You cannot escape truth when talking across a pillow. Delirious comfort leaves no space for fear. If there was a banking system for time, for moments, for getting back what we’ve lost, I would invest all these empty hours I bleed out introspectively on a page for a few voiceless words whispered across the pillow from … More Pillow Talk
In another life and with another brain I would have made myself master and pupil of language – instead… I tiptoe on the precipices of residual memories that spill out from suppressed synapses. In the nine-minute intervals between hushing the waking bells I’ve fooled my mind the night before into believing will penetrate the film … More Otherwise Known as REM Sleep
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 … More Memory Wormhole (An Opening)
Whenever I would get to see you, when it was our time, I felt I was stepping up to the challenge of an arcade pinball machine. Feeling below the cabinet for that hidden power switch, I’d seek you out. Reaching into my coat pocket for my busted burner phone and punching in the sequence of … More Top Score
I once cracked open a diving stick and emptied the sand from it for no good reason. I walk past the fence of the public pool and am hit with a burning sensation within the caverns of my nostrils from the day I first jumped into deep water without holding my nose. Instinct exhales the … More Diving Sticks and Other Recollections of Public Pools
She met him when neither of them could stand to be alone. They remedied this by getting together. Now they’re face to face and he’s trying to tell her how now he can’t seem to be with anyone. The tightrope walk between being available and being alone is an act he’s made his own. Acrobats … More Temperance of Permanence
It is a little-known fact that when you look at the back of a movie poster you see a mirror image of the picture on the front. The same goes for how the images look when you stand behind the movie screen itself. Spend enough time in the seats of a cinema, and you will … More Cinematic
Middle age endows its members with, amongst strands of grey, bushels of gifts. Most are neglected, others embraced, but none must go unnoticed. Years accumulate, begging the excavation of long-buried relics—memories tucked under blankets of time. Unlike meticulously dusted deposits of Jurassic carbon, the artifacts of days past have a tendency to uproot hurriedly from … More Middleton
These are words for Parker Dudley, my beloved yellow Labrador Retriever, as recorded by his best friend a few times over the span of his life. Fall 2002: (The beginning of a draft of a letter the 15-year-old version of me envisioned handing Parker’s veterinarian prior to his neutering surgery. Sadly, this first paragraph is … More Tribute to the Yellow Prince: Words for Parker Dudley
The old man adopted Kiddo in April at the suggestion of his eldest granddaughter. She told him a puppy would be good for him, what with a year of living alone under his belt. When she first offered the idea, just a short time after Julia went to the Lord and the walls of the … More Washed Away with the Floodwater
