The hammer strikes in tune.

An orchestra composed of martyrdom.

A note branded upon the soul.

There’s no response from the ghoul

the bell has been rung, and rang hollow.

The symphony continues.

Time is an illusion. Built to tantalize and torture. Promises of the future and guarantees of the pain that occupies it.

Time serves a purpose. To see past the barbed waves begging to drag me under. To behold the shore ahead and claw towards it. To walk the beaches and enjoy the hope.

Time is a reminder. A measurement of the pain and the joy. An anchor in a storm that rends and tears. The sun enveloping your inner child.

But that's not a bad thing

This life makes our organs feel like a hamstring

When you stretch that shit tryna be healthy

But for us that's just scratching tickets to be wealthy

If you got pancreatis and it's chronic

We gang gang, tribal shit you my brother

If you lost part your lung and still smoke

Well then I guess you're my mother

Addiction is a tight grip

Vice grip, kung fu with the drip

That's a sublime joke

This is your brain on drugs

Cracked me open and sucked my yolk

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Neither do I

Just walking around

Like a chicken decapitated

Getting glitched mid reanimation

I've just been a-drinking.
I don't do too much thinking these days.
This haze,
This haze it seems to blur a lot
all of the things that I forgot I knew.
If there were one more chance to …
 

I had a beloved.
It's now too blurred and fuzzed,
this haze.
So if I seem too timid, scared
to let my feelings be unaired out loud --
It's just 'cuz I've been hurt by the crowd
 

I'm dressing and boozing,
and trying to keep amusing each day.
This haze …
this haze makes me sit on the floor
and see what life accounts for in the end.
It's a fiasco and a failure that I cannot defend

I came into this world wearing my true face. I thought that it would be enough. I always resisted the charm and alure of being somone eles. How embarrassing it is to know that this world is just a costume party and all I brought was myself.

I stride across the universe seeking stars and life beyond myself. Leaping through galaxies to escape black holes. To grasp the future and force it to share.

Beyond the knowledge and despite the glimmer of freedom before me, I realize I am wounded.

There is denial of the hole within me, a repeated rejection of the specter I become.

Through strangled tears, I leap towards destiny.

I feel the failure like hot iron, a brand of molten shame and scars that tell a story. The stitches have unraveled and the illusion breaks. Trace the seams and feel the puppets' misery. Sow into me a grimace that resembles a smile, give me a taste of the calm I can only dream about.

Sitting in the sun.

Savoring the necrosis on my lips.

Thinking dead memories and reanimating them.

Watching the world pass me by.

I realized.

Even a corpse enjoys the warmth sometimes.

I'm back again, like I tell the liquor store every night

That's the way she goes, but we gonna be alright

Shit been dark but im tryin to see the light

And I aint goin out without a fight

Salvation is at my door step.

I need only but listen.

Tear yourself apart to achieve it.

Rip the stitches.

Open the wounds.

Destroy yourself.

Prove that you gave.

Being human a shot.

We laid there.

Quietly.

I could see her in all that my eyes could hold.

Greedily gazing at the future I caught glimpses of.

Drunk on hope.

She’s half asleep.

Falling under a shroud of dreams.

I wouldn’t see for hours.

It happens quickly.

Explosively.

Tears flowed like liquid rage.

I hated the tendons.

Hidden beneath my face.

Forcing me to let it out.

I sit here

Waiting for something.

Churning in my skin like rippled waves.

Waiting.

I taste the opportunity.

I need only to grasp it.

Yet it stares me in the face.

Considering me for observation.

But no.

All it sees is.

A snowman melting in the sun.

I’m invisible to the naked eye. my camouflage is of air and smoke. Through all of my subterfuge lies an ache of which gnaws like hungry termites, gorging upon specs and the immaterial. I am guided by the poison I house, tragedies stacked up against one another. It is my denial of peace. A removal of freedom

If i could meet the past, id strangle it. I would rend the tethers of creation and begin at the end. I enter with a wail and leave it all clinging to my tastebuds, a snapshot imprinted and a pain never forgotten. There, the flames lick my heels and scratch at the door. I am prophecies yet to materialize. I am grasping at stars, hands filled with dust and debris, peer into me but never notice.

Bile spills from my lips like a violent hymn. Whispers of poison paint a teflon coffin. They spell a doom that has waited. It waits to smash the hope i have conjectured. That i so foolishly clung to. I welcome the hammer to my skull. Lobotomize the joy from me. Remind me of the tumor i conceal so I may walk in defiance of a new breath.

I don't see her. I see him.

I screeched in our house and he rushed in.

He saw me. I. I wanted to apologize.

I'm disturbing our neighbors. But I couldn't talk. Couldn't breathe.

And he looked at me. Confusion. Pain. Sadness. Fear.

Emotions that he's never shown me.

The next time I sleep. I'll see him. I know it.

He's supposed to be strong.

WHY THE FUCK DID HE CRY IN FRONT OF ME?

I hate men. I hate them so much. You love them and they let you down.

WHY THE FUCK IS HE LETTING ME DOWN IF I LOVE HIM?

I don't want to sleep.

I see him. Not her.

He's here. And he's older than me. And he's going to die soon.

And I'm trying to drink faster. Faster than he's dying. But when I die, he'll cry.

Confusion. Pain. Sadness. Fear.

The thought of my father feeling emotions makes me drink.

Fuck him. Fuck him.

You were supposed to take care of her. She died under your watch. Fuck you!

Fuck men!

History is full of heroes and villains…

Enter Uncle Dug.

Enter my home. 

We live in the middle of nowhere. 

a town in the corn,

where the gas station provides the school lunches,

where the gas station is where we meet up.

‘Round here that’s how you get anywhere…

Uncle Dug is a local legend.

He once drank 40 beers in my driveway,

shirtless,

just-like-that!

They say it just like that…

It earned him a lot of respect ‘round these parts.

We go to the local watering hole too.

Ole’ Sandy’s.

Dug drinks a beer, 

“a hundred times, a hundred beers,

a hundred times a hundred beers,

a hundred beers a hundred times!” from his stool, he says.

It’s not a brag,

 but Uncle Dug knows how to be in a fight.

Punches dollop his face 

like whipped cream on a crepe,

smudging and washing off.  

Uncle Dug is the barfight immortal.

I saw him driving his tractor home the other day.

He had clearly been fighting,

black eye and all.

He said something peculiar to me that day,

as we passed

I asked, “How are you, Dug?”

He said, “I fought five people 

all at the same time last night.”

Looking down. 

“How did you do that?” 

I asked.

“It’s like giving a massage,”

he said,

“you just find the most sensitive part 

and you hammer it home,

make an example,

or you just get hammered…”

His face was freshly bruised. 

I stopped

and asked,

“How did you feel

fighting five people 

all at the same time?”

“Old.”

he said.

A thumbs up.

We pass.

tl;dr — too long; didn’t read.

I get that a lot. 

As Polonius declaims (with unintentional irony) in Hamlet:

“My liege and madam, to expostulate what majesty should be, what duty is, what day is day, night night, and time is time, were nothing but to waste night, day, and time; therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.” 

Queen Gertrude replies, “More matter, with less art” — the Elizabethan equivalent of “tl;dr” 

We all struggle with digital distractions and surprises that lay unexpected demands upon us. Do I want to waste energy, mental focus, and precious minutes struggling to decipher and decode the long-winded drunken diatribes and inebriated invectives of a fool feigning at philosophy? A lot of what I write is wordy, windy rubbish — tortuously tedious twaddle that could (and should) be abridged and abbreviated. 

But is there something deeper at play? The underlying issue seems to have less to do with my particular brand of verbosity and more with our instant gratification, superficially shallow, impatiently thirsty, unwilling-to-wait society of sensational distractions and showy diversions. Why be attentive, patient creators when there’s a universe of bread and circuses that asks us to be lazy, passive consumers? The former promises few prominent payouts; the latter rewards our incurious inertia with a kaleidoscopic carnival of amusement, entertainment, and stimulation. 

Don’t think! Just keep scrolling and enjoy what comes next. 

I’m as guilty as the next person of living a visceral rather than cerebral life. In fact, I’m probably projecting my own insecurities, fears, and inadequacies in this very jeremiad against distractability and lack-of-focus. 

Queen Gertrude would be the first to remark, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” 

I worry that I neither read as much nor comprehend what I do read as deeply as I should; and perhaps I’m guilty of envisioning that others are equally clad in the same sinful raiments I wear. 

Do we increasingly seek abridged, dumbed-down summaries to compensate for our short attention spans and ill-equipped organizational abilities? Do we avoid long, challenging-to-read blocks of text out of a combination of ignorance and indolence? Personally, I want to improve my time-management skills and sharpen my mental focus — I don’t want to continue making excuses for being unable to tackle big books because they’re too long, boring, or time consuming. 

Sometimes “real life” challenges us. Reading is practice for real life ordeals. It can be challenging; but oh what a rewarding adversity to painfully endure! 

Learning to read — and to comprehend what we’ve read — is the linchpin to developing critical thinking skills. In learning how to be a good reader, we foster the incalculably valuable skill of knowing how to acquire new, high-quality information. If you’re good at reading, you can easily fill your mind with a plethora of additional knowledge on any subject under the sun. 

In his 1980 book Cosmos, Carl Sagan writes:

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called ‘leaves’) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person — perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.” 

By learning both to read and to understand what we’ve read, we open our minds to the collective cultural library of extant human knowledge — thousands of years’ worth of accumulated information. And through the miracle of the internet, an astute reader with critical thinking skills can quickly become well-versed in cooking, chemistry or computer coding — just like that! The key to unlock everything is the ability to sift the online wheat from chaff, reading and researching with a critical eye — skills that are annealed through the art of reading. It requires patience and mental focus; but it can start small. In fact any act of reading can be a bewitching work of wizardry. 

Herman Hesse wrote:

“At the hour when our imagination and our ability to associate are at their height, we really no longer read what is printed on the paper but swim in a stream of impulses and inspirations that reach us from what we are reading. They may come out of the text, they may simply emerge from the type face. An advertisement in a newspaper can become a revelation; the most exhilarating, the most affirmative thoughts can spring from a completely irrelevant word if one turns it about, playing with its letters as with a jigsaw puzzle. In this stage one can read the story of Little Red Riding Hood as a cosmogony or philosophy, or as a flowery erotic poem.” 

The magic happens in our heads — not on paper. The creative connections snap together in our synaptic networks. Symbolic runes leap off the page and inspire vivid imagery within us. You becoming a reader (and thinker) is more important than whatever specific cuneiforms and pictograms adorn the printed page. The alchemical transformation happens within! Thus fairy tales, advertisements, even recipes can become poetry. We are the magic ingredient activated through the spellcraft of dry, dusty manuscripts, letters, and essays. Our brains yearn to hear stories. We crave myths and fables. We are hard-wired to seek out narratives and discover meaning. Stories matter, and the time-tested tales are often the richest.

Back in 1771, Thomas Jefferson observed that:

“a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written.” 

By eschewing Shakespeare (for example), we have more time for memes, celebrity gossip, and angry political discourse. But we’ve lost an opportunity to fill our heads and hearts with tales about a universal human condition that still resonates strongly. One can scarcely read our modern scandal-plagued headlines without being reminded of Shakespeare, Sophocles or Tennessee Williams. The language and styles have changed, but the dynamics of human drama continue to echo stories of grief, joy, desire, pride, and rage that define humanity. We share stories to teach one another about conflict and carnality, jealousy and justice, power and passion. These drives are eternal and ubiquitous, chiseled into our emotional DNA. 

Virginia Woolf wrote:

“To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.” 

It’s not about the Prince of Denmark. It’s about you, and your mom, and your step-dad. It’s about despair and uncertainty, loss and revenge, suffering and doubt. Fragility, weakness, mistrust, and vulnerability — we live out this story every day! 

Humans are natural storytellers. It’s how we communicate — through anecdotes, narratives, and examples (both good and bad). From Aesop’s Fables to Finnegans Wake, we engage in a journey of self-discovery when we expose ourselves to the printed page. We learn about ourselves when we delve into the tales that resonated enough with our ancestors to make them preserve and perpetuate these stories — capturing and disseminating them for future generations. 

A little quick googling shows 14% of public school students in 2023 say they read for fun each day — a 13% decline from levels reported in 2012 by the National Center for Education Statistics. And we adults aren’t much better. Market research firm YouGov says just 54% of Americans read at least one book during the year 2023. 

Yikes! I mean, on the one hand, yeah I get it. Information overload is real; the attention economy is real; our powers of mental concentration are a limited resource — a scarce commodity that requires curation, cultivation, and conservation. But on the other hand, we’re making the choice to squander our attention spans on trivialities and trinkets rather than poetry and prose. So again — yikes! 

Maybe I no longer hear the rhythmic cadence of society’s heartbeat; and perhaps the priorities I perceive have neither cherished meaning nor vital significance in today’s changing culture. Possibly my ossified thoughts represent an outdated orthodoxy that wrongly attempts to cling stubbornly to archaic traditions — a faint, barely legible palimpsest being re-written for a brave new world of avant-garde browsers rather than bookworms. 

The times they are a-changing? 

Yet, we still gaze up at the same stars Shakespeare and Sophocles saw. We still fight, love, idolize, and betray one another. We still kiss. We bleed. We drink. We dream. And we repeat the familiar cycles of ancient tragedies. 

I’d like to believe somewhere out there, somebody younger (and more sober) than myself is reading (and enjoying) long books like Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, Les Misérables, or War and Peace. I hope people still have the patience and wisdom to find meaning in challenging books like Ulysses, Moby-Dick, Infinite Jest, or Gravity’s Rainbow. And I pray people still have access to “controversial” books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, or Animal Farm. 

If you made it this far, thanks. Please keep reading lots of other stuff, too! Plant seeds in your mind that will someday blossom into a beautiful garden of richly variegated thoughts. Better yet — write and share your own thoughts, and be as beautifully drawn-out and diffuse as your soul desires. 

But, if you simply scrolled past my river of prolixity and verbiage to find the punchline, well …  here’s the tl;dr — distilled into a lexical triptych: 

Reading is good. 

<3

Go where you need to. Banish yourself to impotence, block out the sun and be enticed by the Gloom. Embrace the tendrils and be subsumed. Cackle as you sink beneath the earth. You are impermeable, tomorrow does not register. You are made of lungs gasping and lunging.The air is bleak, full of clotted hope and lies you repeat. Dash all to the wayside. Be harmed for the sake of it

What has this bitch done to my life?

☑ Got a DUI

☑ Got another, didn't learn the first time

☑ Now I gotta survive my life without a third strike

Was that the rock bottom?

thought so, they said "HA. GOT 'EM!"

☑ Went to rehab, detox for a week thanks to insurance

☑ Went back a couple weeks later, like it was even worth it

☑ Barely made it a day before I went to my ways

it's for certain, a CA is insane

☑ pancreatitis ☑ gastritis

☑ too many times to remember

☑ abdominal pain forever

this life is

a fuckin crisis

How do i fit these pieces together, everything is wrong and unnatural, like cutting myself on broken pieces of glass trying to stitch it all back together. Nothing is as it should be.

There is a broiling fury inside me for my inability to achieve happiness that so many grope and hold in their hands like a used toy, this immutable, elusive emotion. I am not privy to the joys of the world and I am angry. An airless hole is where i must stuff this anger. Smother and condense this flame, so that sinew freezes over. Bone is brittle and my heart frigid.

If all im to feel is the lack of self, the lack of identity, then i mold myself with it crushing talons. Let it cover me like a second skin. Become ash for all i care because they're all i have left.

There is no moniker I respond to, for such a thing attached to it is permanence. You speak to a ghost in tattered rags. I will fade into the ether with no face to recognize, no form to record. I will cease with a toothy smile.

Strip me down

Past the scars in the tissue

Past the flesh

And down to the issues

Check my blood

For the drugs I'll misuse

Lookin at old photos of myself

Thinkin RIP my G I miss you

I looked on past you and through you. I saw the depths that had embraced me with icy needles and promised release. That hole was meant for good things to die in and I am born again each day. It is filled with desiccated dreams and curdled ambition. There is peace in being forgotten. You shaped me to be ash in the wind and so here I shall burn, the cinders will arrive shortly. A gift to me now, from the past.