On Justification (it’s just a paper)

Don't be fooled –
your doctor watched the game that night
instead of studying for the test.
Your teacher too, I'm confident –
went to the bars the night they learned
what they're teaching you today.
They were hung-over and exhausted,
they hadn't slept all week.
They even might have earned themselves
a hangover with delight.
Yet they are here,
and things will be alright.
So much is pressed too tightly
upon us –
so much is weighted far greater
than it really is.
Relax, I say.
It's just a paper, after all.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

On Skipping Class

The best of them have done it,
no matter what they say.
They ditched an English class
or history lecture –
that old archaic fart that drools
while droning with spittle
in the darker crevices of his face.
They’ve held the beach
upon the scales, and when found
their textbook wanting,
have cast their work away.
Even Hawking, I’m certain,
tottered between beer and astrophysics,
and Franciscan friars,
turned their eyes away from heaven to
look down at the beauty
all around.
On warm, inviting spring afternoons,
when a cool dew from the lifted morning fog
still lies naked on the grass,
when that high perched glowing orb
wraps its fingers around your will,
what is left to do?

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

The Corpse Flower

Once or twice a lifetime,
the corpse flower blooms
for the gardener
that held his breathe
for years.

I believe that is the essence
of all things.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

Upon Reflection (on living)

It used to make me mad,
and then it made me sad,
but beauty made me melancholy,
and now I just don’t know.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

Sets

If I am this and you are that
And that is this and this is that,
I think you’re this and this’ just that,
While I am you and this and that

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

Camping

Take the back road back to nowhere,
as everything else goes by –
sit in silence by the fire,
and move in rhythm with the night.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

Boardwalk

I sometimes walk along the beach
between the fair and stars –
I sometimes hear the distant laughter
melt into the dark –
till human need returns to me,
and I turn my body back –
the ocean in the background,
and twinkling lights ahead.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

“The Renaissance”

The clothes

Renaissance fairs are known for their attire, for their lavish decorations. Men and women of every class and religion and race and creed spend fortunes to become “time appropriate”. Some work in offices, long corridors of blue felt with steel rims, under florescent lights – slaving away long hours and sleepless nights for swords and leather straps – for the appropriate armor and that “perfect” belt. They grow their hair out and forget to shave for weeks, unless their bosses complain. They are children of the children of a revolution that no one remembers but all still understand, and the Renaissance is the dream of escape – where they all are servants and serfs – and no one sees the irony.

Frequent fair-goers wear all sorts of “relics” and necklaces – “precious stones” on tanned flesh from dead bodies, once quite real and alive! They sometimes wrap cloth around their mouths, leaving only their eyes exposed – for the mystery or attention is anyone’s guess. True, most people still wear Nike’s and white, Hane’s t-shirts under their costumes, but authenticity was never the goal anyways. These are the weekday Ringwraiths, with weekend reveries of heroic greatness far away. This is not reality – it’s magic – and I am lost among it sometimes with everybody else. Our skin can be so tight in mirrors!

The Technology

While cars meander conspicuously across the fairgrounds, more subtle are the cell phones, tightly tucked between the car keys and the wallets, complete with magnetized petroleum based cards with holograms and photo-identification, accepted at most boutiques and venders.

The cells use the latest digital waves to broadcast their signals to servers, connected to a mainframe where minutes are calculated to the thousandth of a second and tabulated for the monthly bills which arrive at their homes sometime after their “weekend releases”. When many of the fair-goers see their bills, they express disgust at the government’s taxes that apprear ever-growing and heavy when the cost of living continues to rise and buying power slowly declines.

Some will even go as far as commenting that the degradation of longstanding social principals and the corruption of morality have led to this sad state of affairs. They wish we all could just go back to the good-old-days, these “conservatives”, these dreamers from the fair – but they do not see the irony!

The Renaissance

I pray one day they wake up from their waking dreams to find that it was not so much a dream as they had made themselves believe. One day these dreamers must find themselves, lost amid the drift of countless generations, that river of objective relativity. They must live beyond their serfdoms and hierarchies, and they must find that Real Renaissance, be everything else for not, and life an irony the shows itself on weekends – brighter than the sun for any with eyes enough to see.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

The End

When all the fiery flavor’s flung –
the hero’s died, and trumpets sung,
what, save past grace, resides?
Our fortunes cast, and time spent rye –
where does the seed of hope still rise?
In dreams – in dreams of mind – they lie.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

keyboard

Tell the keys to touch themselves,
I’ve seen enough tonight.
That word is said too much for it,
to not be old and tired.
“love”…
I’ve said enough tonight.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

Why: I Sit and Smoke on the beach

Maybe you can understand, or maybe you just won’t – it’s not of consequence to me. Maybe though, you comprehend why I need to smoke so badly, and sit here on the beach. Although you might, I pray you don’t – I pray you don’t see yourself, with that paper slip and leaves, rolled in hand, as the waves convolute and twist and rive – the stars above your head on fire! If you do, I’m sure you understand why I crave that cigarette so badly, when I cannot bare to smoke.

(Socrates lived between 469 and 399 BCE, in the state of Athens. He died for his belief in civic virtue and “the good life”, contending that we know nothing. )

I am certain you are of mind and spirit beyond the days you know; you have read all the great books of Constantinople and Paris, and long for an idea of feat or war to call your own.


(Plato was a devote follower and friend of Socrates. He expressed belief in “the forms”, continuing to stress the necessity of man to strive for truth.)

Isn’t it funny, these things that were supposed to make it all so much simpler, but instead left us without the real something we’ve always needed? Isn’t it ironic, this sense of irony in the world – the best philosophers and poets and writers and dreamers have dreamt their dreams away, till it seems there’s nothing left to say? And so, we are a generation of sailors – of astronauts and thieves, who sail away on borrowed ships to stars, and steal the words of kings.

(Descartes’ questioning of knowledge transformed methodology and logic. Using the analogy of a dream and melting wax, he wrote of perception and reality being separate. After abandoning academia, the only thing Descartes was certain of was his existence.)

If you can understand me, or if you’ve lived the way I do, I am sure this would all make sense. I am sure then, you will do this, and do that, just the way it’s meant to be – it’s most efficient and proven so by math and time. You won’t waste the previous moment, and you won’t stray from the golden course. You are not Oedipus, as you wish you were – you are linear – but not by choice. You have a house – elegant but simple – you have a job – ordinary but secure – and security – all that isn’t you. You are not new, and you wish you were…

(One of Martin Luther’s goals was to ensure that philosophy and reason were put to the benefit of society. Luther stressed the crisis of faith within the individual, and proclaimed the salvation of humanity an internal struggle rather than a system.)

Sometimes, on restless nights, you take long drives you can’t afford to the beach, and sit on lands you’ll never own; even though you know it’s best, you’ll stare into the sea. And when you’re calmed enough by placid waves, with the stars above your eyes on fire, in the distance you can hear the mermaids on the farther rocks, singing out their tempting lies. Oh, but what you wouldn’t give to swim to them and leave, to pass this world behind and search for gold and spice and things. What you wouldn’t give to fight and have the chance to die, to kill a Cyclops of your own and put Ithaca out of mind. What you wouldn’t give to dream, or perhaps wake and find another life or dream – yes, that would be acceptable.

(A politician at heart, Machiavelli was tortured by the Medicci family after the fall of the Republic of Florence. He wrote of the necessity of the wrong and the economy of violence as truth in a world that does not always choose the right. At heart, he longed for Italy to reunite and return to a republic. He was executed a few years after completing The Discourses and The Prince.)

If you understand me, then you’ve walked along your share of wharfs and watched the merchant ships cast off. You’ve sat on wet and dirty cement landings, and prayed to God for rain. “Why, why won’t it rain,” you cry, and you cry your days away. What you wouldn’t give to cry. And so you write on blank pages, with really nothing more to say. You search for new endings, but the same words take your hand again.

(Martin Luther King was born in Georgia on January 15th, 1929 and was assassinated at approximately 6:05 pm on April 4th, 1968. King wrote of the responsibility to further human potential and protest unjust laws. A man of faith, action, and thought, King led the Civil Rights Movement and was seen as a father to many in a generation rebelling from the accepted values of their parents. He was thirty-nine years old.)

You see, we are each endowed by our creator with certain inalienable traits, among these life, desire to create, and passion. I long for my David, my Mona Lisa, my perfect thought. I am the last to live among a world of gods, where all the thoughts were thought not so long ago. So here I am with you; I think you understand me too. I think you understand why after all this, I need to sit here on the beach and smoke my cigarettes, even though I loathe the smoke. I only wish it were original.

(Existentialism: a philosophical theory which emphasizes the individual person as responsible, through choice, for the manner in which they pursue their existence – free.)

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry

Ships

We resign ourselves, after much thought
in distant reverie under countless glistening twilight
princesses, reflections in the eyes of God.
We stumble through the bramble of ourselves,
shaken by the tempest of the day, that demon squall
somehow we fought with fervor through,
to come back to
this place we used to know.
Now it too is distant,
now we are men
with wrinkles on our souls –
ships forever lost to oceans
only we have seen.

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry