Geniusest

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

How many words were invented when we invented our government? Congress. President. Senate. I’m waiting. Which of these positions was invented specially for our unique democratic experiment? Because if we took these words from history, let there be no more mystery as to why it doesn’t work. We run our nation like the question how many broken lawnmowers does it take to cut the grass. Maybe a piece from each will work, and we can somehow splice together a decent machine from the rest of the world’s spare parts. But I doubt it. None of these countries, empires, philosophers or tyrants sent us their hearts. Just their rebels. Contraband. Freedom bound. People who look forward to sleep because of their dreams, not to avoid them. Face it. Democracy hasn’t actually successfully happened yet. The infrastructure required to stabilize it in a modern realm may yet not be in existence. And what we need are geniuses. Not chess champions or intellectual gunslingers pointing facts or eleven year old violinists.

We need what genius really means. What it’s always meant.
For the time being. A chance to reinvent.

Literally. Literarily. And eternal.

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

I don’t care for gift-wrapped rights. I’d rather have the fight. Besides, they never give the good ones outright. Like the ability to mess up once or twice and come out of it without a spinning record playing scratchy music in some judge’s office forever somewhere. Or to take stock of what all the world has to offer, before substantiating it into federal categories of access and control. I’m supposed to believe in God we trust, when my entire life a nonlethal, nonpoisonous plant has been condemned to extinction by my own government. I don’t know what you’re saying with closed eyes and hands folded together, but I assure you, there is a more powerful form of prayer. To any entity that fancies itself creator. Speaking just from my experience, there would be hell to pay if I caught you tearing pages out of my journal. Literally. Literarily. And eternal.
And yet, that is what we are hypothetically doing to a creator every time we build systems that only speak legalese. Like the world is locked, laws are keys, and without a lawyer on hand, it’s just safer not to touch anything. But I have more faith in the status of existence. Compared to its own inventions, the human being is a better system. Creative, flexible, great at independent study, plays well with others. We are born with our rights. In fact, I would go so far as to write, anyone who ever even tries to put them down on a piece of paper seeks to own you, in some way, if not today, then slowly over time. You. Your children. The entirety of life. Like it was a book we could go through and edit, lines to cut, or whole pages in clumps torn out altogether.

But that is not the nature of the universe.
Our creator is not a writer. It’s a chemist.

Not like ghosts, like knives – Old Journals

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Look at me. Do not look to me.
Your eyes pass through me.
Not like ghosts, like knives,
parting flesh in furrows, seeding lies.
Not not truth. Just misrepresentation.
Which may yet prove worse.
I am honest to myself first.
While others seek to hurt, pin, nail,
quenching thirst in drought on blood, in floods,
poured over reflecting blades curved crooked,
serving to snag more of my skin,
tear away more at my armor, laid tight,
heavy over weak pale white. Then,
look at me. Not at Jeremiah. At me.
Which, to you, is I.

This idea my work has been seeding.
It is only for you who are reading.