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Invoking the Blank Page
I am looking to you, Blank Page, for help. I awoke today with Worry. While I was able to slough off the morning blanket, Worry persisted its shroud about me. An invisible source secures a tight hold around the top of my head. It clamps the innards of my chest. The cinches have been there…
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You Better Run
When you go for long runs, moments become monumental. After a while, you finally hit that temperature when the pores on the crown of your head open like infants’ eyes, oozing the byproduct of your stamping feet’s toil. Their opening is the moment you desire from the time you take your first stride. Hammering the…
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Romantically-Inclined Commuters
Public transportation, while physically wall-less and barrier-free, will agonize one’s sense of stability within their social world. To experience this sensation to the fullest extent, it is recommended for one to use public transportation at least twice a day and a minimum of five days a week. Travel alone for maximum observation time and tend…
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June First
Let fall the words they spoke to you on nights rage struck your temples like lightning to an oak tree that went its whole life all those layers of rings not getting hit just to get hit. Let the wilderness consume your mind not because you need to simulate recklessness you, so calculated now what…
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a loner in isolation
I don’t keep anything in my pockets. That was the first thing I noticed, gosh, back when I still had to move my car. My chapstick and pens sit on the desk and my car stays put except for weekly street sweeping (though I don’t hear them come by so don’t think I even need…
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No One Makes Money at Landlocked Bars on Holiday Weekends
If I only knew the time, he thought, I would know it all. Standing behind the bar on a slow holiday weekend he would wax philosophical. Something outside would catch his eye and the thought would skip away. Like how the awning of the place retracted with one of those poles you slipped through a…
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Pillow Talk
You cannot escape truth when talking across a pillow. Delirious comfort leaves no space for fear. If there was a banking system for time, an exchange rate for moments, for getting back what we’ve lost, I would invest all these empty hours I bleed out introspectively on the page for one morning spent volleying whispered…
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Orphan Dryer Sheet
An missing orphan dryer sheet falls from the inside of my pant leg in the produce section by the apples. Solving little mysteries makes me smile.
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Road Verse
When the second chance is really the fourth or fifth And you aren’t ashamed, but you won’t admit Lessons are learned as you go, They don’t wait at the end of the road. When you’ve lost the faith you thought was heaven-sent Don’t make it all about trying to reinvent The soul you traded in…
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Talking in My REM Sleep
In another life and with another brain I would have made myself pupil and master of language. Instead: I tiptoe on the precipices of residual memories that spill out from suppressed synapses. I desire nothing but the nine-minute intervals between hushing the waking bells I’ve fooled my mind the night before into believing will penetrate…
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Surviving Suicide: What I’ve Learned After 10 Years
10 years ago, I attempted suicide. On a summer night in 2008, my parents drove me from the house where I was raised to the emergency room in an effort to save the life of their 21-year-old son. My action was built on several years of mental turmoil and anguish, of unchecked thoughts and words…
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Get out of your head.
I used to worry about a great many things, existentially. I am learning to reel it back. You let your mind get such a lead on your heart that it casts a shadow over those who belong in the latter.
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Father’s Day, 2018
My father is wise. His wisdom has helped more people than I could ever count. When I was young, I was envious of the so many to whom he lent his ears, of the wisdom he dispensed as if it came naturally. However, when his learning was dispensed to me—it was with frequency as is…
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On Hearing Notes Composed in Mourning
I attended a concert of classical music this evening. The final piece, “Ode to Lord Buckley,” composed by David Amram, was written after the death of the titular entertainer. Amram knew him well. What follows is a scant account of the performance’s sublimity, composed by myself. The saxophonist scoops notes penned in memoriam and hurls…
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Bagel Bar
After that first night not sleeping, they went for breakfast sandwiches at the cramped bagel joint overlooking Main Street. The two of them ordered at the counter, but Clyde waited for the tray of food to be prepared. He took the tray and approached the empty stool next to her hoisted bottom and dangling legs.…
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Landlines: One Reason the ’90s Were the Best Decade for Elementary School Romance
Chivalrous courtship, (in the elementary-school-aged-male sense of the word) isn’t dead, but it took a major hit during the latter half of the first decade of this millennium. It started when households began doing away with their home phones and choosing to exclusively use cellular phones. With that one decision, the family itself lost a…
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Forgiveness
You’ll reach a point where you cannot blame your mistakes on your parents’. In the early years of your second decade, you’d determined they were the reason you wore a hero’s mask over your villain’s face and fought for both sides. A double life, your father called it. When you were alone you spat at…
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Memory Wormhole (An Opening)
The falsities I signify as memories lie in stacked planes, pierced by a needle, threaded taut at the most peculiar points; each day is an involuntary setting off of previously lived remembrances, bounded in touchstones I’ve symbolically mythologized in my psyche. One past moment bounds into another: full submersion in a wormhole of past occurring…
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Sophisticating the Rudimentary 