Time and time again, you will be reminded that life is fleeting as you bask in a world of impermanence. Humanity’s crisis is, by all means, one of meaning…⁣
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Herein, every emotion has a place and a value – neither repress it nor act on it immediately, for it provides genuine information about the fabric of reality; it reveals what is sacred to you; it signals a direction by which to search for meaning; it summons us to be in service of meaning. ⁣
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Yet within the landscape of meaning, there must be a willingness to live as though life itself was never meant to end — this is the impulse of why you exist, the reason you continue to exhale today. ⁣
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— Lyrical Zen

In order to be born, you needed:

• 2 parents
• 4 grandparents
• 8 great-grandparents
• 16 second great-grandparents
• 32 third great-grandparents
• 64 fourth great-grandparents
• 128 fifth great-grandparents
• 256 sixth great-grandparents
• 512 seventh great-grandparents
• 1,024 eighth great-grandparents
• 2,048 ninth great-grandparents

For you to be born today from 12 previous generations, you needed a total sum of 4,094 ancestors over the last 400 years.

Think for a moment – How many struggles? How many battles? How many difficulties? How much sadness? How much happiness? How many love stories? How many expressions of hope for the future? – did your ancestors have to undergo for you to exist in this present moment…

— Lyrical Zen

Tears submerged in an ocean of silence, after so many years, become the mute messengers of an undeclared love; an inaudible spirit searching to appease the unreachable sadness in the depth of our eyes.

The subject of love has sunk itself into the recesses of quietude; we know the words but lack the experience behind them, so our actions contradict our claims and beliefs. We were blessed by the penetrating light of infinity, yet victimized by an unfortunate misynchronization; our hearts are simply asking us to care and nurture, but our abdomens have accumulated too much rage to follow suit.

For all the conceivable injustices that mankind has brought before me, am I a fool for believing in love and the goodness of humanity? Or perhaps I was predestined to roam amid the voiceless vicissitudes of a mutually shared illusion…

My end started at the beginning, where providence picked its favorites in the premorse of a living contradiction – influenced by many but defined by none, I exemplify the perfect example of non-perfection. As such, my soul mourns the recollection of the moment I laid immersed in the blood of my predecessors; despairingly unable to assuage the demons that have plagued us since birth. Though the seasons have shifted, I suffocate at the horizon of my many weaknesses, unable to detoxicate my psyche because I was once blessed by the arcana of an infinite love. And so today I remain prudent with my words, but articulate in my actions.

My only remedy in the scheme of loving you is taciturnity – do not search for understanding in the gravity of my words, nor in the cadence of my phrases. The nonuse of words is a conscious choice; my devotion is unexpressed and inexpressible, my adoration is undescribed and indescribable. Too often were my intentions confiscated by this incommunicable silence, insulated in the midst of an urge to live the most profound of all truths. If life was designed to acknowledge the certitude of impermanence, then let death reveal itself so that I can embrace quietus, and entrust you with my book of life as a bona fide testament of my deepest proclamations.

I suppose that I am silently apologizing for my vocal frugality, or better yet, my verbal abstinence. Still my dreams yearn for your affection as if we were the only remaining hopeless romantics – even the slightest slumber summons the engram of your visage, undisguised. My anatomy, calm and unmoving, ardently awaits the magnetic melody of your voice; the sweet scent of your aroma paralyzes the gentle rhythm of my respirations. We are far in distance, close in heart, but when I arise you reluctantly vanish along a vestigial path, as if secrecy was your only refuge. Here I’ve been living my life to fulfill every promise I’ve ever made, and there you stood falsely assuming that my love had an expiration date. I could very well be an impatient optimist stretching out my hands in vain, even if allowing you to set foot in my life was the most beautiful mistake I had ever made. Agonizingly perplexed – are my actions consequential or will the paladin of my cause vanish like frost under the morning sun? They say a person cannot handle affection if they don’t know how to give it – an enigma – yet vulnerability is an unspoken love, longing to immortalize itself in the devoted embrace of a true admirer.

I am thus loving in silence. Only herein, do I find the courage to live in a hopeless world and look at fate unflinchingly in the eye; to waken our slumbering consciousness and combat the mental and spiritual pollution that surrounds the commercialized status quo of our world. It is under this provision that each and every elegiac memory forever demarcates the moral causation of my travails, where an instinctive impatience accentuates my movements and disambiguates the cornerstone of my ethos – like a global orphan strangulated by the solitude of his mental asylum, but set free by a singular vision in the supreme experience of life.

– Lyrical Zen
January 2012 / Accra, Ghana, West Africa.

A man in my position is expected to wear a mask for so long that he forgets who was beneath it.

They said that speaking of romance and matters of the heart would make a man weak – on the contrary, it only makes a man more passionate in times of war. We can only be as strong as the women that raised us, as tears wet this paper like the rain drenches the soil. Just as an embryo incubating itself in the secrecy of a womb, I was held incommunicado for a predefined period of time. Here, I reveal a manuscript, perhaps naively, to delineate an interpretable blueprint of many men within the context of our personas; to shine a light of understanding on the aphotic regions of my heart; to know what makes our brothers suffer dolorous moments in silence during the matutinal and nocturnal hours of the day.

Scientifically, tears are produced when the lachrymal glands’ nicotinic and muscarinic receptors are activated. As a sentient human being in a perceptible world, the tears secreted by these glands are naturally released in times of pain and joy. Tears, which, in the absence of witnesses have absolutely no possibility of being wiped away. A man’s tears, however, are manipulated and monopolized by a tacit social contract. So therefore a man must cry from within; our tears are not at the eye level, but at the bottom of our hearts concealed in an infinitesimally vacuous space. Abandoned, where no witnesses take the stand, tears become the prison that introduces a man to himself. In times of pain, we tighten our musculatures under the protective umbrella of our self-importance.

Now at the swing of time’s pendulum, we witness yet another generation surrounded by hearts of stone, in cities built of stone, stoned in their quest to seek deeper avenues of meaning. Throughout life, many men are nothing more than a spectator – an anonymous face standing against the wall of an opaque discotheque, in the midst of pretentious visages gyrating amid the lethal fumes of emptiness. Here I see my brothers attempting to uphold a façade below the limelight, but weeping silently with each his own story never foretold; narrated only by a subconscious morse code that society never deciphered.

We all became an outward mirror of an inner condition; the helpless victims of random childhood events fated to plunge memoryless into an adulthood whose every aspect grows increasingly obscure. The modern world has shamed us; our souls inordinately marinated in the culture of speed – systematically desensitized, fractionized, and homogenized by the umbrage of mutual misunderstanding. Opting for solitude rather than allowing love to take its course, we suffer an emotional impairment that disables us from trusting one another. Thus, we enunciate our frustrations like the victims of a broken promise, as though our best efforts could never appease the wounds that lie within, clinching to emotional addictions that refuse to satisfy the heart’s vacuity. Hastening our own demise as we look for substitutes in the dense patina of ephemeral relationships, we’re absent in our presence, we’re surrounded yet alone, steadily sinking into a noxious miasma of longing. It is here that we try to exist, engulfed by an unrequited sentiment of loss; an inexplicable feeling of not knowing what we’ve lost.

Mystified by competing priorities and unable to escape these worldly superficialities, many men run out of currency pursuing women, but never run out of women pursuing currency. And so we succumb to vanity and erode moral certainties. In anticipatory demeanor, we are transformed into cut-throat desperadoes leeching for substitutes. But there are no replacements – most are left to stand alone in the dimness as love endlessly eludes them at every turn; a state of mind bearing resemblance to the times when you missed that special someone so much, you wanted to reach out and pull them out of your dreams.

Love – the word itself is often vocalized in vain. For a man, its power is often underestimated, antagonized and countermanded in his every effort. Yet our knees tremble at the exchange of glances in the abeyant moment of romantic hesitancy. Too many refused to believe that when a man truly loves a woman, she will become the reason he smiles; that he will embrace her soul with an abundance of brio as the sun caresses the ever-flowing oceans; that his heart will pulsate in harmony with the guiding rhythm of hers; that his palms will sweat at the reminiscence of souvenirs long-expired; that his tears will continue to flow quietly, long after the loss of a genuine love…

— Lyrical Zen
August 2008 / Paris, France.

Writing this at a time so still that the year seemed not to have begun at all.

It’s amazing how much one is able to recollect simply by trying – whether musing the past or dreaming of possible futures, it has become clear to me that in hindsight, I’ve acted fallaciously. It’s regretful that I’ve gravitated so far across the globe without explication. From the very beginning, I could feel myself ebbing away from that which carries the deepest meanings, the hearts I’ve left behind, the numerous celebrations and anniversaries missed, the birth of children maturing into a new generation of dreamers, the tender moments missed by your side… Everything I grasp embodies a reflection of your spirits – a gleaming reminder of these deprivations. I can only live those moments through photographs long expired, tormented by ideas which refuse to settle into words. I’ve managed to accumulate a verbal holocaust, in hopes that you will take my words as a sign of contrition. I fragmented my obligations to you the day I pledged never to turn away, so it is with deep anguish that I write this apology.

To face this world blindly and transition from fear to love is far from an effortless undertaking. The system we are born into wasn’t designed to build great men; it only seeks to destroy men of greatness. While attempting to command my identity in a world that wants to define it for me, I would have been reduced to another numerical statistic if it was not for the impulse of my constant metamorphosis. The perversity of the misguided masses compelled me to journey the globe in search of truth – and what I found is truth itself, alongside its infinite questions.

I’ve chosen this time to remain both socially disengaged and relentlessly camouflaged in order to surmount my immediate domain. As the conflicting forces of the multiverse accelerate simultaneously, I was destined to question my underlying assumptions concerning the verities of human experience and concede to my lack of an identifiable nationality. In respectful silence, I was confined to absolute solitude and emerged as the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin pillars of flesh and blood. My reality is unphotographed as is the fabric of my existence. The lacerations of my suffering condensed into tears that poured into the eternal abyss of my soul; an affliction that only transgresses the afflicted during the deepest of slumbers.

It is through the exotic simplicities of my nomadic momentum that the message became clear: I had to love myself and my inheritances vehemently before I could ever proceed to loving others; the vertebrae of freedom lies between the lines of that message. By constantly redefining my purpose on earth, I was able to extricate a modicum of peace – an aggrandizement of my foundational raison d’etre. And thus, we amassed and cultivated untold solidarity across the seven continents; our efforts become undistinguishable and never unicellulate; we spoke with dignity and eloquence, and sought refuge in distant locales – far from the sanctioned violence and the wounds of mental slavery. We no longer settle for mediocrity in the pursuit of success, as defined by our numerous erstwhile monologues. We exist to learn from our infinite mistakes and teach thereafter, synthesizing our horizons so that the light of righteousness may reach the farthest corners of this earth.

Ergo, today I stand in front of you, ill-at-ease. Despite my multitudinous trials, the artificial distance that exists between you and I has become the hiatus of my life, the centerpiece of my existence. Like a bruise that refuses to fade, I’m at the mercy of your healing acceptance. My only solace, are the fond memories of your love for me… It is through life’s countless near-death encounters that I’ve become thoroughly cognizant of my fragility, my impermanence, and the finite quantity of time at my disposal.

So here, in this very moment, I write my will and obfuscate no further to prosaically express my apologies. With the scant little that I possess, I bow at your feet and surrender my life efforts to you, to love, to family, to friends, to humanity, and to infinity. The essence of these words seeks to act as appeasement in these times of change. I remain loyal to my filial duties and bequeath my legacy onto future generations. Only then can we transcend beyond the world of superficialities. And only then, can we be taught how to dream and live King’s dream amongst peers and loved ones. Birth and death, the persistent dualism of my life is univocal and infinite; as it seeks to transmute vision into reality and take easing steps towards its final destiny. A destiny that longs for acceptance, so that you may trust me again like you trust gravity.

– Lyrical Zen
March 2007 / Seoul, South Korea.

Mathematically speaking, I failed in solving the elusive equation of love. I wanted to subtract myself from the equation in order to divide the pains from the joys and multiply the result – while adding another chapter to our story of devotion. Alas, the geometry of love is complex, as though the angularity of our human nature lacks a vital measurement in the pursuit of our common hypotenuse. As I integrate myself over the interval of having written this text, I derive relationships between the symbols and variables appearing in my life – tediously pondering when I will reach my limit as I approach infinity… I remain terribly remiss in such affairs; the solution seems to be far from numerical, far removed from being the sum of finite quantities.

Perhaps, this equation was never intended to be solved…

— Lyrical Zen