Future defined in shock -- Minds all but lost
Escaping it’s tiny case -- Defining their own shape
Defile the world’s own -- flock Man’s folly the final cost
Energy caught mid race -- Their will of patterns make

A burning maxim defined
The fire behind clouded eyes
Flowing forth in kind
A future of intersecting skies

My senses have been at war with me for as long as I can remember, always tricking me, forever showing me more than I need to know. My earliest memory that I have a date for is 9/11 on a military base, and in it I remember nothing but mechanical screams. I remember standing on my porch as the base rallied itself, sirens and flashing lights on every car, tearing at my body with monotonous pulses. I remember the jets overhead, the bone wrenching blast of movement that they left behind. I remember the cracks in the concrete, wavering in front of my tiny face as I trembled in the wake of the neverending onslaught. Just waiting, watching the world shatter in my mind.

Stitch and remix
Grab reality and affix
Attached with a masculine grip
Build the stars as you see fit
A world built from the seam you split

Take each step in time
A momentary peace sign
Each breath marking the rhyme
A score for the all encompassing lines
The ordered rows staying aligned

You know that person that always tries to finish your sentences for you, trying to prove that they have a sense of the world around them by making an assumption and rolling with it? Well everyone does that, or at least their brain does. When you hear something your brain tries to predict what it is as soon as the sound begins, the more information it receives the more defined of an idea it has. As it hears a word in the sound it switches to recognizing speech, and tries to make it easier to understand malformed sound by predicting hat word will come next. This can make it hard to understand people who have a different accent than you, or if the topic suddenly veers off course from what you were expecting. If you pay attention there is always a part of your mind running those predictions when your talking with someone, a part of you trying to make the audio processing job easier by ruling out words based on context. A sort of echo in the background of your thoughts that jumps in reaction to every new word.

Traverse the lands brink
Across every world link
Each defined and distinct
Making broad skies blink

The world shakes
As the morning wakes
To a shattered fate
A mourning mate

The aftermath of lives past
Their tortured mind all but ash
Drawn out over static facts
A bed of nails and wax

Find me motion defined
A motion that shows its mind
Staying within lines predefined
Reactions by which life can bind

The world reeks of beautiful waste
Of stories told with volatile taste
A human mind seeks with haste
Each source of this rancid trace

The mandates have been a catch all for my dreams and aspirations for almost as long as I’ve had any sort of presence online. They were born of boredom on one of the early days of my first job, wandering around the parking lot thinking of a way to meld different stories. Essentially I was trying to figure out a way to build a world in which any character would fit. Seems like a simple idea, but the answer I came up with has a lot of ramifications.