Childish Dreams
Spoken word-Written August 5, 2019
I often wonder,
At what age I stopped dreaming like a child
I used to sleep just so I could dream
Building Utopias in my slumber
that would challenge, even, heaven’s infrastructure
Yet now,
My dreams look like Pride rock,
Right after Scar ate all of the antelope,
Some days I’m Scar, other’s, I’m the antelope.
Maybe it was around the time my imagination stopped giving a run for God’s money
Now, I am mentally broke
Desperately fishing for loose change in the crevices of my mind
anytime someone asks for my two cents.
You see, creativity used to come out of me whether I wanted it to or not,
Kind of like diarrhea…but good.
I was the quintessential ideas person.
I was an abstract artist who with the help of my best friend
Did my aunt a favor by
livening up her drab white carpet
With bright red paint, so that by the time we finished
It looked like we’d conducted open heart surgery
With our bare hands
I was a baker,
Who attempted to bake a whole cake,
in a metal pan,
in the microwave,
because, well..efficiency
I was an artistic innovator, who combined theatre and dance to create a performance piece acting out each lyric to Usher’s “Yeah”
Which looking back,
I now understand why my mother sat both horrified and amused as my friend and I acted out
The lewdest of lyrics in the most innocent of ways,
because words were just words were just symbols for imagery
painted upon the crooks and crannies of our infinite imaginations
You see my mind was a kaleidoscope of ideas,
which were mere fragments, maybe even failed projects in someone’s eyes
but chaotic carpets can be found on the floors of any Google office,
Microwaved cakes hit the market hard in the 2010s with the mug phase,
And I’m sure Usher would be doing a lot better as a musician if he’d had me as a music video producer/choreographer circa 2007
I refuse to believe that children naturally lose their creativity because they are forced to grow up
I think some of us become drained,
pouring ourselves into problems,
not sure how to fix every gaping hole
Because the most creative people, just want to make the world a bit different.
But how do you change the world,
When you can’t even pick up a paintbrush,
Because the canvas reminds you too much of how it feels to be blank
To have a writer’s block so intense that every path out is a darkened dead end,
And the words won’t be enough to make the world beautiful again.
I wish you could’ve seen the world the way I saw it as a child.
It wasn’t perfect,
But it was like the most endless block of clay which if we kneaded it hard enough,
It’d give us what we needed...
My college professor told me that the act of creation
Is the manifestation of your own freedom
Though I am far from the curious child I used to be,
I know my ancestors did not escape chains
For me to live in a self imposed captivity.
Utopia is a mindset,
And sometimes we just need dream a little harder to recreate it.
We still have the ability to see Walmarts as playpens, full of turning obstacles and hot lava,
As opposed to war zones.
We still have the ability to see border lines as tight ropes
As opposed to tied ropes, and chains and fences, shutting us away from our friends
We still have the ability
To instill patches of heaven, in the most hellish holes,
We can be empty,
Without being hallow,
Ready to fill our souls
With the light that shines as bright as a child’s eyes
I am a lantern
Unsurely, yet vividly flickering in the darkness
Though my flame may have waned,
I will not be extinguished,
We will not be extinguished,
Because at some point in time
We knew what it was like,
when the idea of reality
Was like a fresh piece of play dough just waiting to be disrupted.
There is a reason children play dress up
Wearing shoes others are too afraid to fill.
I dare you to dream, think, imagine, like a kid again.
Create seemingly outlandish solutions
without worrying about the weight of reality
And the next time someone tells you your being childish,
Tell them thank you,
because that just means,
You’re still living, the dream.
