GEOLOGY 101

People are like geological layers:
The first thing you see is appearance,
maybe green grass,
a well-manicured lawn
or wild amber waves of grain
or an overgrown thicket of sharp thorns
or a vast and vacant desert,
but it’s always interesting…
first appearances are always interesting,
but peel back that thin layer of appearance
and you find the crust of people,
the hard dull heavy thick personalities
fractured by internal pressures
created eons ago deep inside them.
The crust wraps around us 
Like a perpetual nail gun
and ultimately, it’s boring.
You start to get to know someone,
realize they’re just crusty,
and you stop wanting to know them.
Crusty people are boring.
But, peel back that crust, and reach down
and you come to the mantle, way down,
way way down inside, under all that crust,
is the mantle, hard as diamonds, full of iron.
That’s where people get their strength.
That’s what holds up the crust, 
keeps the earth from exploding 
from all the internal pressure.
Crusty people are only 30 miles thick,
paper thin really,
but the mantle is 1800 miles thicker.
It’s our backbone, our skeleton,
our hardheadedness that makes us keep going
when it’s all so pointless…
And if you are ever so lucky as to peel back
someone’s mantle,
then you find their core,
that white hot plasma of pure energy
pulsating, bubbling, burning, 
pure fucking energy!
Everything that makes being alive 
so real, so important, so precious
is because of our core.

But wait, there’s more!
If you could get through someone’s core…
which you can’t…
but if you could get to the very center
of someone’s core,
you’d find their inner core,
something so rare
that no one knows
what it is.

So the next time you see some 
well manicured lawn walking around
or some crusty old geezer sitting on a bench
just remember
somewhere under that thick mantle
is a burning hot soul 
just wanting to explode.