Ambition. Who has time for it?

I spend my life with a head in the clouds looking back into the windows of the past. 

I find myself posing the darkest questions just before the waning hours turn to bird-sung sunrises.

And one of them is: Why do I have to feel this way to write? To yearn for the words to come out of my fingers and not my mouth? Why am I so set on sounding unbearably pretentious when I feel like I've lost everything and have nothing?

Most times, I guess, I'd rather be happy than write.

I have a lot of hate in my heart. It's a rabbit with a frothing, foamy mouth of anger and disease and shit. It probably bites when it's not busy sleeping in. 

Every man, I feel, tries to measure up to their father. And in that sense, I feel like I'll never be quite the man that the one before me was/is and I am both relieved and destraught in that aspect, but I feel that the father should respect the path that the son has chosen to take, regardless the astute stupidity that they suffer from the consequences of that path. Point being, I wish I could tell my dad exactly how much I respect him and appreciate the path he laid before me even though I did not take it. He is, as cheesey and expected as it is to say it, one of the biggest and influential parts of my life. I only hope that I could ever be half the man that he was before he even got to be my age, much less the man that is a part of my life now. So to the dads and fathers everywhere that have always been there for the children they've made and supported with unconditional love, thank you. From one coward son and the rest. You are both more and the men that we deserve, stubborn as we may be. 

I realize that I'm coasting on my former body of energy into the eclipse of the anti-dawn. I find myself floating somewhere between... constantly. 

I just don't know, man. I just don't know. 

Is it easier to see when the storms are calm or is the clear horizon a curse of clouds and mists in itself? 

I sit here on the stranded paddle boat and talk to myself. An island of wood in the murky, bottomless abyss of dark water and I'm still safe enough to breathe. To think. And I think myself in a corner still. When all the mirages pull back from the back of the eyelids and I see that I'm still in the same place with prettier drapes, I can only ape my surprise when it's something I should have known all along like a song stuck in the back of my head from long drives with the family to the next town over because it has a shopping mall. I've mauled my discontent like a disgruntled postal worker when it's only a benign tumor that the insurance won't cover. 

Where do you go when you know that you're not bound by the ties of living like everyone else. They all have that rose colored tint to their sunglasses when I'm the only curious creep sitting in the bush with binoculars out of focus, trying to conjure up something more grand than bland but somehow the dice still lands snake eyes up and I'm barely two jumps ahead of too much boredom to hear the whistle of an empty head to follow my empty heart apart from the alarm that the smoke and mirrors bring to my being here and up so late at night that even the drunks don't pass by anymore. 

Am I a whore to the wonder and what ifs or am I just bored with the lore that I've been read like bedtime stories that I long for something more vibrant and vivid than my sense can pantomime and I can rhyme into being?