Poem: When the Skies Turn Red

Greenhouse Effect Open, SLC (2013)
“When the Skies Turn Red” by Karen Neverland

This is one of the poems from my book, Cosmic Breath. Thank you for your support!

When the Skies Turn Red

When I was born, my eyes were connected directly to my heartbeat, and each time it pulsed I pulled the whole Universe in.

That was until the first time I heard anger.

Hate split apart the Universe I held in each eye as I realized that what sprang from nothing also must return there and fear was born within me.

But I rewrapped my essence into a gift paper covered presence and I gave away myself in the most beautiful of methods.

By the time I found words I had already defined reality into what people thought of me, with an ego to prove my complacency.

The Universe pulled back from my eyes because I was now defined by the words I could speak and the things I could see.

Then school gave me a pencil to permanently prove my reality physically.

We memorized periodic tables and were periodically labeled as smart for repeating ideas on command, rather than creating our own.

We were taught to forget our heartbeats in favor of the theories behind them, because realness is only in what you read.

We were taught to sell our gold-encrusted eyes for the “good life” where we traveled blind, walking along roads full of other expressionless eyes that confuse our lies with True Beauty.

Evolution robbed us of our vision since we no longer used it.

Now they told us all we needed to know.

In a classroom they told us:
“The skies are always blue. The skies are always blue. THE SKIES ARE ALWAYS BLUE.”
“What kind of a fool are you to depict them differently? What kind of a fool are you to act irrationally. Distract yourself with our numbers and facts. Magic is for the deluded.”

Even as they polluted my seas, changed my sunsets from orange to green, and replaced my grass with plastic.

A system of eight hours a day beat me down, until I was more lost than found, feeling around in the dark for a life that lay inside of me.

My daytimes were spent dreaming, believing that the skies are always blue.

My dreams were replaced with television scenes; a sleep that sewed my eye-sockets into sunken, star-struck fantasies.

The roses in my cheeks wilted, yielding only thorns in my eyes.

Smiles, once sweet as a chocolate-shop, locked together into a rotten-caramel cemented grimace laced in venom.

My Kundalini snake snapped with poison jaws, until my Garden of Eden became a decayed wasteland.

I stayed there for a really long time.

My saving grace is that I don’t remember most of that self-serving hell.

You don’t remember much when you’re a shell, and time passes quickly when you’re not living at all.

But one day the Love-Force entered my Life Source.

I suddenly saw the words: “Love Movement” staring back at me from bathroom stalls.

Either one person was following me everywhere, or there was a radical Revolution of Love happening from the bottom up.

I found myself scrawling the words “Live, Laugh, Love,” on available blank walls, and “Love Matrix” in vacant halls.

I had awoken to a Heaven that was happening all around me that I had been too blind to see.

And when it opened my eyes, my own Universe was projected, rather than just reflected.

As I felt my heartbeat, for the first time in each moment, I felt the Magic in Life, Love, and Laughing again.

And I dedicated my time to attaining all three, because you see: textbooks don’t teach the things worth living for.

And textbooks don’t teach the things worth dying for.

So after 26 years of delays, here I am back at stage one, but I’m having a lot more fun in this silly “System.”

I’m ready to play without rules or restriction, by breaking laws that are riddled in contradiction.

I’m ready for a few more pages in this Fiction; I’m ready to be my own rhythm.

And you know, this time around… I’m going to paint those skies red!

 

© Copyright 2014 Karen Neverland. All Rights Reserved.

Author: Karen Neverland

Author • Poet • Certified Usui Reiki Master-Teacher • Bachelor of Science in Communication • Licensed Minister •