Wake Up 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, delusion,
protection of the self vanishes
like smoke before the wind,
What do you have then? Phase

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 - lesson three:

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.
Stay focused - it is the only
Only moment, only chance,
you have left

To read the last chapter
To find yourself
To wake up