this cigar used to be a tree

sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes my cigar is a different than your cigar or not a cigar at all. sometimes it's a street or a sequoia or a wistful memory or a big raging hard on. You don't know. You don't know what my cigar tastes like. Not to me. Not what it smells like or feels like or tastes like and you best not forget it.

I went to an ansel adams exhibit today. highly recommended by the way. beautiful images. some which I have seen before of things I have seen before. many times before. that tree. that waterfall. ad nauseum. repetitive images that are never exactly the same but never different enough. always compelling in the way my own wounds are bound to move me.

I think about this and how I can look at the most beautiful thing in the world and I know it's beautiful and I see it's beautiful and all my logic makes sense of it's beauty but also it looks like parts of my past so frustrating, so ingrained with confusion, that that waterfall no longer mystifies me with it's beauty the way another waterfall, half as beautiful, would.
and I want to remake these images over again. I can't stand it. why is it so beautiful and I can no longer see it any more? why can I only see lonely wanderings of a child among the trees and these arguments, these ridiculous arguments only a family can have and the realization that I will never be whatever it is that would solve this conundrum. why can't I see myself at all in all this beauty. why am I still lost beneath that big beautiful tree every time?

images are wrought with memories and some memories are so deeply buried, so painstakingly forgotten that I see those images, taste those tastes, smell those thoughts and I can only feel...nothing. I can only feel nothing about the biggest thing on earth, I see the seven wonders of the world instill me with a void. and... great. what now?

how do I take these things and change them. more to the point. how do I change me in the face of these things. how do I resent the switch so I can reopen my eyes again to all these things I have learned to look, just beyond.


it's only pain. and that doesn't scare me at all. it's the void. it's the nothingness that turns me cold.