque caricature of the future I had once looked to with such hope all those years ago.

  Childhood is the one time in our lives when we get the chance to see the world as more than just what it is. The world positively glows—

  But that’s just nostalgia. The world didn’t change; I changed, tossing away my rose-colored glasses.

  Final Pictures

  It’s easy to hate yourself

  For all of your small mistakes

  Which seem to add up

  To a terrible picture.

  But rest assured:

  No one sees the erasures

  In the final picture

  And yours will be

  Just as beautiful

  As you’d ever hoped.

  The Invisible Man

  I was alone on the corner of Third and Hawthorne. The sun had just dipped below the horizon, leaving only a dim pink hue in the lower half of the sky. The air was still warm with the heat of the day reverberating against the old brick walls of the city block.

  The air was uncharacteristically devoid of nearly all noise save for the occasional purr of a car engine in the distance.

  In this scene, I can pinpoint the exact moment when I realized I loved you. I know the exact window I was standing near, the exact tree growing on the opposite end of the sidewalk.

  I began that walk with uncertainty. Somehow, invisible to the outside world, something changed within me that would alter the course of my life. And yet, looking from the outside, you would never know it—not even a hiccup in my step would betray my thoughts. You would have never guessed, if you could see me walking there, how much the moment changed me. And yet it did.