My friend told me she liked my writing but is looking forward to when I write something positive. How’s this: Tonight the air barely moved. Hot, blue sky with jet stream highlights. I ate watermelon, cucumbers, popcorn; I watched my new friend dip a chip in salsa and spread a jelly across bread. The buildings…
I was in the front seat, the navigator’s seat, an atlas open on my lap. I felt as if I was going to vomit. Staring at the highway, the concrete, the fading yellow lines. Behind me the other six in the van muttered to each other. Jasen, my roommate, a balding gay man in love…
I have forgotten myself. I strain my memory and look into the sun, squinting, but it remains: who am I? Or who was I and can I get back there? It is a grand larceny, this life: you only understand it long after the fact. I look for ways to reach inside myself. I try…
I am left with little else than the isolating loneliness of my experience–but it does not have to be this way. It can, in fact, be the opposite. Through whatever wisdom I am able to accrue, I can share it with a person or persons who need it. I can empathize with something not yet…
Reading is the empowerment of those who do not seek power for gain over others, but gain over themselves.
I don’t believe in the gospels, the Koran, the Talmud, the eternity of the human soul, hell, or the promises of leaders; but I desperately want to believe in fate. A certain kind of fate. The fate that weaves through the seven verses of “Tangled Up in Blue”.
Although most of my life is spent alone, being alone scares me. It cedes the control of my heart. I wrote to make my thoughts commodities I can control. From my emptiness and fear, I weave my puppet strings, rubbing against my callused hands. And the world will dance. And the world will obey. Other…
I fall back on my bed, stretching out, thinking of the time, in 2010, I entered a national poetry contest. I must have sent 60 pages worth of stuff. I wrestled it into an envelope and hid it behind a two paragraph letter of introduction. I felt naked and confident–I was doing something. Of course,…
When I was younger, I used to lie in bed and try to piece out the cuts of a scene from a film. It was a person lying in bed, like I was, and one of the shots was a close up on the character’s hand as he gripped the bed sheet, just before waking up, then…
It would seem that water would lose its effectiveness, but it does not. I love it because it is everything. Tonight dragonflies are circling above the rocks, passing in front of the blue and then the pink, moving toward the water to just hover over it. I wonder if they hear the water cresting against the…