Part Three: La Piel de un Hombre

This trilogy should have been titled Insomnia.  I battle sleep like the oceans battle the  full moon.  Quiet nights create a marathon of thought.  Riddles without answers and tomorrows without memory. 

Dark emotions ooze from a fissure in my soul.  Failure.  Fear.  Insecurity.  They lingered like an incurable cold.  Mix-matched puzzle pieces, stare into the shapes of a life and love.  Turning and twisting each piece to give it reason to fit.  I want to create a masterpiece from my empty heart. 

Could you stand on top of a Mountain and scream?  I did.  I heard the echo resonate through the valleys and carried by the winds. I closed my eyes and prayed it would reach your soul.

If you fall and feel the sting of the hurt, let my voice sooth your skin.  Let the warmth of my heart hold you together.  Let my love make your skin feel evening mist and morning dew.  Fall asleep to my heartbeat.  

Me 

Part Two: La piel de un hombre es pequeña.

It’s 3am, losing a battle to insomnia has become a conflict between the soul and the heart.  Roll over on my side and feel the quiet agony of my bum shoulder.  There, in the darkness of my nights, you are.  

A picture of you.  A picture of me.  A ceiling fan spinning my Caruso.  Could swear it was eviscerating me with a serenade that was deserving.  My Wide-awake thoughts can climb the ivy of a cathedral. 

Stare into your eyes you could see a love I had never experienced.   You quickly looked away in disgust.  Only you could do this to me.  A moment captured in you empty eyes.  Broken.

When you find yourself alone, if you think of me, think of dying leaves as they snap from trees.  When they gather and get lost in the mountain of thought.  It’s only until this moment, this one second, I realize the cold chill of darkness and I beg for your warmth.  

We all capture seconds, minutes, hours, days, moments you roll out your soul on an empty platter.  When she touches your face.  When she kisses you with an abandonment, a want, a desire greater than who you are.  Moments when you can’t catch your breath because of her presence.  You realize who owns your heart.

To feel so alive again.  To crawl out of your own skin.  To give all you are.  Only the warm burning sensation of this bottle of Glenlivet can sooth the bleeding heart.  Sealed for 18 years, opened to help me breath, to attempt to resuscitate a soul.  To numb a heart from feeling.

Oh these sleepless nights.  Ruthless thoughts of someone else holding you.  The agony of another man’s skin keeping you warm.  It leaves my body cold and callous and without reproach.

“What happened when two people committed to each other?  What happened to forever?”  Questions from a friend, between two boys trying to discover what they had not learned in life.  Ironically one boy would learn to be a man while the other would continue to roam a world searching for his missing piece to complete his heart.  

Roaming a world with a broken soul, knowing it is you who is that missing piece.  Maybe the purpose set in front of us sometimes does not agree with life.  Maybe life gets in the way?  How much would one give to scream that with you the world is, insignificant.  With you I realized the separation of the seconds from my minutes and give me the hours which have become my days.  

I’m sorry.  I am forever apologetic that nothing inside of me ever gave you the days that became months, months into years.  With you the stars feel small in my eternity.  Tonight when I roll over and stare at your smile, realize that it’s your eyes that hold the keys to this soul.  It’s the warmth of your skin making me feel alive.  

“La piel de un hombre es pequeña sin el calor de una mujer con ojos de cariño” Rick Ramos

Me

Part One: La piel de un hombre

Lately my minutes have become hours, hours have become days and days have become weeks.  The nights have become a sonnet that whales at a volume 11.  I find myself reaching for the remote to lower the volume on a TV only to realize it’s on mute.  

This screaming of thoughts is an uncontrolled river after a thunderstorm without end.  A storm without hope from a rainbow.  I’m dragged out to sea and get lost in the sand grains of life.

Recently I jumped on a plane to find a reason.  Not myself.  The measure of a man described by Sidney Poitier is “To simply wake up every morning a better person than when I went to bed.”  My life is about accomplishing this one simple deed.  But what happens when I can’t sleep? Does this make me the same flawed man in the sunrise?  Will I ever find the puzzle piece God created to complete me.  Or better, the person who holds the key to my soul.

On this journey to the beginning of time, a place where time didn't stand still, it started.  A humble, sincere approach has me realizing, I am dying without actually living.  I’ll roam the earth with scars that have no place in a heart more deserving.  I sound like a broken record or a broken heart.  It is, it’s mine and now more than ever I realize from the words of a man who for whatever reason wrote these simple words.  “Estoy viviendo sin vivir, estoy muriendo sin murir.”  This is what is left.

Yet does my darkness not deserve to be understood?  We all suffer from a preoccupation of life, love and an unreal perfection.  Its valiant for a square peg to fit in a round peg, yet the only way it will is if the roundness of the heart is larger than the rough edges of the scars that come with the square peg.

What happened to the simplicity of life?  Where the measure of a man was based on the callous of his skin.  Instead we walk by people laying on the ground and feel nothing.  How can people walk without feeling?  This holiday season my world turned upside down.  Appalled at the human spirit, when did the skin become so insensitive to your brothers and sisters?  One God, right?

On Christmas Eve, while most families were celebrating life.  I found myself playing Santa Claus to my brothers and sisters that don't have.  My heart has not recovered.  To realize that so close to my soul are families without, crumbled all that I am.  My heart was in disarray before I put the big guy suit, watching the smiles, the gleam in the eyes of people made my skin feel alive.  Yet, it was the lack of emotion on this one child, he made my heart cry.  

I want to crawl into your bed and have you hold me.  Tell me there’s a reason for life.  My heart is in disrepair.  The sorrow in that Child’s eyes prevented me from closing mine for a night’s rest.  The lack of your warmth is why my labyrinth into this solitude is my own prison.  It’s why the tears run down my cheeks at night and wring my neck. 

            “This isn't Christmas!  Your not Santa Claus!” My response, “Yes I am.”  Only to have the child tell me, “Then all I want for Christmas is a home!”

I could not let him go.  I realized the measure of a man is not what he accomplishes in life, it’s how he treats humanity, how he treats those without reason, how his skin heats at the thought of a woman he loves, how he comforts those who don't ask, how he finds the difference in comfort to the challenge of his own heart.  

La piel de un hombre se cuenta en momentos de amor a la vida.  La cruz de madera es de esos momentos cuando la piel rechina con la perdición de amor y vida.  “What happened to the old me?”  Well my friend, when he left to find reason, he realized his heart belongs to someone, he realized the prison of life can be vacated with a kind word, the heart in disrepair can be patched together by never giving up on life.  By always waking up a better man than you were the day before.  

The measure of this man is a story has only begun.  The question is, will you hold my hand and never be ashamed of my touch?  

Me.

What ever happened to Mr. Green Jeans?

Boy Scout

Forget the canoeing, arts, or even climbing merit badges, think chess.  Such was a simpler time in the age of forgotten youth.  The innocence of 1980 can best be described as a time when you were only 5,  marching to the beat of “Father Abraham” had a power of disenfranchised.  Kids struggling with puberty, discovering a road to whom they would be carved out of was in itself grandiose.  

The year was simple enough, 'The Shinning' made household names of Steven King and Jack Nicolson.  Stanley Kubrick became iconic and “Here’s Johnny!” would always pierce your skin much like ivy crawls up the chapel walls.  Life would never be the same.

CNN launched a new way to account for information, with a little help from a boycott of the Summer Olympic.  An actor named Ronald Regan. Least we not forget a guy named Terry Fox who gave humanity a reason.  The age of social media began with "The United States will Boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow."  No Twitter.  No Facebook.  No Instagram.  CNN and Ted Turner gave you a reason to tune in to this world of ours.

Indeed it was a simpler time.  “Put a little warm mustard in the palm of the hand.  Rub the face with a feather.  And ‘WALA’ we have lift off.”  Indeed David Rice was the master of my chaos.  It was implosive to see the fear of children when Witch Dr. Rice would tell you a story of fear.  He would grab a handful of dirt, throw it on the camp fire and fear had a new face.

Who knew then that this would become a lifetime of friendship?  Some girl from the Russian front would...as the days get closer to Dia de los muertos the imagination runs wild with what Mr. Rice would have come up with.  

In 1980 a young lost child found a reason within his chaos.  In 2015 that child has become a man and his reason is the chaos in his heart.  On December 8, 1980 John Lennon was shot and killed in front of his home, no reason could justify the taking of someones life.  No rational, no expectation, nothing could ever fix what was broken.  In life we are taught to fix what is broken, not throw it away.  With his life, we through away a soul because we could not understand it.

The summer of 1980 gave me direction, it stitched me together to a point where forgiveness became a word that had a meaning.  It allowed me to find a sunrise that would follow a sunset.  It allowed me to exist, then and it allowed me know to bleed with definition.  My meaning is defined by a simpler time, maybe I have always been naive or just maybe I just gave too much of my heart away.  

Here we are in 2015 and what have we learned?  That you can be wrong and swear that your right.  Thank you John Mayer for making such a simple verse have so much meaning.  At the end of the day, its not that I can't let it go, its just that my shadow days may not be over, my heart will ache, but I will always be that soul, “Father Abraham, he had many sons.”

Ricky

A letter to life...

Dear Life,

Sitting here at the corner of tomorrow waiting for the sun to rise, puddle of teardrops behind me, I ask you, does today stand a chance?  Striking a match and dissecting the colors of the night sky, blurred with a slow draw and smoke escaping.  A sip of poison, and the sound of melancholy running through the speakers…

Me rechina la piel. Pregunto qué es lo que tiene de mí que hasta el asco te da?  Fácil de ver en el reflejo en el espejo.  Pido disculpas por ahora veo lo que es.

At 13 you couldn't find a cloud without a raindrop.  You put on a smile and rolled on.   Time allowed you to find wings, heavy with callous these feathers always took you home.  A sonnet with letters put next to each other to find a tune that would allow you to reason.  

Todo el mundo aprende en algún momento las heridas que le dan ritmo al el corazón.  Siempre mi mente disfruta tu calor, son los golpes de esta noche que me deja en pedazos.

In this twist of hours, time allowed you to find her greatness.  This mindless emotion that finds its place in the middle of my dreams.  Wake up in the middle of the night in a soaked induce nightmare and realize the reflection in the mirror.  

Vivir.  Respirar.  Entender.  Para ser insignificante.  Para que su alma expulsado ... para ser honesto con usted mismo.

Life, understand that I don't want to be a lost cat in a dead end story.  Sitting here at the corner of tomorrow, waiting patiently, please don't leave me in this labyrinth of solitude.  When the morning comes cross my fingers and hope that today this horizon shows signs of life.  

Hasta ese dia, se arrodillarse y pedir perdón a la noche.  Te amo mi vida.  

me