The night shifts tectonically
but is only registered
by dreamers on the edge
of waking and song birds
filling the sycamore
with their sounds of alarm.

Was I ready for writing or was writing ready for me?

Time shifts in on itself,
ties up temporal connection,
in between now and then,
one in a series of self-returning
Gordian knots that keep me anchored
to this life I appear to live.

There was a time I sat in thrall of, this may be a time I am still not done with, this may be the time I most need reason seen through cause I never cared enough to bleed to…

I spent some time in the deep dark south. Not the South you’re thinkin’ of. It’s not that far from the scattered metro lines of New York or Pennsylvania, Maryland or Delaware. Not far from Virginia either, by way of the crow-flies. That being said, it wasn’t truly the South in any sense, being the tourist mecca it was/will be/never was that it always has been. Still, its position, roughly 38.9889° N, 74.8198° W, puts most, if not all of the island of Wildwood, NJ, below the Mason Dixon Line, effectively rendering it a part of the South. One could argue the fact that the Mason Dixon line follows the southerly contour of Delaware in its progress East, but, then one, as a good Northerner, would have to admit it to the Union, or, as a good Southerner, would have to decline the tax-free shopping. Either way it’s a lose-lose scenario. And so it remains, for the sake of simplicity, in the South (Read: I don’t feel like erasing.).

The bastard butt-dialed me back. It was weird, because I had been street-view googling our old house after looking up the Lat/Long of Wildwood, and suddenly, the bastard calls. Now I’m listening to a voice mail of his cab-fare talking about McDonalds, Seattle…

Now I’m back on the pale horizon, grim shuttlings looming on the unforgiving posts, doomed arrivals we swore we wouldn’t speak about until after their fetters were gone, and yet were slipped, letting go the massive missives that whirled their worlds away into fattened droughts of pernicious liquor; age-old, Esteemed Offendee.

Those were times where I dozed, then dialed awake for a strong minute, then fit myself back into seas of depression and inward tides, flowing unceasingly till the next low hit. Then, I’d ebb out again, a world swimming in myself, and the strange fish-creatures, with their dripping carcasses arrayed, layed out for their sunbathing, cooled, and escaped.

I came to writing, probably, for the wrong reasons.

Like so many fish stories, it started with a girl. A girl and a notebook and some idea of a path that wasn’t as well-tread as the rest. Maybe that was a mistake. It doesn’t matter.

She was a cutie and I was a kid with a lighter, a pen, and a book stuffed in my pants, ready to prove that I knew how to use each in its turn. We figured it out in our ways and those ways came together, so to speak. (As it turns out I wasn’t a good enough lover to complete that specific double entendre.)

In any case, she dug me, and I dug her, and our digits dug into the sand that first time our lips met beneath the rising sun on the cool sand, that first morning we spent together, forever entombed in walls made of terrycloth wine bottles. Such a long time, eons before I met her bulldog father and rain-washed mother later that morning, whole evolutions behind the swell of time that it took us to rise from that newly dawned beach to walk the block and a half to her hotel to send her off, the morning of her last day in paradise. That day lives in infamy, in subjective fantasy-land, in the hole in my heart where first I bore a startled seed. That day was dead upon breaking, and yet, I knew it was the start of something that I could never really control, something I would only ever own in complete surrender, something I should only ever lap at, like a parched and sleeping dog dreaming of water.