Sequel- A Poem

I think, now

At some distant point near Long Last

You’ve now gone

As far as I can let you go.

I think you’ll always be

A kite in my night sky

Something gone but lingering

In a space now far beyond

The space I’d once left just for you

On a towering hill sat next to me

Where I never had to feel the line go slack

And see white nothing falling down

A child’s string now lost in towering grass

A severed line leading to

A child’s empty cup.

And I’ll always know you’re out there

In empty skies that aren't my life

Something to flutter now so far beyond

The still grass that solemnly sings

Only one half of a promising song

And unspoken vows lost like a kite on the wind.

How Odd the Disconcerting Replication of Otherwise Ordinary Things

Hello again.

I officially made it through my first ever Thanksgiving away from home or, if you’re not partial to celebrating that day for national or ethical reasons “It was Thursday just a couple days ago and I didn’t lose my mind.” As it turns out, I didn’t do many of the things I thought I would. I didn’t sit in a sports bar, Bukowskiing my way through some fair bit of poorly planned coping mechanizing. Nor did I follow through with my ideal plan: Buy a lot of bread and then wander around town feeding crows. Did I care that this would’ve made me look like a Home Alone character left on the cutting room floor? I did not! And to be honest, I really was looking forward to that even if there was a better than average shot of all the birds ignoring me. That would indeed have been a grave blow to the wobbly and unreliable morale.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to face any of those trials and tribulations that at this point are relegated to the realm of the ‘strictly fantastical’ that is usually reserved for poorly built metaphors and the idle hopes for a second date when the first date was a disaster. No, instead I wound up going to spend the holiday with my boss and her family. I’ll admit that I was trepidatious; I’m not necessarily partial to people and, even when I am, it usually works out best when they’re someone I’ve known for….let’s just ballpark it and say (at least) 19 years, 4 months, and 13 days. But, I’ve been oddly happy these past couple months so I wasn’t looking all that forward to ushering in some sort of rampaging depressive episode because some crows ignored me. No, I was bound and determined to turn the tides in my favor and avoid all rocky outcroppings or gigantic icebergs that James Cameron should’ve seen coming. So I called my boss at noon on Thanksgiving Day and said, paraphrasing “What the hell! Why not! This seems like a better idea than manufacturing my own psychological downfall!”

Since I routinely say things out loud because I’ve mistaken my very real reality for some sort of mystical charm palace, it’s possible I did use those exact words. We may never know. Although I’ll keep you all posted if I get called into an HR meeting with some haste once Monday rolls around.

So I rode with my boss and her unstoppably chipper daughter out to Beaverton, dodging all manner of horrors along the way (Most notably: Red lights and this one really weird guy who decided the darkest part of the evening was a good time to walk down the middle of a one way road). I sat at their table, meeting a husband and another daughter, both charming in their incredibly distinct ways, and felt oddly at home for being somewhere that was nothing like the memories I had of the times I’d spent with the family I’d left back home. Instead of old memories, there were old stories that weren’t mine. Instead of family jokes where I knew every punchline, there was a new writer’s room. And instead of the slow quiet that often lives with a group of people who know each other impossibly well, there was incessant laughter, new customs and traditions, and food that was a far cry from the Thanksgivings of Bismarck, North Dakota: Ganje Edition.

There was also a gorgeous bird who sat on my shoulder for the better part of dinner. And if you know anything about me at all, that is about as good as things can get. Also? That bird gave me kisses when I left. So. Your move, 2022. Beat that.

This is all to say that, it was the strangest feeling. Days don’t mean quite as much to me as they used to and while I used to think that was just a side effect of being me, I’m beginning to realize in meeting more people that it’s more just a side effect of being human. Birthdays, when they’re not counting down to tobacco or booze, are just days. Holidays, more often than not, are little glimmers of what used to be where, if you sit completely still, you can almost see the memories of the child you used to be that are now hidden deep in the cracks of floorboards once new. And in this strange state, everything just…blends together. But that doesn't mean that those days don’t still mean something when they wander around once a year. Because more often than not, they do whether we realize it or not.

I suppose, in that way, it is always better to be an echo than nothing at all.

And me? I was an echo. Not in my own safely-structured bit of familial familiarity, but in someone else’s. A strange place where I was allowed to be myself, but even he felt like someone new. And I found myself welcomed and happy in a strange place I never thought I’d be: Sitting at a new table, so far from my old one, and taking a chance at being someone who embraced new traditions instead of wandering vaguely in the hope of finding something I wasn’t even sure was there. And yes, there will be more than time enough for me to decide next time around whether I’m ready to feed some crows (I’m bound to make that happen eventually!) or find something else that can be genuinely specially mine. I can’t always rely on the kindness of new acquaintances. But for one day it felt lovely to do just that, because it was precisely the kind of thing that I might never have done back home, specifically because I never would’ve needed to.

So I suppose, in the end, this is all to say that moving away can have the strangest effect on you. Every little old thing that used to be is gone now, and you’re just a child playing with blocks in the hope of building the kind of personal memories and traditions that will reverberate through the lives of those who will one day wander into yours. But it doesn’t have to always be that way. Sometimes you can just go out on a limb, tell yourself to be polite, friendly, and the ideal guest, and accept an embrace or a hand that’s offered to you. In that moment, you become a fly on the wall, a spectator to another life or lives, and for just a second you can feel what it’s like to be part of something so much bigger than everything and anything you’ve ever known.

That time will end, it always does. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. And even if there are few traditions to be found in the lives and memories of others over the course of a single meal, there will always be the promise of those memories. And memories, if they’re good enough, just might last forever.

This was supposed to be my first Thanksgiving alone. But I wasn’t.

There was laughter, there was joy, and I got kissed by a bird named Sunny.

It’s hard to imagine ever forgetting something like that.

The Strange and Unenviable Task of Writing Things No One Will Read

Well hello again, persons of the internet and various strange and inhospitable plains.

When I moved out to Portland, I decided with some concrete certainty that I would forgo almost all social media and instead keep my whereabouts and eclectic activities tied firmly to this website and this blog. What better way to experience the world, I thought! What better way to hone my writing talents while wandering poetically through my new home! Well, as it turns out all that idealized self-assessment has apparently translated to me spending a lot of time on instagram looking at pictures and posting less-than-compelling content. Is that out of the ordinary for me? Of course not. I have aspirations to be the next Neil Gaiman/Christopher Moore/Edgar Allan Poe all rolled up into one, but, unfortunately, I also have the mental faculties, dedication, and attention span of a wildly bewildered stick insect who is suddenly appalled to realize that after all this time, all of his friends have just been sticks.

Anyway. This is all to say that I rather dropped the ball on this one. And if I’m going to keep paying for this ridiculous website that no one really asked for, then I might as well put it to good use. What form this “Good use” might take? Well, to be frank, I haven’t the foggiest. In the end, it probably just means I’ll ramble aimlessly in my typical “scream into the void” fashion and just hope it makes a difference. Will it? Probably not. Seems a bit stupid to think that it would. But oh well, what else am I going to do? Go out there and meet friends and bird friends and hot babes? Enough with your fantasies, let’s be realistic.

To give you the briefest update on my life out here (because that really isn’t the point of this entry and it’s rather late and I have various sleep-related activities I’m looking forward to investing in), things have been, in the words of all great minds, ‘not too shabby’. Meeting people Is hit or miss and I have yet to fully woo the crow population of the area, but I’m happy to announce that I’ll be putting about 92% of my energy into the latter while allowing for a nice 8% reserve for talking to ordinary human beings. I don’t see what could possibly go wrong. But yes, the weather out here is nice, the rain is always present, and I’m thoroughly enjoying being caffeinated and drinking IPA’s. The latter is still a shock to me. Had you told me this would be my fate, I would’ve thought there was a better chance of me liking a Wes Anderson movie or a John Mayer album like a psychopath. But oh well, life is a strange thing and tastebuds, those creepy flesh donuts of the tongue, are somehow even stranger.

Of a little more topical interest (he said to absolutely no one, devoid as he was of even rudimentary awareness and social norms), in the last four months I’ve finished Book Seven and Book Eight in my tireless effort to succeed at my hyper-vague goal of “Write More Books Until I Eventually Fall Over Dead”. That’s something I’m rather proud of. The first book is my first bit of anthology horror that will go by the title of Confessional and features (I believe) 15 tales of horror and dread. It features the sort of spook and fear that I’ve always enjoyed, the looming, the ominous, and the tonal, but there’s also going to be more than enough evocative and shuddery imagery that I hope there’ll be something in there for everyone of the scary bent. Sadly, I can’t even imagine how poorly it will do in terms of sales. Parading around a book like that in front of a bunch of folks who’ve spent the last two years buying my somber saddo books hardly seems like a winning strategy. Then again, if I was in this for glory and money and adulation, I would’ve just become a politician who lied his way into the pocketbooks of those he’s managed to deceive.

There’s still time, grant you. Sadly, as earlier stated, I’m not the most motivated person in the world.

As for the eighth book, that is something that can actually be found here. Going by the excessively long title of “The Side Effects of Waiting for the End of the World”, proving once again that I’m not afraid to use SO MANY words when fewer would undoubtedly do, it is the first poetry compilation I’ve ever put out into the world. Featuring much of my work from the past several years, along with a dozen or so written after my move out here, it realistically is probably the closest I’ll ever get to writing an autobiography. It’s personal and tracks through my thoughts on life, existence, and the sadness that tends to go hand in hand with living. I like to think its relatable, indeed I think with art most things usually are, but I suppose I’ll have to see. It may well be that It’s too much ME, too much of that strange weird guy who you used to see in the midwest wandering a bookstore: See as: An answer to a riddle it hadn’t even occurred to you that you might want to solve, mostly because you didn’t and you don’t. But, as with all of my writing endeavors, I wrote them because I wanted to write them and I put them out into the world because, in time, I decided I wanted to put them out into the world. I think they’re quite good and, I truly do hope there will be people out there that happen to think the very same.

At the very least, there will be something out there. And it will be the sort of something that wasn’t there before.

No matter what, and even if absolutely no one reads it, that will be enough for me. I suppose, in the end, it will always have to be.

So please, throw $12 at the titanic Amazon machine (that now apparently my most liberal and most conservative friends and family both hate with equal vigor for wholly separate reasons, proving once and for all that time is a darkly comedic flat circle) and make my life a little bit easier. Who knows, you might wind up enjoying it. At the very least, you can live with a certain bit of comfort in knowing that, if I ever starve to death, it probably wasn’t because of you.

Then again, maybe buy two copies. Just in case. I’d hate for that guilt to follow you until your tragic and inevitable death.

Buy THE SIDE EFFECTS OF WAITING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD. It’s decent, I promise.

A Dispatch from New Beginnings

“It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.”- Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

Well hello.

Now that I officially have the good old internet once again, this is indeed my first ever dispatch from my new beginning. I was going to name a poem that, but to be frank the poem wound up sounding kind of stupid and so it became a blog title instead. Why waste good words, even if there are only five of them? Anyway! I suppose this is the introduction of Portland Luke (‘Portly’ for short). Gone are the days of me being a medium-sized (yet unknown) fish in a puddle, and here are the days of me being a bluegill-looking thing in the Atlantic Ocean. Was this the right choice? In the words of my hero (myself), ‘Who the hell knows?’. But today is my two week anniversary of living somewhere entirely knew for the first time in my entire life, so I figure that’s something worth celebrating with a tongue-in-cheek blog post.

What is life for if not to celebrate somewhat pedestrian life achievements?

Anyway. Life is going well here. I’ll probably wind up looking for a job in roughly the next ten days so that financial stress doesn’t become all-consuming, but for the time being I really am enjoying my meandering walk-about life through my new city. I’ve managed to write two new short stories, roughly 25 pages each, and they both were met with resounding approval from my eternally-trustworthy superfriend Jess (last seen as a ‘review’ in “It Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time”), so I can at least say that these first two random weeks have been creatively productive. In personal life terms? Not so much. I’m better at randomly wandering into a decades-long friendship than I am “Hello stranger, will you be my friend?”, so it’s been a rather lonely couple of weeks, but then again I’m a rather lonely person so I can’t say this is anything new or unanticipated.

As the Gaiman quote indicates, I seem to have brought myself to Portland. What a drag!

But really, life out here is going quite well. I could complain but I’ll save that for my insane short stories I’m currently working on. Petty negativity is better expressed creatively, or so I’ve found. Life is short so you might as well murder little lemons indiscriminately for the sake of consuming their life force and bodily fluids, that’s what I always say. And I have, I think. The walks through gorgeous parks and trees have been numerous, my exploration of local bars and restaurants has been sublime (featuring great beer and some truly lovely sushi), and I’ve already added four new birds to my Birding Life List. Pileated Woodpeckers, it turns out, are just as gorgeous and awe-inspiring as I always believed them to be.

I will admit it is a strange thing to be out here, however. I’ve never been the greatest at recognizing the passage of time, so there is already a part of me that feels as if I’ve always been here. I often find it difficult to relive my day-to-day life in Bismarck, North Dakota, and find moments of memories flashing through my mind at a cinematic pace at the absolute strangest of times. But I do miss my family and friends out there. I miss the boxing nights with my folks and the card games on Sunday mornings. I miss the beers and hangs with the coworkers who became friends (or vice versa). And I miss the sushi nights and random rambles with the creative types I really only just got around to meeting and enjoying right before I left.

And yet here we are, in Portland anyway.

It was for the best, I know that. The uncertainty in my new life will kick into gear aspects of my creativity that were rusting away into oblivion back home and I’d imagine I’ll be better off for it. Although I will at some point need to get a car, because there is a definite limit to my current adventurous escapades for the time being, and that’s a rather annoying truth. I had hoped to get by as long as I could, but dammit there’s an ocean out there just 90 minutes away and I’ll be damned if I’m going to just let it sit there doing nothing without me. But other than the infrequent loneliness and missing of loved ones, the uncertainty and anxiety that comes with an infinite amount of new things, and all the other stuff I’ve cathartically complained about, I really am enjoying my time out here.

Will it be the eternal home of Luke Ganje, part-time author, full-time undiscovered male model? Who knows. But it’s a change of pace that’s been mostly a joy to experience so far and I hope it pays dividends in my writing. I’d always thought of myself as a limitless fount of inspiration and imagination, but it turns out that living in the same place, working the same job, doing the same thing, and staring at the same walls over and over and over again for years, can actually be a little detrimental to my whole ‘imaginary friend’ attempt at wandering lethargically through life. For the time being, this will be better. I will (eventually) meet new people and see a bunch of truly weird shit I never would’ve seen at the Bismarck Denny’s, and that’s alright with me.

Maybe one day I’ll tear through the front page of The Bismarck Tribune with a release of “The Nodak Nomad: How A Bismarck Native Calls Himself a Nomad Despite Never Really Going To Too Many Places or Even Doing Very Much”. Look out, Cliff Naylor. I’m coming for you and I’m stealing your fans (the unaware elderly while they’re still alive) and I’m never giving them back.

But for now I’ll leave you with this, because the day is moving along and I need to do something other than pushups and blogging: I am enjoying the experience, it’s been quite a ride already, and so far I’m not dead.

Which, when it comes to that last part especially, I think we can all acknowledge is a positive plot twist none of us saw coming.

Forgetful- A Poem

I fear so very much the thought

That I’m wasting my most precious time

That I’ve lived a lasting finite life

With some flawed hope of grand design

Whether it’s been etched upon a notepad

Or perhaps I’ve been bled upon a stone

Why even now on one last open plain 

Do I feel so terribly, so frightfully, alone

Despite every one of my best efforts

To script out the days that pass 

The moments between joy and sorrow

The life that happens there 

Is everything you’d thought you’d feel

Even though they will not last

As eternal as a dewdrop

As boundless as our love 

You’d like to think they last forever 

But black ash paints your bright white dove

It tars up every flightless feather 

It steals away all that was yours 

And in the silence of the night there’s a wonder

A stutter

The arrival of perennial fear

That there’s never really enough time for them

Those words that mean “anything at all” 

We try to tell ourselves there is

And we live life through years in which we lie

To ourselves so that we might sleep or dream

Of something better than a voluntary goodbye 

And that’s really what they are, aren’t they?

You know you don’t really have to go. 

But what a cruel world it is in which we live 

Where we perish in empty nests covered in snow 

No matter how we thought to linger

For one more second, minute, hour or year

There’s never enough wealth for even a moment 

A moment just to stay

To say perfectly the things we thought we’d said

Only to forget, to embellish, to delay 

For the sake of an imagined comfort where

We live a timeless life

One in which no pain is uttered

Because it isn’t real until we say 

That I suppose it’s time for going now

I guess after all of this 

I tried so much to cherish and share

Each and every vital thought like light you sparked

But now that I am going, I’m swallowed by a fear

I swear it wasn’t supposed to end this way

I swear I just got lost

I was going to show you my whole life in an instant 


… I swear I just forgot. 

Cecropia

I have no idea how old I was exactly, but I keep telling people I was nine. It’s bound to be a close enough approximation and as with most things related to childhood memories, there’s a haze to that kind of thing that can be baffling at best when trying to put a specific number to when you were what or when, where, or why. I just know that I was a child and, for the sake of this account, probably about nine. Also funny, and acting as a damning indictment of my memory, is that much as I don’t know my exact age I’m also just as uncertain as to why I was where I was. I just know my mother had driven us to a little used car lot on the strip of Mandan, a tiny little town that is attached like a leech to our tiny little city that likewise desperately wants to be something more. And it’s raining. That’s the part I know for absolute certain.

I can forget why I was where I was. I can forget how old I am. But I’ll never forget when its raining, not even in a memory.

So there we were, standing in a car lot, in the rain and accompanied by another family. I don’t know who it was exactly, but there were only ever two options so at least there’s a picture in my mind that can haphazardly form without any effect that might be too terrifyingly Frankensteinian. We were all huddled around the cars and some of us were laughing, although to be honest I don’t think I was. An appreciation for the sound, rush, and smell of rain isn’t something I was born with so much as a living thing that grew from me over the years. And then, just like that, a rush of commotion and those very particular childhood sounds that told of either adventures formed or treasure unearthed.

It was the latter. And as it turned out, it was a treasure I’d never forget.

I suppose to underscore this I should make clear (if only briefly) how my mind works. The truth is, and as sorry as this might sound, that I never really remember moments. It makes life a bit of a drag and it makes writing an absolutely abysmal affair at times, but that’s just how these things tend to go. Instead, I remember flashes. There’s rarely if ever the memory of the emotion of a time, no matter how special or sad the occasion happened to probably be. There are rarely carefully catalogued specifics. Instead, in the white haze of dense fog, I remember the little snippets that flash just right and, since I am who I am, those snippets that burst through the dreamlike banks are most often animals or birds, insects and, perhaps on the rarest of occasion, a person. But for the most part, those photograph flashes are reserved for those who are not like me.

I remember the first time I saw a Great Horned Owl. I remember the first time I saw a Great Blue Heron and the same goes for a Wood Duck. Even more profoundly, I remember walking through Athens and while my memories of the Parthenon are now next to nonexistent, I see as clear as day the first (and probably last) Hoopoe I’d ever seen. I remember standing outside the Coliseum in Rome, but so much more than that I remember seeing my first Hooded Crow. I remember how it flew as a scavenger only to be chased away by a much more agitating gull. And I remember its colleague that I tried and failed to photograph as it sat on a railing by some nearby ruins.

Clear as day. Every time.

There is so much joy attached to the life around me. And on dark days I rely not on past lives or conquests of varying sorts, but on those so unlike me.

This is all to say, have you ever seen a Cecropia Moth? They’re titans, really. Seeing them brings to mind Old Gods or Mothra battling Godzilla, something great and vast and old. In reality, most everyone I ever tell about them utters the dagger-in-the-back “Well it’s just a moth though” betrayal. And I mean sure, I guess you could say that. But it’s also North America’s largest native moth. Its wings are significant enough that, were you to see them fly at night, you’d swear you were watching something even a bit larger than our regional bats. And they’re absolutely stunning. Whether it’s the distinct markings and eyelets on its wings or the fuzzy (and adorably chubby) red and white banded body, they’re visually arresting in all the ways that matter and it makes perfect sense how and why they would capture a child’s imagination in the rain.

Everyone was standing in a circle around a car that I’m almost positive was a bluish gray although that just be my seeping memory of the rain and clouds, and one of the older boys got on his hands and knees to crawl underneath for this mystery we’d yet to solve. No one said anything about just what that boy had seen, we all just…flocked to the excitement. So when he came back out and up holding a moth far bigger than his hands, though still careful to shield the moth from the rain it’d undoubtedly been hiding from, the sound of awe and fascination was universal. It was that sound. The one you hear not just when you see something beautiful, but when you see something beautiful that you’ve never seen before.

And no one in that used car lot, not the parents nor the kids who stood in the rain for reasons I can’t recall, had ever seen anything like it. Sure, we’d grown up with swallowtails and monarchs. But a fully grown Cecropia Moth of absolute jaw-dropping size? That was the kind of new that you just don’t forget.

I didn’t anyway. And I actually spent years remembering that until I saw another when I was…let’s just say twelve for the sake of avoiding that whole numbers/memory thing this time around. I was milling around my family’s backyard near the railroad tie steps that ushered you out of the backyard and up along the side of the house. We had old neighbors then, a nice gardening-conscious elderly couple whose name I won’t spell here for the sake of not wanting to muck it up, and they always had leafy vines that would topple over our fencing and house everything from Yellow Warblers to the bees that I quite unpleasantly discovered could kill me. It was an ordinary space, just eight or ten feet of vines and wood, but every now and then you’d see something memorable in there. (Justified shoutout to the aforementioned warbler).

Then, one day, I saw my second Cecropia moth. I don’t even remember exactly how I found it beyond a “Secret Garden” highly stylized reveal that exists in my childish memory, one of a young me turning over a leaf or two to see the chunky titan on the underside. This one didn’t linger as it had no rain to hide from and chose instead to explode in a burst of giant flapping wings as it haphazardly flew past me and high up into the air. That part I remember clearest. I remember standing on the railroad ties in the summer breeze, watching as my second Cecropia disappeared into the trees that lined and surrounded our backyard. I just watched it go and I loved every minute of it.

And that was it.

It was gone.

For the longest time, that beautiful moth that brought to mind all manner of fantastical things to spring up in my imagination became a figment. A spotlight figment, sure. A lighthouse or a red hot flare. But a figment all the same as I spent the next twenty years of my life wishing I could see one again. I’d wander through our North Dakota attempts at forests and hope year after year that I’d see another burst of light in the form of an incredible creature I so fondly remembered, and to be honest it never worked. The space beneath cars on rainy days remained unoccupied and the vines were eventually replaced by a species of plant not nearly so invasive, and with those childhood spots now gone, my moth friend seemed to go as well.

And as odd as it may sound, I spent every one of those twenty years hoping I’d see one again. And, when I decided that 2020 would be my last year in North Dakota, I spent every moment of last year’s summer and the beginning of this one hoping I’d see one more before I left. That seems a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? What are the odds of seeing something that’s eluded me for the last twenty years, let alone right in time for a move (and what would obviously be a self-serving turn of events)? What are the odds of, with less than a month to go, a coworker coming up to you and showing you a picture of one he’d seen on his garage door? What are the odds of that very same coworker calling you an hour later to tell me that, while on his lunch, he saw that the aforementioned super-being was still hanging out in the shade?

And more than that, what are the odds that I’d drive over to an apartment complex I’d only been to once and see the object of my childhood daydreams relaxing without a care in the world on a warm but breezy summer day? Due to the hyper-specificity of the questions, I’d be willing to bet “Slim to None” would be an accurate answer. And yet there she was. And somehow, after twenty years of remembering every fragment of a pair of childhood moments, blowing up and exaggerating the size and majesty of every frame, this fresh new memory was everything I’d hoped for and more. She was just as daunting, as beautiful, and as clumsily charming as I’d remembered the others I’d seen before.

She was my entire childhood in a moment and a fitting goodbye to my life in North Dakota.

It was only after moments of study and reflection that I carefully removed her from the concrete and hot metal, carrying her gently and with utmost care not to touch or tarnish her wings, and transported her to a fresh collection of trees far away from the heat and unsettling interest of swarming swallows. She all too happily clambered (again quite clumsily) off my hand and into the leaves and branches, and after staying for a few minutes longer to watch her find her footing and marvel, I turned away and began my slow walk back to my car alone.

It was so odd, those moments.

If I could’ve just stayed in those trees for the rest of the afternoon and watched her, I would have in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t even have hesitated. And while I think so much of that truth is due in large part to the simple fact that there’s something so magical about the living things around us, there was something more to it as well. In that moment, I felt like I was walking away from my childhood. Away from the memories that had kept me company all this time as I waited with bated breath to see something remarkable again; for those little flashes of light that so often helped me keep the darkness of life at bay.

It was the strangest feeling and even now it’s a trial not to put on my boots and go out in the hopes that I’ll see her again.

But I won’t. Because I have my new memory now, one to live side-by-side with the decades-old photograph flash of a life gone by. And I have that quiet hope that the next time our paths cross, it won’t take us twenty years to get there.

And, if it does, that it won’t feel like such a long wait.

Pace Change- A Poem

It’s always been easy for me to get stuck wandering long empty halls

Lost as a metaphor for a child or a dream that’s gone on for a bit far too long

Hands trail over wallpaper fossils that represent decayed mental states

Adrift in our colorblind wonder and in awe of the false rays of dawn.

The bones trace like chalk on a sidewalk and feel like our childhood loves

They match the arms that held me tight in a grip but sobered when given enough time

New eyes trace bare patches of texture and age in a search for our past family flicker

While faded footsteps dance in the shadows of loss and a corrosion to which we resign.

There are no longer the etchings in bone of old breaks and every hard memory earned

Worn smooth by the incessant presence of time that hovers even when left alone

The back porch sags on wood rotting and overlooks a lawn growing fresh green

Lost remnants of a childhood’s yellowed dead grass that packed dirt into cement iron stone.

There’s a pain in old space that lingers and does whether inside, outside, or both

As heads tilt to one side and then another in search of something left far behind

It’s a treasure hunt sailing seas for a meaning in a world where an X holds a home

In the fossilized hope that the last thing to go will be the past and the grasp on simpler times.

Slow Fade- A Poem

You’ve made it all much easier

The cherry-picked nature of life

That even now on the precipice

On the ledge of your amorphous goals

You stagger along the drop of what still might be

Petrified by who you are, who you’ve been, and where you’ll go.

Your feet kick small stones into oceans

Tumbling down as a boulder that cracks

With the force of a world-killing meteor

That it might as well be for all I have left

There’s the waterfall splash of a cannonball

The empty embrace of childhoods imagined

We’re standing at the edge of a balcony racked

By indecision, by a pitiful fear, by an unavoidable path.

And I think I know the truth of it all

I’m almost positive this might be it

For all the little moments I’d swear that I’ve lived

There’s never been anything quite as close

Quite as real

As this towering drop beneath my feet so surreal

That I’d think it could be anything but

The beckoned bellow of a life claimed once and for all

As a new home, a better place, a heeded call.

So this man stands outstretched

His arms so much like mine

A pathetic approximation of something most have thought divine

But he’s nothing more than a terrified child

Who sees at long last the strange darkness in new paths

That whisper great truths and even greater lies

For the sake of one last great harvest

Greater hopes and dreams that beget

Something more than a reality’s too-brief descent

Toward all that might be more beginning than an end

It’s all an endless promise

A beckoned call that haunts the moments

That stitched together build a single human life

And for all that we think might have been

For all that we still are

We stand still in a breeze, still at the brink, ever too afraid to fall.

The path that brought me here

As this man I can’t remember

I swear there’s a chance I’ve never seen him even once before

Has only once been simple and a privilege

To feel such pain that fades like day

Disappearing into strange dark things until

They come crawling back again

But what a joy they say it is to be me

What a gift that I’ve been given

Stuttered and uttered by an ignorant horde

That stand aghast at the base of a mountain so vast

Staring up

Staring up where I’ll still stand

And they’ll ask in time the cause of it all

The purpose of a plummeting depth

But they won’t have the right questions or the thoughts

Now descending

Past stable sturdy grounds where they stand

Wondering blankly as they will always do

For the sake of bolstered ineptitude

As foolish men who don’t even know what art could be.

I’m sure they’ll say

Well… a lot of things

And even a broken life is right twice a day

But there’s something not quite wrong about falling

A comfort sung as a fragile life recording

About how that drop would ring of regret

Between the eighth and seventh floor

But that’s the strangest thing about life

About dreams, about our odd human plea

That we might know just what’s worth dying for

And it’s a hope

It really is, it’s a guess to overshadow what might’ve been

If we’d only chosen something more than what we are

But there’s a silence at the bottom

Where even in daylight the men are drifting

Far from the depths into which we’ve dived

Because even then the spectacle’s fading

Like a dead man hesitating

Rather than embracing something more than a status quo

And even as I’m sinking in my ocean thoughts self-defeating

There’s a bliss of falling past what’s already gone

And even if the lights are dimming

Even if i’ve lost it all

There’s alway just the slightest chance

That I’m swimming

That in the end I’m drifting out past your finite pier

Far from who I might’ve been and farther from who you are

And for all you thought I might’ve been

Perhaps I’m gone but I’m still here.

Paper Man- A Poem

I once had this friend

A paper man

Cut from a discarded page

That had fallen from the well-worn spine that had split

On the book that formed the life that I'd lived

And captured every moment, before and so long after

That he’d been formed with jagged cuts to save

Only the words that matter most

The ones that still had some faded meaning

Left in safety to watch the past fall

Far away from the page that had been him.

They were once the moments and memories

Of a story that I swear used to be

Something to bring peace to a war-torn night

Where there was something steady and standing between

The raging waters of a spiraling river

Tumbling down toward an ignorant town

That swore so much they were a city, an evolution

Something more than a blank space seeking written renown.

And this paper man cut

From a forgotten book left

Deep in a childhood now gone

He stood at the head of a towering wave

And waited as he left more of himself behind.

Fewer of the words that had once granted solace

Fewer friends who had faded away

The paper man and the scissors cut slivers that scattered

Like a party’s confetti soon to be struck

By the wind and the willows and rain.

And the paper man meant many things to the river

He meant even more to what cut him away

Far from the tome of unfathomable weight

Far more like a poet’s empty page

He was losing the friends he’d lost so long ago

To the strangely impassive passage of time

He was letting go of the family that remained in his wake

Standing tall still in the strange waves of change

He was cutting so small the love and the life that was no

Longer anything more than a wish

For the what might’ve been, could’ve been, should’ve been still

And yet had left him with nothing but this.

This…

This small fragment of a greater story that had simply already been told

Told so very many times

That even those who loved it had grown old

And passed into ash that blew changes

And turned them into new life and better things

Like a strange strand of evolution so perfectly grasped

To leave behind the scissors that cut timelines

Instead of forming something much more like wings

Something, anything, to carry away the last remnants

Of the paper figure that stood before waves

That were little more than a metaphor for a coward’s feared change

But oddly that knowledge did nothing to erase

The crippling last gasp of anxiety and fear

The death grip of all that had been

And held so tight to what little the paper man had left

More that he wished might stay

That the scissors cut more and more even now still

And even then more fell away.

Words dropped like snow in the summer

They got caught in each wandering breeze

They got lost in the skies and the clouds and the lies

That perhaps they could fall somewhere new.

Somewhere they could’ve reassembled

Where old things and words and love long-deserved

Could fall into place as the could’ve been that would be

But the paper pieces of a paper man were simply words

And words will only get lost on the wind.

So as the waters moved with undisguised purpose

New blue that swept away the stagnant still life

It struck the once-towering paper sculpture

That had once been a towering man

A tale that had been written over decades

And to the tune of the songs that were his

Only to see the scissors cut like an editor

Who knew so well how little anything left truly mattered.

And the single page of a book that had split

And become even less than it was

Found that the life that was coming didn't care

Where it was going

Or who he’d been even now not so long ago,

Because change doesn’t stutter, it doesn’t hesitate or utter,

The last word that is ever left behind

As the scissors cut away the last bits of life that remained

The paper man found he had only one left

And he felt so small

So insignificant

So far away from what he had been

That he read it only once before being swept away

To either drown in the fresh new currents

Or be taken out to sea

And even though the latter sounds daunting and wrong

Doomed to the death of a hack writer’s siren song

It beckoned at least of some possibility

That even though in the end he hadn’t mattered

And even though his epic had already left him behind

Perhaps he could rebuild the story

Perhaps, if given enough time

Now safe from the towering scissors

That left ‘was’ as his last final line.

Sunday Breeze- A Poem

Try not to imagine life without sound

Instead, the slow rush of an always breeze

The music of infinite birds

A jazz heartbeat of a rhythmless tune

Broken by a blackbird so confident in its voice

In time his shadow will go quiet

Ushered away by a tidal time

But in spirit there’s a constant replacement

Fourteen where only one has been

Alive in a redwinged pause

With the noise of every living thing

We grow accustomed to their presence

The warmth of all that breathes and hovers

Like a cold day’s clouded breath

We know all good things will be broken

They are falling glass on a jagged stone floor

But they linger in constant replacement

An evolutionary standard in a fast-wilting world

It would be a joy if we thought that they mattered

If we tried to listen to the songs that are played

With even half the attention we happened to spend

On human things and their manufactured beauty

So much better the dead and the dying

The mortal and wondrous curl

Than the smoke of the last burning pit in the earth

So much better than the land that we’ve filled

So sit instead in the rush of the wavering world

Listen to the life that lasts

For the sake of who we might have been

And all the time that’s passed.

Godzilla vs. Kong: A Professorial Deconstruction

DISCLAIMER: There are a great many things worth being upset about in life. Human rights violations, for example. People who stand right behind you while you’re in line at a supermarket is a good one. I would also accept “anyone who says Wes Anderson is amazing at what he does”. But as a whole, movies are just bits of entertainment to help us hobble along until we meet our inevitable deaths. They’re the screensavers of existence. So, as a whole, they’re really not worth being upset about and despite the words that will inevitably follow, I’m really not as upset as I will sound at times. In case you’ve been living under a rock, I’m a fairly dramatic person. That being said, I will do my best to be calm, reasonable, and understanding. Thank you.

Fuck this movie.

I think everyone involved with this movie should be tried and convicted for Crimes Against Humanity.

Allow me to explain something to you, straw figure that vaguely resembles a man who happens to be sitting before me as a willing listener. A good monster movie is not hard to make. All you have to do is have, at most, two compelling human characters and plop them in the middle of chaos and monster mashiness both to ground the viewer in a world we recognize and also make us care about something. We’ve all seen the television infomercials about starving children in other countries and most people are unswayed as they wait for their re-airing of The Andy Griffith Show to resume, but if we know one child in our circle of friends who happens to climb to the top of the Empire State Building and fall off while grabbing at a toy airplane? Oof. That’s a doozy that will take us a while to get over. This is for a very simple reason: Humans are stupid and our only way to keep at bay the crushing horror of the suffering of the world is to only see it in little pieces and segments. It’s easier to fathom the suffering and death of one person than it is to fathom the death and suffering of millions. It’s the same in movies. If you follow one character, well-written, over the course of a movie and something bad happens to them…it’s gut-wrenching. But if you see a big monster devastating an entire city, undoubtedly killing tens of thousands of nameless, faceless, innocent bystanders…eh. Big monster go boom.

Characters matter. People matter in monster movies. If you don’t think so, that’s okay. Just please don’t sit next to me at a dinner party, you absolute psycho.

Now that we’ve established that amazing deconstruction of the cinematic form, let’s meet our heroes of this cinematic tour de force.

Godzilla: A big lizard. A Titan. An old god who keeps a vague balance to the world.

Kong: A big monkey. A Titan. An also old god who keeps balance to the world kinda. It’s a yin-yang thing.

Alexander Skarsgård/Nathan: An idiot. A moron. Some guy who, because of his shitty science book, was relegated to a basement where it looks like he either drowns kittens or harvests organs from toddlers. He’s also our hero? Even though his main role is to be deceived into helping a lunatic create a supermonster while accidentally being the cause of (ballpark) a hundred thousand deaths? I mean, sure. Why not?

Rebecca Hall/Ilene: The sort of caretaker of Kong, she is easily deceived by Thoroughly Clueless Accidental War Criminal Nathan into taking Kong on a boat for ‘reasons’. This despite the fact that he is, again, a basement-dwelling Gollum person with no professional credibility. Honestly, that’s about it. Also, she’s been studying the big ape for a decade and somehow never realized that the skyscraper-sized behemoth has been sign-languaging with a child. You’re a scientist, Ilene. You’re supposed to be observant. How bad are you at your job?

Millie Bobby Brown/Eleven: Returning to her character from “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”, the writers for GvK chose a bold route of scaling her two dimensional character from the former film down to something resembling a dimension so thin we’ve never seen anything like it. It is something so small, so lacking to the point of near nonexistence, that it may in fact cause the Large Hadron Collider to do something weird and bring about the end of mankind. All this, for the sake of…well…nothing. Deus Ex Strangerthingscashgrab.

Brian Tyree Henry/Guy: I mean this is just Alex Jones.

And lastly, Jia: The only compelling character who takes the form of a small deaf child who has a special bond with Kong. She’s adorable, she’s cool, and she’s a pint-sized badass.

Oh! And Kyle Chandler is once again in a movie, proving for the umpteenth time that untalented human beings can always get a 9,518th chance if they look like Matt Damon if Matt Damon had been ruthlessly stung by an entire hive of bees.

I guarantee you, it’s possible that I just put more thought into all of these characters than any of the screenwriters ever did at any point during the conceptualization of this movie. How do I know this? Because they just…do things. There’s no rhyme or reason, there’s no logic, they just endanger the entire scope of humanity for the sake of progressing a plot that isn’t so much a plot as it is “Okay…How do we get these two big monsters to fight a lot?” At which point, a man either stoned out of his gourd or high on ludicrous amounts of LSD said “What if, and hear me out, a guy tricks a scientist to take Kong to the center of the Earth, where there’s this crazy energy and also some sort of double-world, and there’s this rich guy who wants the energy to create a robot Godzilla! And then regular Godzilla fights Kong. Kong has a throne by the way. Oh holy shit, what if we give him an axe too?! And then there’s the robot! And then we have kids doing funny things and making jokes! And omg we can have Kyle Chandler in it! People like him, right? We can stab him with an Epipen if his face looks too puffy!”

And the studio executives said “By god, Stanislaus. Put down that mop, you scraggly-haired janitor boy! You’re one of us now!”

And Godzilla vs. Kong was greenlit.

I assure you this is 1,000% probably what totally happened. At the very least, that could maybe excuse the atrocity of cinema and monsterness that I was forced to sit through.

Over the course of two hours or, perhaps, a timelessness so great and vast that I can only assume it will soon be mimicked by the eternity of darkness I’ll inevitably have to face after an undoubtedly heroic death, we’re treated to poorly-written jokes that are only out-dueled by their poor delivery. We get shoddy CGI that comes and goes in its quality as someone inevitably had to say “Well look. We don’t have the funds for all of it, so lets go the cheap route on a lot of this and hope no one notices.” We get some of the most muddled and laughable contrivance and plot devices that they make “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” look not just like a proper movie, but a timeless epic destined for status alongside “Schindler’s List” and “There Will Be Blood”. We see massive holes drilled into the center of the earth about 700 feet wide (I can’t imagine that won't have dire ecological consequences). We see sets and effects that must’ve been purchased off eBay from JJ Abrams after the umpteenth terrible Star Wars movie. And over and over again we’re told (through flashy implication): But look! Look, you simplistic potato minds! There are flashy colors, big noises, and monsters! Please love us!

I was once a clueless 17 year old boy who thought a really cute girl was just super busy ALL THE TIME and not, you know, really not into my dorky teenage self. I possessed more self-awareness than the people who put out this movie under the guise that it resembled something even tangentially related to “Quality.”

Did I mention there’s Mechagodzilla? I’d say he’s a wonder to behold, but he’s been so poorly and hysterically designed that you might as well tape a banana to a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot and hit yourself in the head with a hammer. I’m 99% sure it’ll prove to be a more visually satisfying experience.

In summation, other than our titular super beasts, I didn’t know until the writing of this review what any of the character names were. If a man were to storm into my apartment with a gun and a strangely topical mortal demand, I wouldn’t be able to describe with any coherence what the actual plot of this movie was and would be inevitably shot after stumbling through what I thought might be a description of the villain’s motivation only to find that I must’ve chosen that moment of the film to relive all my childhood traumas. At the very least, that would’ve been more enjoyable. There is no plot, there is no characterization, there is some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard in my life, and no matter how big and cool any special effect happens to be…there’s no amount of bandaids that can re-attach a gangrenous leg to this septic sprinter.

This movie forces me to yearn for the world-weary character drama of Air Bud: Golden Retriever.

On threat of my life, I beg for the screenwriting magnificence of the final episode of Game of Thrones.

There is a special place in Hell reserved for those who would have the gall to ruin the legacy of Godzilla, one of the greatest cinematic creations to ever be. I’d say that they should pack some sunscreen to protect them from the heat that will greet them, but I won’t. I’ll simply sit back and hope that that kind of thinking ahead will be observed by Satan, caught, and all bottles will be confiscated upon their arrival. It will serve as a fitting punishment for those who planned for damnation more capably than they did the creation and release of a tentpole monster movie that should’ve stood a decades-long test of time as an unparalleled popcorn movie.

You stole away the last remnants of my childhood wonder that was already on life-support after the release of “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” and you beat it to death with a shovel.

I hope you’re happy, you human stalk of celery. When I evolve into my final form as a warped and frustrated old man, you’ll have only yourself to blame. Pummeling and splatting a child with a gardening tool… how could you?

In summation of my summation, I’ll put a pin in this with the words I uttered when the credits began to roll: What the fuck was that?

Godzilla vs. Kong: 1 star out of 439

Idiots.

The Side Effects of Waiting for the End of the World- A Poem

I think I saw the world pass by on what I thought was a pier or distant hill

With one eye shut and the other opened wide to the detriment

Of every dream, every hope, every moment lasting until

It closed like a lost lucky coin that’s fallen

Into a fountain

Into a void

Into the chasms vast of our last hopes now past

A silver dollar dulled by the wish of a star burnt out.

There were so many truths that gleamed like dew drops

From the distant peak on which I balanced

Granite rubbed smooth by the passage of time

In what was either abuse or a caress

And as I stood looking down

Too much of a fool to be profound

I saw what my life could’ve been

And I fell from my mountain, tumbling down like half-forgotten

Dreams that were dreamt as a child long ago.

And as I slid and stumbled

As the avalanche of the waiting world did rumble

I saw the moments of was and might slowly pass me by

It was almost as if they were waiting

Paused in time debating

Whether or not I had any right to see what might have been

But in their hesitance I saw the flickers and a snowflake’s life

That stands eternal only until the thaw

And every movie screen shutter that shuddered with truths now uttered

Said or showed the very same thing

That who I’d wanted to be hadn’t mattered

That the dreams like glass had shattered

Beneath the weight of the man I’d been and been too afraid to be.

I saw as I fell with the crumbling stone

Down the cliffside of every bit of progress I’d made

The time that I’d spent making friendships now vacant

Like an open space in an empty parking lot

And the memories made that even now must decay

Because even the best things in life are sewn with time

And the stitching is ripping

The fabric is failing

And as I fell I saw each loved one of the past fade away

Left as they were, their footholds so sure

Peering down as even a fall can leave someone behind

And I wish I had waved

I thought perhaps I might say

Goodbye and thank you for what you have done

To get me this far

To the top of a mountain, a bar,

That only I ever thought might be there

But I’ve never been good at the kind of thing and have lingered

Just once long ago

So I fell in my silence and struck stone after stone with defiance

That those on the slopes wouldn’t know

How much it all hurt, the plummet, the process

Of failing and falling to become something new.

And even now I still hope

Approaching the ground growing close

That I might learn to glide even if it’s ‘just in time’

Because what might be is a mystery

It looks like jagged rocks and a prairie plain

As it looms and shadows like a predator hunting prey

And I suppose that it might be, that even hope can be frightening

That the fall holds more fear than the climb

But the funniest thing is that every thought and hope and dream doesn’t matter

It doesn’t comfort

It doesn’t hold

The embrace and the safety of all that is known

It’s the exhilaration of letting go of what might’ve been.

It’s the fall. It’s the progress. It’s the hope that feels like distress

Faced with eyes closed tight and arms spread out wide

Letting go of who I never was,

Goodbye, my lie of life once lived

Goodbye, my towering home

I feel it all

It’s so very close

There is no longer a mountain

And I’m at peace with the rush of the wind.

90 Days

Well, I haven’t done one of these hyper-personal and rambling blogs in quite some time and while there haven’t been any requests that they begin again, I figure I might as well tap out another. That’s all life is, isn’t it? Doing what you want to do and hoping there’s a point? That’s how I’ve always approached things anyway and I’m happy to confirm that it works about half the time. The other half, however? Well. Let’s not talk about those.

I’m happy to say that my new book has officially been released and is now out in the world. To be frank, this is a far stranger feeling than last year’s effort and I think a great deal of that has to do with the content. See, there was a definite armor attached to the first book in that there’s no way to feel fully exposed artistically when everything about you is cloaked in absurdism and dark humor. This book though? “The Beginning and The End”? Well, that’s a collection of the best short stories I’ve written over the course of my entire life. The cream of the crop. And they’re also stories that have helped me process little pieces of myself that are my own. Personal slivers, I suppose you could say. And while the entire reason I started putting poetry out on the web had to do with the fact that I needed to teach myself to be comfortable with the concept of people potentially learning a great deal about me, this effort felt different. The stories in this new book are in many ways a more real version of myself than even the one that wakes up every morning and goes to work. I don’t know how to explain it other than that. And as such, it’s the most professional version of my earliest stated mission statement of my writings: That I would only ever write what I honestly felt and how I saw the world, in the hope that there would be someone out there who knew in some small way what I’m talking about.

I suppose you could say this book is the literary representation of a man standing on an empty island, throwing messages in bottles out into an endless sea. And I’m proud of it. And I feel quite alright with the idea of so much of myself being out in the world. Life is short and I have more important things to let my anxiety worry about.

Speaking of! 90 days. Three months. That’s the amount of time I have left in the town I grew up in as, at the end of June, I’ll be headed out west to the rain and clouds of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. I’d be lying if the whole prospect wasn’t at least in some way existentially terrifying. Because while I like to think of myself as a super dangerous and daring man of action (sources cannot confirm), it would be quite accurate to say that at the moment I only live 11 minutes from the house I grew up in. Fortunately, that’s 4 minutes farther away from my previous living situation, so I think it’s safe to say that I’m completely and utterly prepared for being a billion miles from everything I’ve ever known. What’s the worst that could happen? I wind up homeless and murdered after a pompous millionaire runs me over with his Cadillac?

Well now I have to worry about that… Damn my imagination.

I am excited though. It just so happens that I’m unable to do much of anything without feeling crippling anxiety about it. I once sat in my car in the parking lot of a grocery store for fifteen minutes before realizing I just didn’t have it in me to walk into a place with people in it, so it’s safe to say that my mind isn’t always my best friend. But this is something I need to do and I know that. I need to push myself a little bit so that I can continue on my way. I don’t think there’s anything coincidental about the fact that I wrote my finest work (the as-of-yet unreleased “The Clear, The Cloud, and The Volcano”) in the aftermath of my month in Europe, or that so many of the visuals in that story were echoes of my time in Portland. Creatively, I need a little shock to my system. I need to experience aspects of life that are foreign to me here and leave behind the parts of my life that will only continue to calcify and slowly drag me down into the dark depths of a person I don’t want to be.

There’s so much good here in this little city I grew up in. But I’m afraid there are just a few too many memories and haunting dreams of how I once thought things might be. I owe myself a new beginning and there’s nothing I love more than dense trees and the smell of fresh rain. So Oregon is calling to me, and I no longer have it in me to deny the simple truth that I belong somewhere else if I’m ever to belong anywhere at all.

I’ll miss the friends I’ve made and the food of my favorite restaurants, I’ll miss driving down every road I know by heart and feeling the comfort that I’ll never get lost, and I’ll miss the constant joy of knowing that a visit to my parents is only ever a drop of a hat away. I’ll miss fight nights. I’ll miss hearing birds and knowing exactly who they are by their song. And I’ll miss living every year in the hope that I’ll be walking outside and suddenly hear the haunting call of a Sandhill Crane migration. There are so many formative things here and, as such, it’s definitely proving to be a bit harder to leave than I thought it would be. I’ve never been any good at goodbyes and I regret to inform you that growing older doesn’t make it any easier. But all we can ever do is ask ourselves to be brave and pursue the path our dreams lay out for us. Life is short… far too short to ignore a call like that.

Every day when I park in my garage, I punch the button as I’m leaving and that door begins to close. And it’s the strangest thing… for the past four years, I’ve walked the exact same way, at the exact same pace, so that I know exactly where I’ll be when that door goes quiet. In three months I won't be able to do that anymore. In three months, I’ll have to ask myself to take a different path and hear new things when step 19 hits. And you know what? After 31 years, I’m ready for that.

Goodbye.

And hello.

Conventional Life

I’ve cried at the end of every story

Because I know what those stories mean

For all of their developments and all of those you’ve met

Every plot is just an ending that hasn’t happened yet

It’s in the details of every scene, in the silence and the pause

It’s in the lives and happiness that can only hint at greater loss

A little piece of me has gone into every life I pretend to see

What a blessing, what a curse, to watch the passing moments of each life that cannot be

When friends are at a distance and life is spent alone

What a petty thing to have to say that even the imagined might have to go

Are they not important? Have they not done enough?

You’d think the lives they’ve been forced to lose more than meets the cost

I wish that you could understand, or perhaps that you could see

What living lives that I must end has always done to me

I’ve tried to see you all as meaning more than my written word

But for the never lasting life of me, you’re one more thing I’ve yet to learn

You’ll never be the ones I’ve wished would always be here with me

For all the flesh and bone you offer, you’re nothing compared to the dream

Where things are cold and simple, and even if there’s often pain

The greatest friends I’ll never lose are the ones I’ve had to make

They’re hidden in the word count and cut from the hopes I’ve had

And I’ve lost so much of who I’ve been for the sake of what will last

You’ve never understood the man I am or the stories that I’ve told

And you’re so much less than the men I’ve made who have souls they haven’t sold

It's Almost December

It’s on days like this, during times like these

When I’m not so terribly happy to be someone who saw

My time as an agoraphobic broken bridge hidden from lives most certainly lost.

A man of short roads and a weakening grasp

Driven by something, ever pointed, ever longing, toward all that’s been overgrown

And though the path is empty, with emptiness before me, I fear that I’m afraid that I’m alone.

Am I though?

I guess the odds are good.

Because for all the time I’ve spent on this, I’ve never really known

The path to lasting happiness

The source of every bird song and whatever words they sing to say

How am I supposed to tell the truth from all that’s false and fades?

They look so starkly similar

As if you’re trying to tell a house from a purple finch

Where shades of burgundy and washed out blood are Catholic tales of manufactured sin

That will stand as a Rorschach painting

Of ink spilled over all that you might hope to see

Hidden in the fragmented shade of the man you’ve always been told you must be

By flowing robes stood on fracturing pedestals

Who preach with outstretched hands held high

That the greatest thing left for us to do is to just lay down and die.

Beneath the dirt and chapel stone

Where we’ve fallen before a great weight pulling down our ascent with hat held in hand

Held up in a solemn surrender, to the unrelenting allure, of this apparently godless land

That will tear down our tallest cathedrals

Great monuments to the gods of the moment that bow to the elements when given the time

And so then are we not our own fragile creations? Are we not our own end of the line?

Let’s say we are, and that perhaps I should feel better

In the end we are trials and tribulations, and we are the stone buildings that fall

And for all of the time I’ve spent here in fear, how odd it is to be nothing at all.

With no eyes left to see a creator

Nothing to hold and mark my place on the earth

I remember even now the words of my father that the truth will always still hurt

Still in the throes of great passion

Stiller then in the times that will linger and sting as the arrival of our greatest grief

How strange that every moment of this life has been shaped by blind men with no doors for their keys

So in the end I suppose I will wander

There are still some long roads that are still left to see

But what an odd experience this lonely Eden has been-

And what a strange thing it is to be me.

I Guess They Have To Go

Oh what a world to live in, what a world to see

Where freely floating plastic bags could be snowshoe hares running free. 

Across dead prairies of tire tread, around the stumps of every tree

Bound to the earth that’s been left for them, the emptied landscapes they cannot leave. 

Have you ever seen a painting or cut an artwork from its frame?

Have you smothered a roaring fire despite the beauty of its flame?

Have you ever seen our great gods running across their open roads?

And thought how fair and just the act to decide that they’re no more?

Perhaps it all won’t matter both if we have and what we’ve done.

I’m sure we’d like to think just once that you can’t blame us for what’s gone.

That the world is doomed to expansion, that life must bow to life.

That we are dying planets in the dark and will become the empty sky.

I wonder if we’ll be happy there, in a concrete box above the world

Where we sit with glass in hand and speak fondly of the pearls

Those fragments of impossible beauty at which we once sat and stared

Before the trees were nothing, before the fields fell, to hope there’s beauty in a world that now has been stripped bare.

I think we know the answer. I think we fear the mortal tone.

That for all our great expansions and every striding growth

We’ve written on the rising walls that we’ll now be here alone.

Nautical Themes

Nightmares last forever because they’re only ever dreams

That last in every fading light of long days that cannot be

We think we live in waking moments, sunlight red and breaking dawn

But planets die even as they rise and morning plays such silent songs.

We wish that we could hear it all, that we weren’t such tragic strings

We are sailors starving in the sea, alone and wishing the sirens would sing.

But even the oceans have been emptied, even the waves have gone away

The sails fall before windless skies and mortal anchors have been weighed.

We stand in silent mourning of the lives and dreams we thought we’d lead

We pour the blood of it all in goblets but even our gods do not believe

That we could ever be worth more than the dirt of the earth, our failure so self-assured

Or anything less than the flawed lines of our lifelines, that will only ever blur.

Today the boat is in still waters and now the stars have finally died

The final flares of celestial life have left empty our pitch black skies

We are those sailors in a rotting ship that will slowly sadly sink

And now we wake from a sea of sleep beneath sheets of rising waters, and even the sirens refuse to sing.

Trickle-Down Happiness

I see even now where I’m sitting

On the couch by slanted stairs

Spiraling down towards lives unending

Lost in every remnant of lasting despair

Do you ever find yourself so tired?

Exhausted by the lives that might be?

Something to hear more than an echo

Of one less whale who’s been lost out at sea

Like you’ve been told to hold your head beneath water

As if you’re bobbing for apples or dreams

There might yet be something to hold onto

Like a rotting stem held between rotten teeth

Such a hope would hold the tide steady

And fight every war in a dead man’s boots

But what is the point of false missiles when

You have rusted guns or a knife that won’t shoot

Death at the men who would die for a cause

Even when they don’t know what it is

Draped in a flag that bleeds the darkest of reds

Like a marker or a pen etched in skin

A tattoo that’s been given every meaning

In retrospect like childhood love

Where we hope and we wish that we knew what it was

When all we’ve ever known is a mirage

That stands in the corner of the room that we’ve built

With its back to the camera or screen

A fragment or a memory or a heartbeat so weak

That every whisper might sound like a scream

From deep beneath the earth that we’ve soured

To trail away as a plaintive cry

Dug away until even our tenth finger bled

Strawberry red to mix with our lies

That we’ve told to everyone we thought we might know

In the panic of societal fear

Pinned to a wall in a house of cards that might fall

We built for the one who might hear

Each cry for the sake of the lonely

Each promise for those who are deaf

Lost to the moments of poetry scribbled

In the final lines of a man now near death

To be found where he sits near the ocean

A sunset and sand dollar in hand

Trying to pay this his final one way

Only to find even infinite waters can be damned

To rise like a tide so stagnant

To sour with the fish who can’t swim

Not even for the sake of the stars that might guide

Even when they’re firefly lights that grow dim

In the face of an unending promise

And for the sake of all that might be

You were only the moon in the river that rose

And I’m a man on a couch on a Saturday night, too afraid to die ever to sleep

To see

The wet road stretched out so short

But that doesn’t matter

Where I’m going, each thought is scattered

I rest on anchors and

Well.

No matter the depth of the ocean, no matter the strength of the seas,

I thought I was made out of iron and yet…

I have been dropped in the water.

And every anchor sinks.