Here I sit on another indistinguishable night spent alone staring at my keyboard blankly waiting for the inspiration to cease. I would love nothing more than to pull the woman I love close and lose myself in hair down the back of her neck for a few blissful hours of sleep; feeling that security of holding someone as close as possible knowing they long for no place other, for no one other, for nothing other. I cannot tell you when exactly I lost that feeling but I know what came to replace it.
Read MoreJanuary 14, 2016 5:08a
You see, I thought you left me when she took my breath away like all of a sudden the door opened and you jettisoned out the escape hatch like the right droids in the worst place and the best time to evade the clutches of darkness to become a crutch to clutch in the hopes of not needing one but holding on for dear life to the edge of a solid wood door with room for two in iceberg-flavored water while the soundtrack plays on loop hearkening back to the foundations of a musical mysticism that provided a context to construct concrete contradictions of character to and through a distorted piecemeal-tatter of a quilt with boarders left yet undefined while becoming all that more scripted and standardized to fill a lyrical framework of miscalculated misconception and misdirection mistakenly enacted and erected in the hopes of someday not fearing hope itself.
Read MoreWednesday, December 9, 2015
“Write the poem you're afraid to write because it's the only one worth writing.”
Those words ring so loud and clear and true that they haunt my thoughts on a loop. I know what story terrifies me into silence and have known it longer than I have known the true drive to become a writer. Even these sentences dumbfound me into double-thinking my every word with the finality of the ink drying on the screen. I recall fondly and with heartbreak an essay I wrote in the only notebook I have ever filled with non-academic work. I only had a scant handful of unfilled pages before the notebook vanished in the atomic fallout of multiple surgeries, gaining and losing employment in a month, having the woman I fell for tell me she did not want me, my dad's death and my complete inadequacy to render effective, life-saving aide, having that same woman I loved declare her love for me almost exactly twenty-four hours after spurning my love for someone else, and becoming homeless all within a six week period of 2011.
While I have no ability to recall essentially every piece collected in that notebook, I do distinctly remember and have held on to an idea I had one day in class about a good-looking woman that sat in the row just ahead of me. We typically sat in the same seats which gave me the perspective to appreciate her stunning blonde locks and beauty, though only the occasional passing word. One day while sitting in that class, my thoughts trailed off from Western Civilization II and I found myself exploring the idea of immortality as it applies to the written word which quite literally exemplifies recorded history. My point largely rested upon the premise that putting pen on paper to describe this woman made her immortal and encapsulated in the moment of that lecture, that essay, that ink across the page. As such, everything she wore, said, and gestured allowed me to capture her volatile temporal existence.
This idea that my words could capture her essence in such a way that anyone could read it and allow their own mind to reconstruct her character thus taking on another plane of existence withing the mind of that reader. That concept and power emboldens me to and terrifies me away from writing the story I fear to write.
April 5, 2010
4-5-10
I stand in a crowded room
I feel as alone as a desert snake
Writhing and hiding its way through
A summer sandstorm
The wind blows and deafens my ears
With a constant ringing
With the buzzing of a hornets nest
Buried deep in my chest
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
You started it, my love, can't stop it
Tried burying it, hiding it, ignoring it, numbing it,
Running, fighting, fucking, speeding, meditating,
praying, wishing, hoping, singing, writing, playing,
Just to maybe—
Just a moment—
For one second—
I've written more songs than I can remember
Had such vivid dreams I swear—!
That I could reach out across the expanse
Years lost, nights' tears, days' misery
Let's be perfectly clear,
I never 'lost' her
I let her go
without so much as a fight
I wanted to believe
In all the bullshit that poisoned my mind
about letting go of what you love
What a crock of shit
Why would anyone believe it?
I was a fool with a 'silly heart'
Can I chalk it up to youth?
What about immaturity?
Insecurities?
Life once seemed a curious series of mistakes
Now I look back and see short-sided visions
Distorted realities forced into molds
I've never quite believed in predestined fate
But I did believe—
Do believe—
I don't know what to believe anymore.
I just know when something becomes
More powerful than imaginable
Until it's undeniably unavoidable.
5am
“5am” (March 1, 2010)
5am and I cannot sleep
I'm thinking about you and me
Because I can see you not with me
5am and I cannot sleep
I'm thinking about you and me
coming together, you'll see
Cause you're so sweet
When you're talking to me
Never thought we'd exist
As shadows fading in the mist
Looking back in misery
Your love so clear, I should've seen
But you're with him not my absurdity
You were the one I ran to when I was down
Knew every way to turn my head around
Forbidden treasures, Forbidden fruit
Forgotten memories, Forsaken youth
10pm and I'm still awake
mind tremors lie like Earthquakes
Exposing every fault line we faked
We played a game of fate
As of late, I really don't think
You're worth the high stakes
Closets filled with mistakes
Strawmen turned hollow bones
In the burial tomb of her womb.