Harvest Moon

(This is intended to be read aloud)

Autumn always leaves me with lots of things to think about, and this autumn more than most.

Whether it leaves more thoughts leaves is another story.

In the autumn the wind that once went around the corners of blocks comes back

To take back for the Earth the leaves it gave for the warmer seasons. 

At the same time the hidden pigments of the trees that stand so strong

Explode again,

And year after breezy year we say: "The colours are so beautiful",

And big the harvest moon is so beautiful.

You can learn more about my thoughts from the drafts

Of lines never drawn and never said,

Than from the fine a person pays every time they lie when asked "How are you?"

"I'm fine,

thanks."

It calms the fear until after the rays of sun give 

One last stretch of brilliance across a darkening sky

And it sets,

And while we cease to see our own shadows in that moment

As night sets in we remember all the mistakes that set us up for failure.

Before you know it, night has long fallen but you cannot fall asleep.

Between the glare of the harvest moon against the darkness of the night

It seems like both the light and the dark are up against you.

But if you go for a walk outside and commune with the moon,

You might remember how beautiful it is.

There is a dark side and it goes through different phases.

Unlike the moon however, we do not always know when this phase is going to end and

Sometimes it feels like the gravity of the situation is pulling you down more than anything else.

We've all been there, and maybe

It pulled you down to Earth.

But it didn't bury you.

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This is a kind of a dual post. I've been experimenting lately and the above was my first attempt at spoken word, so thank you for bearing with me. In fact, the idea of speaking is was motivated this whole thing.

I'm might be up tonight regretting this, but here goes.

For a while I went through a shy phase and tried to come out of my shell a bit more, and one of the things I did to help was try a new type of social networking.

Despite sometimes managing to put something down into 141 characters or less I certainly didn't end up "speaking my mind" after all. There was always some reason to not post it: This is not interesting... It's too philosophical... Who would care to read this? What if someone actually reads it?

Although I didn't actually post about half of them, I learned a lot about the value of summarizing a thought or feeling in under 141 characters, and by the harvest moon I already had a small collection of unpublished drafts that I felt too awkward to post without context, but figured I could use in a poem or something somewhere else down the line.

And I will, but in a few different ways down the line on this blog instead.

The only one I'll let out now is this one:

If you feel like you can't speak your mind, then speak from your heart.