Author: tonotmissthebliss

tonotmissthebliss https://tonotmissthebliss.wordpress.com A writer and a coder.
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Rewind

If this arrives on time, then it’s 365 days in the past
I’m you from the future and I want to express how last year went:

Tomorrow you found yourself on the wrong side of the line between escape and entertainment
Enjoyment and an attempt to fill a void with thoughtless distraction
A fraction of life’s potential wasting away in inconsequential moments of apathy

Until presented with a choice
You could choose to allow self abusive habits to roam free
Or you could choose to grow
Choose to rise past the sorrow and move toward a new day
A day worth living, worth singing, worth every of ounce of life that
we’re all clinging to

And you chose to grow

In a month you found yourself alone
Nights of cold, empty blankets while dreaming of someone to hold
When the thermostat says 70 degrees but your heart’s feeling 40 under
Feeling darker and darker until fading into nothingness
Destroying all you’ve worked for until you cared for none of this

And then you saw a reflection that you often miss
The part of you against the love
Who wants to live alone in a world of his own problems
Who sees self-sabotage as simply a way of life
The inescapable cycle that always ends with this metaphorical knife

Yet still, you shook off your doubts and fears and you chose to grow

Six months in came the confidence that you always had, just never felt was there
Consistency and discipline laying the foundation to self mastery
Taking it one step at a time while working towards bad-assery
Seizing this moment to be the hero of your own story
Fast forwarding to the good part, where we live with
Every heartbeat remaining, no complaining
While continuously sustaining this temporary
Expression of love

And you chose to grow

In 12 months, you came across a quote
It read: “A year from now you will wish you had started today”

You’ve got some work to do, my friend
Good Luck!

—
Photographer: Jordan McQueen
Quote: Karen Lamb

Captain

A boat in a bottle
Never let out at sea
Too busy worrying what she’d think
Instead of letting my own heart live free

You see, love is not an arrow shot at a target
Love is open seas — three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of rough choppy water
With the gentlest breeze

Choking on the salt of dried up tears
Of which time stole all the moisture
So much time spent unsure
Just a wish in a bottle, a boat that never touched water
Whose sails never felt the rush of a gust of wind at
Simply the sight of you

It’s not a carefully crafted message to never be seen
It’s spontaneous — dynamic!

Love is a shared boat

I tried to build the perfect boat to lead me to you
I followed every direction perfectly, didn’t break a single rule
Yet still I find myself crying these tears of solitude
Once more drinking on an empty deck

You say there’s more fish in the ocean
But I’m too scared to let my boat sink
Took me so long to realize I never made room for someone else
I looked for a savior without being one to myself

You see, let me not forget I am the captain of my own ship!
Shaken in the seas of good days and bad
Sailing through these waters, a soul sits at the helm
Seeing out into the world and deciding upon which direction to go
Which direction should I go?
Here or there, who really knows
All that matters is to feel how the ocean flows
Waves of emotions as we die and as we grow

—

Photographer: Barn Images

Side-note: If this piece reads a bit differently than previous poems, I’ll tell you why! I’ve recently been going to the Poetry Club at my school. The long-form rhyming that’s in most of my written work reads out-loud much differently than in my head. I received some awesome critique and feedback and wanted to apply it. This piece is part of my growth into being able to perform my work. It sounds much better spoken 🙂

Each Passing Second

One time
A line of continuous moments
Separated by a distance that no one has known yet
The space between each passing second seems impossible to grasp
No way to unmask
The illusion my mind conjures before me
Allowing the opportunity to write my own story
One that I love
One that can’t be boring
No, not one-hundred-percent happy
But one-hundred-percent invested
Taking each passing second as a chance to better who I am
Defining new limits, new bars to reach and overcome
For now I know I won’t stay forever young

As the only time we ever have has only been now
Everyone has been saying it, sharing out-loud
That numbered days are irrelevant when presently involved
Giving all to this moment, whether we rise or we fall

—
Photographer: Andree Brown

Constructed Futures

Choices make up this continuum of time
To find a calmer state of mind
For time moves forward, never going back
And we already know this moment won’t last

It’s the sound of air that reminds me of what’s there
On what we all share
This responsibility for nature that we all bear

Let this sound remind you of gratitude
How in the end, there’s little left to lose
Just pass along the torch
Before it’s your turn to leave it scorched
But through an open heart begin to do your part
So that somewhere down the road a better life can truly start

Time-struck

stars

Why must we keep on pretending
When clearly everything we’ve come to know is soonly ending
I wish I could lock this moment in a box
Take a second to put it all on pause
In desperate attempt to infinitely grasp this sense of continuous perception
Not to mention, the fact that all my beliefs are held in suspension
Finding it hard to feel grounded
When the concept of sanity seems to elude me
Religious beliefs fail to sooth me
It’s when this pen touches paper that the world begins to move me
As I get further lost in taking my thoughts
And transforming them into something new
Creating a new perspective for me to view
While leading my heart towards living true
And expressing this thought from me to you

—
Photographer: Josh Felise

Time to Create

Oh but don’t you worry for we are bound to make mistakes
Whether we take it slow or we hurry, there’ll be plenty of outtakes
For it takes more than just one moment for a heart to succeed
It’s continuous motion, to love and be free
Means to truly believe in what it means to freely breathe
We are beings of oxygen, of big bits and little bits
Atoms and molecules all fused together with hidden rules
All acting together to bring to life what we call existence
Each passing moment, each passing instance
Here we are, able to think this
Awareness, mindfulness

Sharing fading memories while traveling through these distant trees
Uncovering ideas and unknown philosophies
Able to be grateful for this sweetest breeze
Here is what I see
Interconnected families
Growing in all directions, becoming something new
Or perhaps a reflection of dreams coming true

For society as we know it was at some point constructed
Grown institutions imposing ideals on how life should be conducted
By the hand of man, we built the life that we’ve always wanted
Creating our own world, despite its future being forgotten

—

Photographer: Joshua Earle

How to Change Your Life

A part of me is completely conflicted about desiring to write an inspirational post. This isn’t about the 3 Ways To Easily Lose Weight or The Secret Preventing Your Happiness. It’s about identifying the elements in personal growth.

Generally, these are long term changes. This entails a combination of:

  • time
  • discipline
  • consistency

With the nearly infinite amount of positivity blogs, inspiration hype, and self-help hoopla to go around, they nearly always revolve around these concepts.

Kind of like how all these lose-weight-fast ads come with an asterisk that say, “Regular exercise and proper diet for maximum results”. Well, if you worked out and ate healthy already, you probably wouldn’t need the quick-fix!
Ok sure, there are some problems where it’s necessary but I’m specifically talking about the “do it quick” type of things.

The funny thing is, this isn’t anything magical. We already know what to do! We just get lost in the games we play in our head. Turns out, some things are fairly simple. Getting a salad instead of fries is easy. All it takes is a simple sentence. Hitting the gym instead of being lazy  is easy. All it takes is a bit of effort.

The problem with reading all this inspiration-porn is that reading is incredibly fast. Just this sentence took you less than 10 seconds to read. On the other hand, committing to change your habits can take a month to kick in. That’s helluva lot more time than the 5 minutes to read this piece. So to truly benefit from this writing you must do more than play along idealizing your own self-growth. The entire point of this piece is to remind you those dreams don’t need to stay in your head. They don’t end after my last word. You carry your dreams forward.

To truly benefit from this piece of writing you must internalize and resonate with these ideas and follow through.

FOLLOW THROUGH.

Don’t just fantasize, actualize! Make it happen. Do it. Do it before your excuses make sense. Do it before your day ended. Do it before problems get so bad you hate yourself for not handling them earlier.

We all know you can do it — so why are you hesitating?

Set Your Sails

I didn’t always have the confidence
To stand up tall for my own stance
Only giving ground to external forces
As if my soul wasn’t mine and wasn’t even worth it
Not worth the fight of choosing to live right
Where I fell out of light and into more vice
As if insatiable addiction could suffice
To be a life to live, just a roll of the dice

Yet one day I looked in the mirror  and saw the picture clearer
Saw my own chin rise up
As if confidence was the direction of a head held high
Fueled by the dreams as vast as the sky
You see, it took me some time to truly believe
That in my own hands, my own mind
I too have this power to shine
Power to grow and become one step further
One bit stronger
A future to nurture
No longer in search of sweet salvation
No longer procrastinating the most important sensation

The feeling of living by one’s own side
Not just running from problems, for there’s no need to hide
Letting fear and doubt come but then it subsides
Living a life of love, not one of lies

—

This last Thursday, I went to my college’s poetry club for the first time. I wrote this piece for the prompt:

Something that took you a long time to believe in

—

Photographer: Kelly Sikkema

 

Grow Everyday


You don’t need more time
You just need to live it
Stop putting off your growth
As if this is your limit
You can do so much more
Just breathe and believe
That you can still rise up off the floor
I know you feel hurt, I know you feel torn
But that’s just what you get since the day you were born

This life is ultimately not of your deciding
But remember the power in your own hands to create
No, not in the future, but here on this day
Today we live in our own way, not afraid
No longer too scared to live it brave
Now stronger than yesterday
The dues that we just have paid
Give us what we have today

So help me make a better tomorrow
Where instead of choosing a life fueled off of our sorrow
Let’s choose one of love
No longer letting pain remain the status-quo
Hand in hand, let’s truly grow
Let’s come to know
That we exist together in this shared show
Each playing our own part, our own role

—

Photographer: Jamie King

A Reminder to Live

Raise your chin and begin again
For this moment is differing
A new song now for you to sing
A new chance for you to bring together your soul into a single fraction of time
Every ounce of your being, all put on the line
To live a life worth living, not just for dying
Not just complying with every rule given
As if life itself had a directions page, straight from the beginning
Where the laws were put in place with no room for disagreeing
No, life is defined through the process of your being
Through your growth and your love while continually seeing
This gratitude for existence, appreciation for feeling

Not afraid of confronting my own pain
Once broken and stranded, only left with the remains
Trying to figure out how to salvage the wreckage
As if life is a conversation with just a hidden message
As if there’s one secret answer, and then I’ll just get this
Acquire my own bliss
No longer in loneliness
No longer alone and feeling the torment of emotions stuck on hell-bent desires
Self-destructive tendencies lighting personal fires
Where I kept falling into currents of depravity
Easily giving up, avoiding all that challenged me
Impulsive desires urged living lazily
“To sit back and take it slow
Why do it now, when tomorrow you can grow?”

To that voice in my head, I say take a closer look
You’ve seen a friend die, like the unexpected end of a book
What about Ben Zukoff
The one who can not graduate
Whose sudden cancer changed his fate
Don’t give me this bull-shit preventing your dreams of late
With breath in your lungs, your power can create
Can create the ideas and dreams that fill your mind
Bringing time and space into something to find
Giving meaning to life in attempts to unwind
The difficulty of living philosophically blind

—

Last Thursday I shared this at an open mic poetry slam at my college. First time reading my work in front of more than like 4 people! I tried to recite it from memory, but 3 lines in, I forgot the whole thing. So I grabbed my phone to help me remember it all. Once I read one line, I was back to performing it from memory. I wish I could say the rest went smoothly, however, I stopped mid sentence during the end of the piece. Having to stop and repeat my favorite part of the poem did not make me a happy camper. But, I signed up again and shared Welcome to Blue Skies, and didn’t miss a beat! 😀