Triangles are my favorite shape…

…three points, where two lines meet.

Hello, morning. Today I dream of war.

I wanted to begin this entry with–I love to talk to women as if they’re men. Then I stop. No, that’s not what I mean. I love to talk to men as if they’re women. No. Not that either. I’ll begin the entry about war.

Social interaction is a form of fight. Some know all the moves, the movements, the flourishes. Some look at it as a dance more than war, because they do not see what dies between the words. Chess is war, and much more obvious. Any game is war of some type or another. Pieces fall by the wayside, points are won, children go on without their parents.

Haha maybe not the last part.

But people are at war with people, when interacting. Culture says "you talk to this type of person like this. you can talk about these topics. this is ethical. this is proper. this is appropriate."

So they fight their own strange skirmishes, men with women with men with men with women with women. Groups, boom, in blooms a new dynamic. Bring in the expansive culture, the Mutt nature of America, step into a different ring, rink, type of think.

So the wars you wage are smalltalk, tiny swords and short quips, quick, sliding up and back, dip and twist. So, more a dance then. But I digress, as I always do. War is a shotgun of words, sometimes, and a poisonous drip, others.

I return to the initial issue: I love to emerge behind enemy lines and speak the native language. I love to bow and pass my gift with two hands holding. I love to talk to women as if we’re equal, as if we’re the same gender, and the penis, and the vagina, doesn’t matter. So it was what I meant, but not really. Some days I have problems with words, and communication, because I’m so far up inside my communication fails and falters.

It’s why I started writing in the first place, in fifth grade, because damn it nothing I said was exactly what I meant. Mostly, it still doesn’t.

I love to talk to men as if they’re women, and in this I mean something different too: I love to be vulnerable. There, across the board. I love to be vulnerable. When I’m always bleeding out the good stuff, the bad stuff flushes away too. So. Bleed is a bad connotation. Radiating, then. When I’m always radiating the good stuff, the bad stuff becomes saturated in the good and becomes beautiful simply by shining, illuminated.

But radiating isn’t really a good war term. You don’t think religion, or happiness, when it comes to war (assuming war is a good comparison in the first place. Hah. My brothers would list several fallacies just in my doing this without proper evidence to corroborate).

Bleeding is good. Sweating is good. Tears are good. I’ve never heard a time when vomiting was bad, either. If your body needs it out, let it the fuck out.

Climaxing, too. But that’s later in the war, a very unique war, a very unique battle, skirmish, duel, barter. Masturbation is a kind of sword practice, all the puns intended. I’m again derailing myself. Of course. I like to stumble into my thoughts, like boots in just the right footsteps to cover my socked feet and tighten themselves on branches as I walk.

Damn it. This wasn’t supposed to be a poem. It was supposed to be about myself and my brother, Lucas.

"I prefer not to think of myself," he once said, a beautiful thing. A perfect explanation of how he sees himself. As not. His environment exists for him to help it, not it help him.

We are cut from the same cloth, the both of us. He says, he wants to be perfect for everyone. At the gun show, while we’re walking around, he says something to a friend that I overhear as, "stop talking to me." I didn’t expect him to say it, and wondered if they were in a battle. But they weren’t. He didn’t say that. But my mentioning it  made him introspective and afraid. He botched his battle. He found a wound while riding his horse home. A small one, but one that bled him out a little too quick to realize.

He wants to be perfect for everyone. So do I. I want to be perfect. I can’t. I know I can’t. He does too. But he deals with it through depression: he’ll never be good enough for this place. This world. He’ll never be good enough for anyone else, let alone himself. I’ve said a million years for him to be perfect for himself, first, and he said, "I prefer not to think of myself." How do you argue that?

You let him evolve, of course. You let him kill himself with the wounds he can’t find, or you watch him become a matador. He hasn’t decided which one he is, yet: bull or matador.

Where we’re the same in our interests, we’re different in our realizations. I say, I want to be perfect for you (understood: all), but the only way I know how I can even come close is to be perfect for me, and see all the little pieces of me in everyone else (read: namaste, from an earlier entry).

Yesterday a blue right, green left eyed waitress told me she recognized me from somewhere, big smile, stating it was the reason whys he didn’t ask us if we’d been to that restaurant before (incredible food). I smiled and said I get it a lot. Then I thought. I get that… way too much, I think.

It could be a come-on, some special secret flourish in the battle of conversation that I’m supposed to counter or allow through. It could be a physical recognition, although I’ve never seen someone that looks like me, and I should take the chameleonic tip-of-the-hat and run with it. Or, it could be a spiritual thing.

Bethany says she’s getting a lot of strangers telling her they have messages, which to me says, "she’s asking the world for help." I could be wrong, of course. I quite possibly, usually am. Yet I’m picking up similar, "you look familiar. I feel comfortable with you." which says, to me, I’m ready to help someone. Perhaps everyone.

Whatever. It’s strange. She stared at me a lot during the meal, in passing, in talking to the table. It was me, she spoke to, me, she asked about the check, me, she gave the check to, me, whose opinion mattered. I think she kept trying to figure out if we truly knew each other from somewhere (which is possible), or else she found me attractive. Another, different, battle.

But it leads back to how I started this entry. Today I dream of war. Mostly because I have a mind so stuffed with stuff, I can’t quite cut through the bramble. Partially because, well, I’m single now, and everyone takes on a wholly different shine.

I wonder if I’m doing it wrong. If everyone thinks that I think they are attractive because I’m interested in finding myself in them. Guys and ladies both. I wonder if I’ve stumbled upon a wrist snap, sword-breaking move that leaves the enemy uncertain.

And why am I looking at the people I encounter as enemies in the first place? I’m scared, I guess. But those I’m most scared of are the ones I want to know the hardest. Not because they’re dangerous–or perhaps it’s because they are–but because something they do, or are, or have, is something I don’t have a defense to. And I want to be all defended, all the way, when I stumble through this world.

I end up picking up people on the way. It confuses me. Bethany would say, now, I’m inviting the hurricane again. She begged for a simpler life, a simpler me, and I wa

s simple for her. I was perfect. For her. Or as perfect as I could find myself, in her. But now that she’s gone, I’m elaborating, splitting up, apart, blooming orchids.

And orchids live off the other trees anyway.

(I write to You (understood) because she isn’t here to listen anymore, and the sieve is overflowing, blood all over the place.)