Closer

I know you’re empty, I know you’re spent. But believe in this, please believe in this. It scares me to write it and it scares me to mean it cause I’ll let you down, I’ll fail somehow.

Yet I feel a peace with you next to me. I can believe when you’re next to me. That this will work out, that the loneliest times are nothing now but memories and false reprieves. That we’re closer to how life was meant to be all along.

At Arm’s Distance

I might pull her close but she stays just out of reach. And I understand why but it’s pulling strings inside of me. I start to think and then I sink into myself when that’s the last place I want to be. I’ll just give her time, take it night by night and I’m sure I’ll see that the distance she keeps will give way to meaning. That over time she’ll show me inside to a world I’ve never seen.

So I'll Sing It Again

I usually only play songs I’ve written when I pick up my guitar to play. But lately, I’ve been playing a song by Glen Hansard over and over. I almost feel like that if I stop playing it, I just might lose my grip on things—as if playing this song is the only way I can hold on to you for now, until you are gone forever or until I can really hold you.

I’m scratching at the surface now
and I’m trying hard to work it out
So much has gone misunderstood
and this mystery only leads to doubt
And I didn’t understand
when you reached down to take my hand
so if you have something to say
you better say it now

Cause this is what you’ve waited for
Your chance to even up the score
And as these shadows fall on me now
I will somehow
Cause I’m picking up a message Lord
and I’m closer than I’ve ever been before
So if you have something to say
say it to me now

Timing

Love is patient. Love is patient. Love is patient. For now that’s all she asks. So for now that’s all I can give her. And it will take everything in me to do it.

: to draw breath in sharply

When I was seven years old playing in the surf of the Pacific Ocean, I got barrel rolled by a big wave. The currents tossed me all around and upside down. Still underwater with my eyes closed, I began swimming as hard as I could to reach the surface. My breath was running out. Right at the moment I expected my head to burst out of the water so I could take a deep breath, my head hit the sand. My body gasped anyway.

At twenty-nine, that same wave has caught me again. Down seems up, wrong feels right, and the currents pull me, helplessly. I’m swimming hard again for the surface, and I hope the next breath is air. Because I’m gonna gasp either way.

What happens?

What happens when you find someone who you enjoy being with almost regardless of where you are or what you’re doing? What happens when you find a person who feels like home? What happens when I start to care again? What happens when no one else understands this? What happens if this isn’t just a phase?

What happens if it all goes away? What happens if it stays forever?

The ones who give up

Part of me thinks I’m gonna lose her, one way or the other. Then part of me knows that I won’t. That everything will happen how no one expected, and it will be more real and right than either of us ever thought it could be. For that possibility, I’m willing to lay my soul bare. But in time. Because the outcome I am suspicious of now could be too much for anyone to process if I actually said it out loud.

It almost seems like the ones who give up find what they were looking for all along, in the end.

Lift

This music flows around me and I fall in it like the ocean. The waves lift me up then bring me down again and I smile. Because I know the next swell will be bigger, as will the one after that. As the waves get higher the troughs get lower. But I just know that there will be the one that takes me high enough that I can grab on to the sky and never come down. I won’t ever come down.

James Wortman

Tonight I’m coming home to a different home. Because I’m on the fourth floor now instead of three. Because of a phone call that told me that James passed away tonight when his heart just stopped beating. And there are other reasons, but that’s the one that gets me. That someone I’ve known my whole life died tonight while I was here, unaware, lost in my own cares that now seem so petty, so unprepared for the ending of a life.

I remember red

I remember the days when I would do anything for her. Patience, kindness, and all that. How she reeled me in. Then slit my throat and said, “Why this? Too much. Too much” as the blood flowed. But now I wonder if it was I who did it all. Pressing the blade in gently until I felt the give. Then pulling hard with the rush of madness until all was red and unrecognizable. And saying “Why this?”

Absurd (in the Existential sense of the word)

I’ve been pondering the absurdity of recent events in my life. And the only conclusion I come to as to how one should respond is with laughter. It may be a laugh of ennui, a dark laugh tinted with masochism, or...or it can be a self-deprecating yet good-humored laugh that asks, “Really?” shakes its head, and answers, “Yes, really.”

I guess that third type of laugh is a pretty complicated one. Oh well.

There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
--Albert Camus

Paroxysmal Pedagogy

How can I be an English teacher when I don’t believe in poetry anymore — at least not in the form most conceive it? What if I believe a poem should never quite know where it’s going until it gets there? That lines should flow together without suffering the violence of an end-stopped break that interrupts the pace and wastes so much space where words should be? And what if I lie and say that a poem could ever satisfy the intractable demands of meaning and truth? What if all I can do is undermine the very line that you read as I write it?

[praxis]

The game is only fun for those who play it well. And sometimes I do. But as soon as I start getting ahead I begin to forget the first rule: it’s just a game. It will never be any more. Not ever. And believe me, I speak from experience. I have a saying, and for a few months I began to question its validity. But it proved itself true in the end. And that saying is this: a girl you meet at a bar will never be anything more than a girl you met at a bar. Not ever. And the day I fully embrace that, I will master the game. Or I will just quit playing altogether.

POTC 2008

Music was played, friends were made, and the keg was floated. Things were said and done that shan’t be repeated. Body parts were revealed that should not have been. Photos were taken that should be destroyed. There was shirtless, sweaty man love. There was blood and bruises and marshmallows.

And it was awesome.

Here’s to good times and the best friends a guy could ask for.

They move on beams of never-ending light

These sounds surround me like a castle and I am unassailable. I stand on the highest turret and take in the scene surreal. Colors and lights and horizons. My eyes are closed but I can see them swirling around in a constant motion of melody and syncopation that is the meaning in me.

Inside of Happiness

I try to forget, but the ties that were are cut and lacking tension, dangling without purpose. I see a photo or a passing reminder and it hurts, not because of the bad times but because of the good, and how I miss those. And I’m happy most of the time now. But sometimes I think that the inside of happiness is a hollowed-out core where no one asks if things are really how we want them to be.

And a folk singer sings, Yeah, I’ve made love, and I’ve been fucked, so what?

Awake

My eyes are open wider now. Not like a person who is afraid of the world but like a person who can take it in. And take it. Because something has changed. Something in me knows I’m more alive now. That I have more life than can be overcome. More light than the darkness can answer.

Ode to Sunscreen

O sunscreen, what a miracle you seem
to the pasty-white white boy I'll always be.
A trustworthy buffer against that orange enemy in the sky,
my suit of armor against the UV arrows that fly
so fast toward my skin, but they won't get in
because you adhere through sweat and through tears
and stick to me like an ever-true friend.

Distant

I may begin to seem that way. But it has little to do with you. Just think of it as an act of self-preservation.

The difference is, we wake up

There are times when I realize I have fallen asleep. Not in my bed or sitting in my chair, but just in life. I am walking and talking and smiling and working. And I am asleep. And it’s intentional. Because that sudden gasp of air and wide-opened eyes that come when you wake up might be too much. It might be too much to look around and see how this world really is—and where I am in it.

But I must. Because feigning sleep is a child’s response. And I can’t claim that innocence.

Lo único que importa es continuar

Last night I watched a documentary about immigrants from Mexico and Central America who try to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. One Mexican man who they followed on his journey said this:

“Before you leave, there will be many people here who will only tell you negative things. Like ‘watch out for snakes’ or ‘the ranchers might kill you.’

“And when you are on the journey, a lot of people will tell you, ‘Don’t continue, la Migra is up ahead.’ But what am I to do with that information? Turn back? I have to keep going. The point is to keep going.”

Lo único que importa es continuar.

All that matters is that I keep going.

Remuneration

I feel it creeping, always a few steps behind me. If I slow down too long, if I stop for a breath it will catch me. And then comes the darkness. Doubt and fear and knowing that I am failing. That I may not be who I want to be and that I definitely never planned to be here—not now, not ever. That things may not work out in the end.

So I steady my pace and try not to look over my shoulder except when I have to. To remind myself that I have to keep pushing even as my body fails. To remind myself that one day there will be an accounting. And I’m the one responsible for all this.

The Sin of the Fathers

I’ll look for the answer in the bottom of this pint glass. If it’s not here, then the next. And then we can talk and I’ll threaten to walk out and maybe even do it—again. But I won’t mean it. It’s just what I need to do to breathe. Just something in my genes, this tendency to leave.

The Monsters and Magic of Entropy

I just came to and realized that I have toppled head first down the rabbit hole of information theory. I have only a vague sense of how I got here. I remember reading Umberto Eco, typing out a quote, looking up a term. I might have clicked on a hyperlink. But now I’m face to face with the monsters and magic of entropy, black holes, transinformation, and Kullback-Leibler divergence and have no idea how to extricate myself without triggering a quantum data loss or a disequilibrium resulting in certain theoretically-posited molecular annihilation.

The Mustard Seed Revolution

Yesterday, I fully realized that I am more interested in prophets than profits. I am more interested in an economy of love and peace than an economy of money and power. More in reconciliation than retribution.

Maybe this makes me unfit for this world. Or maybe it makes me perfectly fit to change it.

After the beep

I can usually say that I’ve left my sentimental days behind me—years behind me, in fact. But the “it’s me” in the voicemail you leave means more than it should to me because I’ve been trained to read into things that only seem to need to be read into, or at least taken out of context enough for me to separate word from meaning and make a textual scene from a mere informality.

How it doesn’t

Yesterday I had trouble getting in because the keypad on the door of my apartment building wasn’t working. It doesn’t work quite often, but this time it was doing something different. I thought to myself, that’s not how it doesn’t usually work.

I’m seeing a girl who tells me that she tries to make me smile because she loves my smile. She holds my hand when we walk down the sidewalk and understands without me having to say a word. And I think, this is not how it doesn’t usually work.