i was turning into someone
beautiful, someone i could
stand to
look at in the
mirror and then you
were gone and i

was nothing.

i am little apart from my
vices, my
failures, my endless
shortcomings and
fondness for the
bottle.

pour me a drink so i can
forget all this, just
disappear into
someone else for
a spell.

in the night
when all watching eyes are
fast asleep
in the corners of the
deepest night i am
finally exposed

i am the celebrity train wreck
in the making
i am the beast
a burden unto myself
i am the architect
of self-sabotage
i cannot prevent
my own bleed-out

but you wouldn’t know it
i make myself
up so shiny
when you’re watching
all smiles and handshakes
to distract you from
the soaking bandages as
i steer you away from
the blood trail

you see, i’m
trying to fix
myself
because nothing has ever seemed quite
right
or true or holy or clean
enough

but somehow
i keep fooling myself that
i can make a
newer, better
me
that i can doctor enough
miracle cures
to finally be the perfect
me

but you don’t see
the relapse
behind the velvet curtains

you don’t see
the habits
that won’t bleed
out of me

and i scrub
and i scrub and
i scrub and i
just can’t get
this stench off of me

and i don’t know what to do

because we all know by now
that, if i am left
to my own devises,
i will, in fact,
make myself into
a version of myself
that is twice the son of hell
as before

here we go again

it seems despite my best efforts
and because of my best efforts

i have relapsed
again and again and again

the view from square one
so familiar

every single promise
vow
prayer
petition
whisper
is just another link in the chain

in the catalog of my
consistent inconsistency
one thing holds truth to it:

i am my own best wrecking ball
my own short-circuit
walking overload
stumbling burn out

and at the end of the day
i think i move past the start
just to get the failure over with

for twenty
seven
years, i

waited.

for you, for something
real, something
strong and true and
lasting

and it was
over before it
began

leaving me feeling an
utter failure

jaded and
disappointed and
occasionally angry and
shattered and
divorced

forever might be out there, maybe it’s
just not for someone like
me

things can fall
apart so
quickly

i have those
raccoon eyes and i’m
down ten pounds but they
say it all gets
better with time

please! be as great a healer as
they all say, because i’ve
never hurt like this before and i
need a brighter future to
look forward to

we’re all so frantic
so aching and desperate
strutting and stumbling
trying to keep
ourselves from
falling apart

we all look after our own
self-made men and women
unmade and unraveling
but keeping up appearances

because maybe
just maybe
if we all run fast enough
we’ll outpace the pain
and the sight of
how hollow we’ve become

at least that’s what we tell ourselves

we’re all just trying to
build up velocity
to break away
from the inner world
of seething hurt
that festering wound

but the reality is this
as we run
so desperately
to escape our inner agony
we’re recklessly trampling
each other
in the process
bumping and pushing
shoving and abandoning
it is insanity
and our hearts display the
aftermath

if we’re moving
so fast
how can we see
that we are all
every one of us
with no exceptions
collateral damage
shattered
by a spiritual war?

and how can we see
that there is a Mender
who uses all of us
in the Mending
of all of us?

we are comforted
so that we can comfort
with the comfort
we have received
from the Comforter

but in our guarded
scheduled
perfectly polished
desperately lonely
american lives
that just takes too much time

because healing is patience
it is the hug that will stay in place
long after the tears fall
it is the silence when words
are just not enough
it is hands clasped together
firmly with resolution
the reassurance of touch
that proclaims a heart
willing to remain for the long haul
because deep down we know
we really know
the consolation we give
is the consolation we need

healing is the dignity of time
for ourselves and for each other
but it can only happen
when we stop running
from ourselves and from each other

Do you remember drinking water from the hose on a hot summer day, while running around the neighborhood with your friends? Man those were the days! Summer never seemed to end. The days lasted for months and everything was important yet nothing mattered. Playing G.I. Joe in the back yard. Building with Lego’s past your bedtime cause you have an idea. Drawing the creatures from our imaginations. Dreaming big about becoming a firefighter, astronaut or president, no one told us we couldn’t, they encouraged us. The simple joy of childhood. As kids we had fun, I don’t have very many sad memories as from my childhood.

Then we transform like the Autobots we used to play with. We gain self-awareness, we care about the dumbest things like clothes and hair and gadgets. We form groups and forget about some of our childhood friends. The teenage years seem to last forever, but not the way they did when we were kids. We just want to become adults and drive cars and have sex. Funny how I seem to only remember the bad things from these years.

Next stage is different for people, so much so that some people never grow out of the post-high school slump. Adulthood comes and we don’t know what to do. Some go off to college and become doctors and lawyers, others start families and still others just continue to crave becoming an adult and sex and waste away years acting like sixteen. The problem with my generation is that most of us are stuck here. This stage should only last from eighteen until about twenty two or so, but some of my generation are twenty seven and still lost. An insecure teenager stuck in the body of an adult.

The problem here is that the stage of twenty five to fifty is the stage of adulthood. When we become society. We will get elected to Washington, we will discover new medicines and scientific breakthroughs that will make our child and grandchild’s lives easier. Yet we don’t know how to be adults. Maybe I’m speaking to the boys out there, but I would surmise that even the girls out there have a similar problem. We grew up in single parent homes. We had to teach ourselves stuff we didn’t even know we had to learn.

As little kids we didn’t know the world was horrible so we lived in bliss, never realizing it would ever end. I honestly believe I had a happy childhood, yet why is it that when I think of my youth I want to cry? I guess because I want to go back and just enjoy the simplicity of those years. Then again when I think of my teenage years I want to cry as well, but it is for regret of lost years. I wish I could go back and make more wise choices. And now here I am in that middle stage between teenager and adult. I feel stuck in limbo, I’m sure once I get out of this stage I’ll look back on it and want to cry and probably out of regret. I know I could have used these years much more efficiently.

I am concerned for the children of my generation. I have a young son, and when I think about him I want to cry. He is a beautiful creature, wild and free and living ignorant to the pains of life. The problem is, I don’t know how to capitalize on his youth and make it the best for him. I don’t know how to be a father, no one taught me. I feel like a failure most days, yet the funny thing is my son keeps smiling and asking me to play with him. He loves me unconditionally, even though I keep screwing up. And he keeps growing up and I keep feeling like I’m wasting time doing other things than spending it with him. Sure when he looks back at his childhood he’ll probably be like me and think it was happy and good. I know when I look back on his childhood I’ll cry and wish I could have my little boy back. I say this as he is still a little boy who just wants me to tell him stories before he goes to bed. He’s my best friend.

It amazes me how short life is and also how simple it is. It is a series of cycles, a bunch of choices that when put together make up our lives. I for one make mostly bad decisions and then regret them later. But we can’t go back in time, so maybe regret is a useless trait of humans. Like many have said, just learn from your mistakes and your past. Yet I tend to repeat my history, and I am not very good at planning my future. Life is just a few short years on earth, maybe between 70-80 years or more if your lucky. You struggle for thing and wish and plan for that. I forget sometimes that right now is my life! Life wont begin when I get the nice house and car one day, these hard times are also my life. The other thing is that as we grow old and die our child are entering the world and beginning to discover who they are and what they want to do to occupy their time on earth. And then they will be us and their children will be them and we will be dead.

I’m not an old man yet, I’m barely twenty six, so I have no clue what it’s like to be old. I imagine it will be interesting. You know you only have a few years left to live, and yet you have all the wisdom you’ve acquired throughout your life. You are really just then getting started. I am just guessing this, but if I look at my dad who has a wealth of knowledge yet probably only a few years left, he could write a book and we could all learn a thing or two from him. But he is just enjoying his remaining years with his wife and I don’t blame him, just saying it would be an interesting place to be. At least I know I have a few more years to screw up and try to get it right. When you’re an old man you don’t have much time to make mistakes.

When I think of growing old I get sad and want to cry. I think about my parents and miss my childhood when I could just ask them to kiss my scratched knee to make me feel better. When they were my strength and comfort. As an adult I have to be my son’s strength, but sometimes I still wish someone were mine. I also think about how one day they will die and know I will miss them. I will miss the nights we sat around as a family and played games and laughed, the memories I will never forget yet wish I could remember better. I love to look at old pictures yet I hate that they are just a frozen time capsule that can never be returned to, except for in our minds and our minds distort things.

We all want a happy life, but I don’t think that is possible. We get the life we live. The one based on the choices of our parents and then on the choices we make thereafter. There are moments of happiness and sadness. There are times of great joy and of great sorrow. But all we have is the moment we are in, right now. At some point in our lives we will stop breathing and absolutely nothing we owned or said will matter, we will die and those living will miss us. Our children will cry and remember us the way they will. And they will continue with their life and choices and they too will one day die and at this point we will be but a name to our grandchildren and great grandchildren.

I think the more you analyze life you more simple it becomes. Death is what is complicated, because we don’t know anyone who is dead. Every religion and ideology has an idea about what happens after death. Atheists believe there is no God therefore we just disappear and nothing happens when we die. Yet if this is true than I see no point in living, because it means that everything is completely pointless, that there is no reason to do anything. I have always believed a Christian version of the afterlife. If I have that wrong than I hope it is at least some form of heaven, although every version of heaven is different depending on the religion. I like the Christian idea of eternity with God.

Eternity is a scary thought and has always made me emotional. It is because I simply am a human and cannot fathom anything that isn’t measured by something. And the beauty of the Christian eternity is that it gives our human lives a purpose. It isn’t so much that we get our slot in heaven and then do whatever we please, it is about being a good person and sharing this joy and peace with others. If you knew how to get a million dollars for free from a source that was willing to give it to anyone who asked, wouldn’t you tell everyone you knew? That is a bad example because eternity with God will be much better than a million dollars.

I wish I could be a kid again and it makes me sad. I just want to cuddle with my mom and dad and live a simplistic life again, let them worry about all the grown up stuff. But who knows, they might wish they could be kids again too. I wish I could go back to my teenage years knowing what I know now and prepare myself better for adulthood. I wish I could go back to my child’s birth and be a better father from the beginning. I wish for a lot but I don’t have a magic genie and even if I did my list is longer than just three.

I hope that from this day forward I will live my life more productive. I hope to be a better father and I hope to be a strong man when I finally become an adult one day. I hope when I’m an old man I will look upon my life as being a success. I hope to not have too many regrets. I hope for a lot of things, but the only hope I have that I know to be true is that when I die I will spend my afterlife with my Creator. As much as I love my parents, they are just screw ups like me and everyone else. But my Creator fashioned me the way I am because that is how He wanted me to be.

[mo]

i am spent
utterly completely
totally absolutely
at my end
with a lap full
of prayers
whose cost
i cannot afford

all i have is time,
that fickle, fleeting
friend
that foe
who speeds up
to send joy away
quickly
then slows to
prolong
despair

what i would give
to break the hands
of the clock
to stop and breathe
to live in a moment
of silence
to squeeze out
the contentment
in a moment of quiet
of calm
and be centered
and rooted
in the blink of an eye
where no tear emerges
from the pain
of a broken heart

[va]

i wrote a musical just for you
and called it “happiness turns blue”
it was about sad people who committed suicide
the tragic scene was when they died
and i wrote the first song
in less than an hour
it related to being so lonely
and that is where i’ve been

i wrote a play
and named it “time”
it took me some to get it right
i wrote the first act
when i was young
and my o my, how i have grown
since last you saw me

i wrote a beautiful poem
and dedicated it to no one
i used all the right methods and rhymes
i even had it published in a book
but no one went to look
it was never read through
so no one ever knew it was all about you

i wrote an allegory
it was really all about me
the hero even had my name
but the best part was how the train came
and it took our hero away
the metaphor was that i’ll die some day

i wrote a novel
and titled it “age”
it took me from my childhood to my grave
i wrote the first chapter
in my youth
it was how my depression grew
and that’s why i wrote a musical for you

i wrote a one hit wonder
and it was called “life”
it took all my years to get it right
but the radio hated it
and my audience didn’t get it
i wrote the first line when i was born
and last note on my death bed

i wrote an epitaph for my grave
so i could rest in peace
it mentioned how i loved
with a heart that beat so true
i wrote everything
just for you


[mo]

how can something so
vital and ever-present
completely encompassing
slip through my fingers
like sand?

it’s like someone shattered
an hourglass
and i am left
to try to save the contents

i just can’t keep track
of all this time
i have lost

[va]

winter follows his lover autumn
ending and beginning the years
they have it all worked out
they are a cute couple
their son spring is a bright fellow
he’ll bring his girl flowers
and make it okay to go outside again
but his sister is much hotter
summer wont let you forget that either
the cycle of seasons move
as the old pass on, so do the months
every year is the same
the clouds come and bring the rain
and emotions come and bring the pain
this ancient wind is pushing me down
it is october and we can feel november’s sting
halloween we pretend we are better off than we really are
a costume we wont take off until december 26th
a new year will come with january
but she is a fickle gal and will leave you
cause february gave her a valentine
but april will just march right in
so come what may
for june ushers in the heat of july fireworks
i just want to fall in love on a hot august night
but we remember the 11th of september
our lives are circles and here we are again
throw out the calendar
glide through these 365 days
as if you were a sailor upon the sea
check off your “to do” lists
and make firm your resolution
this is your year
as every year has been and will be
this is your life
as it always has been and always will be
count not the hours
count your blessing
there are only a few minutes left until we die
cherish the ones you have
regret not the ones you lost
count your blessing
not the hours

[mo]

like a rainbow
time is an arch
sometimes not as colorful
we start our lives feeble and weak
we long to rise up
desiring the pot of gold at the end
then we start to digress
and we die as feeble and weak as we were born

[mo]

always flying by whilst
dragging on

she gives and she takes and she
decides everything

i can never get enough of her, and she
doesn’t seem interested in
me at all

forever chasing her, still she’s
always farther away, always
out of reach

she is stern and
unforgiving and she
never looks
back

the overflow of a wicked heart
is far too abundant
and i’m drowning in the undertow
in the mud and the waste
of my vain imaginations
inanimate convictions
and slumbering spirit

dead man walking
straight into the dirt
to a bed of filth
where there is no rest
because there aren’t enough tombs
to bury all of my dead ways