Future Past

We are always living in the past of an unwritten future.

-RTB

Dream

If you don't have ridiculous dreams you'll never have realistic results.

-RTB

Not Yet

Because I’m not ready

You’re not ready

It hurts

The way frustration hurts

The way sadness informs

Subterranean and dark

Did you feel good when you woke up

that you spoke up

that you vented

That you told me why

The why matters

My fingertips still trace paths

And my heart still remembers rhythm

I feel it and I felt it

hanging onto it

but just barely

the way water runs off a peach

-RTB

79 Words

He sang to her. Willingly if not lovingly. Or vice versa. She didn't cry though she could have. The tears standing at the ready. Eye muscles prepared to work from memory if not from need. If they loved each other they would stay that way forever. But forever wasn't their problem. Theirs was very much an issue of now. But neither would let the other exist there.

-RTB

75 Words

He sank into his chair like an oreo into hot pudding. He heard them laughing, crying out his name in between theirs gasps for breath. He sank lower. His eyes shut of their own unencouraged ambition and he pressed his teeth against each other as though to make diamonds. He held his breath without realizing it and then opened his eyes to the empty room. They had left, if they'd ever been there at all.

-RTB

The Battle

Half the battle is not finding the right answers, but finding the right questions.

-RTB

Creativity

Creativity for me was like a thread that hung off my sleeve for the first 25 years of my life. It was always there. Tickling me. Letting me know it was there. But it wasn't until I tugged on it that I realized I would never be able to stop.

- RTB

It Begins

I'm thickening my skin

Building my armor 

Plates of steel and iron

Coating myself against it all

Protected defended

Impenetrable

No

too much

I won't feel anything

no point

No sensation at all

So I am thickening my skin

With leathers and pelts

stronger skins than mine

Tied closely fitting snugly over me

a newer better improved me

But still yet

I won't be able to move or stretch

Bend or flex 

an immobile version of myself 

I won't even be myself

So I am thickening my skin

Though I am not quite sure how

I will think it thick

Imagine it tougher

Make it what it needs to be

What I need it to be

Want it to be 

For me to be

Who I want to be.

-RTB

rich Rich poor Rich

Though affluent with her love

I felt hollowed out and muggy

Her love around me

Rising up in me

Dense

And cloudy

Like a haunting in my chest

Like a memory with a scratch in it that won't stop skipping

The same line over and over again.

Like a mint that was made of razors

Like an orgasm made of possiblies

Like a sweetness born of acid rain

Like a smile born of apathy

Like tears made of gravel

Like sadness made of honey

Like a maybe made of definitely

Like a definitely made of never

Like the love we made together

Like the sex we never had

Like the sex we made together

Like the love we never had

Like the pot you smoked that I didn't

Like the fear I inhaled that you hadn't

Like an insecurity built in Roman times

Like a seasonal laughter's end

Like a fire carved in yesterday

Like a bitterness carved in stone

These memories are my albatross

These memories haunt me endlessly

And they won't leave me alone.

-RTB

Come to Connecticut

I’ve been invited to share my thoughts on things

Me, a master of singularity and unpurchased rings

But what I have to offer is written in sand

I’m a boy, a man, a mixture of things I don’t quite yet understand

And yet I speak louder than some, much louder than most

But I fear prostheltizing and shy just short of boast

I forget more than I remember

And I cling to my summers well past September

And if I’m self fulfilling my prophecy

Then I’ll have to take more than partial responsibility

For allowing myself to posture and plead

For the things I know I think I need

When I’m quite sure I’m already in possession of all my tools

And should relinquish my captainship on this ship of fools

And I’ll avoid giving a life lesson

Aphoristic Metaphorical pseudo musings full of cognitive indigestion

-RTB

Nuance

Nuance is what makes actors great and people interesting.

-RTB

Do

I think I've found my voice I just haven't found my song.

-RTB

Gabby Had a Bad Day

And the things we thought could harm us
And the things that brought us down
And the people that walked over us
And those things that burned our souls
They fade much like fog does
Leaving things clearer once gone

-RTB

10 New Band Names

Concentrated Irony

Elevated FUPA

Drivel difficulties

The Silent Scrunchie

Drunk and Pugless

Beard Nutrients

Wild Gesticulations

Angry Pete and the Dick Pains

Sport Kilt

Tochi's Night Out

-RTB

Revel

There is a pride we savior in wallowing in our own unique sorrow. A rhythm. A deliciousness to it that we revel in. That secretly or not so, we crave. We want to have adverse reactions to our old love songs, cautiously avoid the paths we used to trod through whatever city. We want to put distance between re-experiencing those memories and emotions. We want our heart to whither as we think about those songs. We want it to be toxic illegal awfality.

-RTB

Because I have a deadline

And its rising
Like a hot air balloon
Full of cold insecurity
An unchained melody
Sitting in a gasless car
And I'm paralyzed
paralytics
Analytic
And stuck inside myself

Like cement for blood
Like fog for breath
An unbeating heart
glued to the inside of my chest

Palpitated resurgencies
And unforgettable fears
Always rising
The fastest slowest march of madness
And a pressure on both sides of my chest

A violence of memory
And incomparable fear
Fed and starved
Watered and withheld
And all without my control
And all without control

Like a muscle that can't flex
And a tear that won't fall
A fall that won't arrive
An exhale stuck in transit

An inhallation
A kept inhallation
remaining
stuck
trapped
contained

and killing
killing without force
and leaving me nowhere
without leaving me at all

-RTB

Deception

This one is about how I seem to fit in to the rest of the crowd yet inside I really feel like I have nothing to offer. If anybody had actually seen this I might have ended up in therapy a lot sooner. Created August 10, 1999.

New York City

When you love this city the raindrops never hit the ground, and when you don't... well, it seems impossible to sidestep the puddles.

-RTB

I Dreamed a Dream

he thought the thoughts he'd always thought he'd think
and though the things he thought were quite the same as always
the way he saw it happening had changed

because he'd never really thought through his fantasy
his fantasy was a fallacy he'd never seen through to completion
he didn't know how to end it

so he'd think it through
or so he thought
but he really had only done half the journey

but when he finally thought his way
all the way through
he found himself thinking something he could never have anticipated

he wasn't interested in the fantasy anymore

because of lazy incompletion or self abbreviating deletion
lies he told to himself or imposed upon the universe
the ending was nothing like the beginning

and while he thought he still liked those thoughts
really
now that he had completed them
they left him feeling quite incomplete
and he couldn't compete with the overwhelming sense of emptiness he felt

now that his fantasy was through

And On and On

I've given up on the rest of my life
I've figured out I just can't do it
It's too much to think about
Too much to worry
It puts my mind in a constant state of hurry
And that's no way to live
In fact
Its a good way to die
And nobody should be thinking about a good way to die
Unless they're about to

I've given up on the the rest of my life
Because its making my insides hurt
Thinking too much about the future
Is like thinking about too much about the past
It makes you miss the present
So if I worried about the rest of my life
For the rest of my life
I'd have no life left to live
I would only worry about a good way to die
Because I'd be there

I've given up worrying about the rest of my life
Because it hasn't gotten me anywhere

-RTB