Sorry isn’t enough. Alcohol isn’t an excuse. My actions were wrong. My words were venomous. I took something personally I shouldn’t have taken personally. I fought for myself and my own feelings and stomped on all of your feelings. That’s not right. I am ashamed. I am embarrassed. I fucked up. Everything was fine and I stirred the pot. I don’t know why I do this. I continue to disappoint you. You have every right to be free. I never want to be a cage. I never want to control

Forgiveness and . . . What else was it? Shit, you already forgot? Golly, dude. Get it together. Try to remember . . . Eh, I’m sure it’ll come back into the ol thinking box up here if I keep typing. What’re we forgiving again? Ourselves? For being so afraid? For being so god damn pathetic? Oh . . . For the silence. The silence! That was it! Today’s focus is on Forgiveness and Silence. See? It usually comes back to me. I fear I’ve gotten so comfortable disappearing into stories

Writers write. Fighters fight. Lovers fuck. And drug addicts look for their next hit. Imagine being all of it? Fear pushes people away. No one will stay if they don’t feel safe. Fear poisons everything. Poets hurt. Readers disappear. And fear spreads like a fire. Burn me down. I am tired of hurting. Thinking myself into misery is one of my best skills. Mix in a little booze and I vent. Add in the weed to make me anxious. Sleep is the only relief. A shit job is the cherry

I have two stories raging inside of me: One full of hope and love and heroics and faith and trust and belief and light, And the other story is full of disappointment and darkness and jealousy and pain and regrets and nightmares and fear and walls. One of the stories dominates the other one for a while. But never forever. The other story fights back. The other story rages. The left hand And the right hand each have something opposite to s

It’s going to be okay . . . Wrong. Try again. Uhhh. . . . What? If you are going to sell yourself a dream, make it a better one. This isn’t a dream, though, this is my life. Exactly. It’s going to be great. Be selective with your words. If you are going to tell yourself an affirmation, make it a better one. It’s going to be— Try again. Stop living in the future. Er . . . Go on. You got it. It’s right there. So simple. So clear. So obvious. Oh! Der!! It IS okay. It IS gr

Jorts; even when she looks like a goof in jorts, I tell her, because I really mean it, “You are so beautiful, Babe, that I'm pretty sure whenever the sky gets a glimpse of you, he blushes, and that's what sunrises and sunsets really are.” “What?! What Instagram post did you steal that one from?!” she says. “That’s a Clint Haugen original inspired by traffic and the selfie you just sent me.” She is the most beautiful human to me. And she always will be. Even in Jorts. CH 8/1

From the soul, young man, It comes from the soul It’s in the first snow fall of the year There’s magic in undisturbed snow A white quiet blanket silences the world And everything feels so Still . . . It comes from the guitar A few notes A few lines And the world hopes . . . It’s in love, isn't it, son? All of sudden Poetry makes sense Music goes deeper Beauty changes The soul grows All because we found a hand to hold . . . It li

Give me a minute or two and I’ll tell you about the man from Mount Hope You see, he started as God’s biggest joke Sad, scared and all too aware His breaking dreams were stacking up Weak, anxious and broken The man from Mount Hope stopped hoping Laughed at Underestimated Hated The man limped through life, Head down, hood up, headphones in, Society didn’t make sense to him So he ignored them, Listening to nothing but his soul He dug a hole Down Down Down he went Alway

Our most authentic version of ourselves is never the comfortable version. How could it be? In this country, we are sold comfort in every ad we see, yet, no one is authentic. Everyone is comfortably uncomfortable living someone else's life. In a society that does their best to mold us to the collective will, how could our authentic selves be comfortable? How would that even be possible? . . . Where is the space for us to bloom? There is none. In psychology, they tell us th

“Empathy without boundaries is simply self-destruction.” - Random dude with glasses. Whoa, that’s a hard hitter, my guy. Take it easy on me. Don’t come at me with ‘destructive empathy’. Just let me be. I just want to be. Let me exist just like this, even if it is destructive . . . Shit. We can’t just be, can we? . . . I see. Everyone is a little wonky. But she still loves me . . . doesn’t she? “Someone punches a hole through your whole life and you crawl into that hole, sear

He always was supposed to love her shadow. One day we will shrivel up and become old. Our spines will curve. Our hips will ache. We will need canes. We will have to squint to read things. One day it will be hard to hear. And we will probably smell funky to the young people. One day our skin will sag, and the bags under our eyes will be so sunken in; they won’t even believe us when we tell them we used to be young and beautif

Today it's the violin that moves the pen And with my left hand The demons and darkness rise And with my right hand The light and hope Rage against the forever night Nothing is planned Everything is improv It all stays more real this way A spontaneous series of events Chained together Creating a human A human capturing a moment By cementing his emotion A grain in a hourglass Stretching out for eternity Hungry for immortality While being burnt out of from the day-to-day Di

The Willow watches the lovers make promises they can’t keep. And the Willow weeps. The Ponderosa wakes to the songs the birds preach. Old songs of two souls entangled fill their seeds. Planted deep in the earth lies the dreams we dare not speak. The sun sighs before she shines, And the moonlight lingers at the dive bar past closing time. The stars cry, shooting across the sky, wishing lovers had more time. Music transcends space and time and moves the hollow heart beat. Wh

Like a lion, I rip apart this cinnamon raisin bagel, before plunging my face into this coffee, lapping up the sugar and caffeine. I wipe the cream cheese off my face with my sleeve. The lady across from me looks disgusted. I reckon she’s never seen a free human before. The coffee shoots through me, so I pull out my pecker and piss on the floor. She’s never seen a free human before . . . I stand on the table and do a cartwheel, and I feel free— I feel like me. This is it, this

I’ve talked enough. I’ve said my peace. I am in pieces. I have to get the dark out of me. My own mind has let me down; It got me here and then turned its back to me. This is my fault. I did this. I thought myself into misery when I could’ve been happy. This damn pen And everything I imagine. I asked for love. I asked for someone special. I waited and suffered for it. I fought for it. I lost so much to get it. And once I finally had it . . . I pushed it away. I swear I am okay

I suppose we never do find our soulmates, do we? . . . But, only because soulmates aren't found, they're made by two people choosing to build something special together. What we’ve been looking for was always lingering inside of us. The magic is who we choose to be, not in what we feel. CH 9/7/26

Like a stone, We sink like a stone. Another rock at the bottom. It’s numb down here. Ghosts of what we would’ve been circle us. Unfulfilled dreams and promises haunt us. The Reaper hunts us. Time moves so slow. It’s cold. We never could live a shallow life, But this is too deep. We took it all too far. The masks we wear are cracking. The performance is done. The next act waits in the distance, unwritten. We threw our wishes down

Chapter 24 (Untitled Fantasy Novel) Someone started to pound their mug onto the table, chanting ‘speech’ with each pound. Soon, the whole room was doing it. Mr. Freedom popped up on a table, standing on it with a mug of ale in his hand. The room went still, no one moving or speaking, everyone waiting on his words. “. . . I asked a man once, “‘What is freedom?’” Do you know what he told me? He told me that freedom is mathematics because abstraction frees him from the shackle

“God will punish you by giving you everything you ever wanted,” he said to me. He was a retired boxing champ and he was sitting next to me, talking casually. I ordered a whiskey and drank it nervously. He was so damn intense. “God will punish you by giving you everything you ever wanted just to see if you can handle it—to see if you really want what you ask for.” “Huh,” I said, looking at my glass, shaking it so the cube of ice rattled around. “What we think we want in lif

Paint your dream house, that was the assignment for the group of kids in the small art room. My kid was just sitting there, staring at the wall. I’d ask him, “Do you want to draw?” and he’d just shake his head. “Do you want to paint? Do you want to do any art?” Nothing. So I’d go back to reading Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and wait. He didn’t move. Eventually, I set my book down and decided to try to lead by example. A house with Kaitlyn, in the country, with a flower