Wake Up- Transcendentalism Final Poem by Gabe Florsheim

Everyone begins at square one;
The only instance with angelic innocence,
The absence of fear, the absence of regret,
The absence of thought.

Tides crash, ebb and flow,
Years of friction, both material and figurative,
But the stones are far from smooth.

When you lose belief in yourself, and the illusion or delusion
The protection of the self, vanishes
Like smoke before the wind,
What do you have then?

There is never doubt. Whenever there is a doubt - and
When life becomes too much - you return to what you
Once knew as truth.

Thinking nothing so they may think you're
Everything but the higher you climb, the lower
You will end up. There is nowhere to go
That you have not already gone, already seen.

But everyone changes and life follows.
I watched them walk away, away and away.
I hide in the only privacy, the stable fraction
Of my delusional mind.

Sleep; a temporary void offering reprieves, doled out
In meager doses, though offering no escape
To the smoking man who does not get up.

His eyes, blinded by truth, only see the shell,
The beauty in the flame not in the coals,
That there is more than the surface.

The light is there - just past ability to reach,
And reality is just a buzz deep inside your head as
The wires are pulled like endless spaghetti strands
Within the mind.

Chaotic thoughts know no rest, disturbances
Strongest in darkness; the wheezing, drowning,
Burning never stops - an endless suffocation in memory.
No questions in this business of lessons.

I'm not getting off this island alive, am I?
Suffocated by a wealth I cannot stand,
Life is a prison, they are the bars.
I must close my eyes, to open them.

Spine and neck cracking continuously, with realizations,
That there is no music playing, no LSD release
In the snapping joints.

Thrown far from grace, I fall now onto grace.

I fall back and attend to the tides.
I fall forward and learn to dance.

I fall and rise, ebb and flow.
I reach with an outstretched hand at my reflection
And I ground my roots in the earth below me.

We are taught and we have learned.
We are the teacher and his student -
The dividing line etched in the fabric of our own reality.

Contrast or balance? We are asked to ponder -
We have never separated ourselves only constructed walls within
And as we are preoccupied, we forget to maintain the canyon without

And so it is tasked of us now:
To learn from the words
That are written in the stars and sown across the sky;

To learn from the words
That are written in the mountains that define the surface of our lives;

To learn from the words
That are written in the ocean that toss and turn and call to us.

To learn and retain all that is given to us
And let it teach us to be all that we may become.

And to stay focused - it is the only
Only moment, only chance,
You have left

To read the last chapter
To find yourself

And to wake up.