M. G.,

It was years ago in the A-frame,
beside a cold bachelor's lake

that was clogged with reflections
of raving burst-headed trees,

that we laughed as Jake threw up
the Genesee river in the midnight sink.

When you caught your breath
you told me how you had traveled,

how you'd found a woman and gone to her,
it was the most you'd ever shared with me.

But this letter cannot reach you, friend,
because Jake just told me that you died.

My head fills with the numberless times
I drove by your long-lawned house,

or knocked beers in a rampant yard
while fires fractured dull dark.

I consider that love is a terrible thing
when I see what it's done to my friends -

it didn't rise as sweet slow dough,
it wasn't a shyly signed valentine -

it was a Petri dish of troubled sleep
that bred malformed dreams;

it was a crocodile's jagged jaw-drag,
it was the dross of unwise prayers.

Well, hell: let this letter remind them all
of that barking laugh amid the stray pines

as Jake birthed a twilit river from his teeth.
Your Friend, Evan.

It’s hard to meet someone serious at college. Everyone’s busy,
self-centeredly grinding away at their dreams. So much so that
people tell you to not even try (especially as a freshman).

I was mostly at ease with myself—as a freshman. I had an
excellent skincare routine—it was downright luxuriant, and it
kept me going, through that romantically baren and lonely year.

But we humans hope—we buy lotto tickets to dream on—though we know the awful math. We Gen Z’s seem to have our own unique brand of loneliness, born of covid and Internet-age experience.

My romantic expectations, sophomore year, were low—ok, unmeasurable.

Looking around was depressing. There were socially awkward STEM majors, jocks, frat men (sure the world’s laid-out just for them) and ‘CSOM Bros" (business majors more interested in parlaying my Grandmère’s money than me) and the elusive, emotionally reserved, ‘regular guys.’

But the unexpected can happen. We all know how crowded campus coffee shops are—the students move in and out in tides as noisy as the real, salty ocean. And then there you were, a rumpled, 25-year-old doctoral student—from another world—asking to share my table.

The loudest thing in that room was your sense of stillness. You seemed to be a new and distinct species, and as we talked, you seemed to somehow smooth my anxious edges. After a few meets, the thought, ‘I really like this guy,’ seemed to have its own gravity.

We somehow managed to thread the ‘too busy to care’ dynamic, and as time went by, you helped me channel my absurd, fiery, pastel-painted, first-love, early-twenty girlhood heat into something longer lasting, deep and authentic. Congratulations! It’s been two years.

Separating now, would be like removing the salt from the sea.
.
.
Songs for this:
Playing House by Kudu
So Much Mine by The Story
After Last Night by The Revlons

My friends used
To always be around
Good times, bad times
It didn't really matter
Every day was a new
Exciting adventure

Fast forward 10 years
Our group is scattered
All over the world and
We've become merely
Memoirs to reminisce
On my insomnia nights

When I die sweet child of mine will you think of me?

She sat there.
Mother of mothers, alone, isolated.
They left, all colors gone.
She had to stay here now, they decided.
We are too busy they say.
I understand.
Like in the beginning.
You’re born alone and you’ll die alone.
The former with many tears and noise,
the other with one tear in silence.
Had a busy and happy family life, a blessing it was.
I know.
But see, a beautiful creature, watching me.
An angel.
Can you believe it?
I’m talking to an angel dressed like a chicken.
But I’m grateful for everything.
I have a roof over my head
and a bed to sleep in.
I’m healthy enough.
I miss them that’s true.
I will pray for them.
Their time will come too.
We all grow old.
One day they will be me if they’re lucky enough.

Always treat the elderly with kindness and the respect they deserve.
Don’t isolate them.



Shell ✨🐚

LA burns, smoke blackens sky,
people flee and abandon cars,
90 and 100 mile an hour winds
feed and fan the flames, people
losing everything, even being
rich, or famous cannot save their
big homes and life's possessions.
Someplace in that expanding,
raging inferno my son, an Oregon
Fire Chief leads 300 Firefighters
and their 75 engines and water tenders
over 900 miles south into the fire storm.
Along with firefighters from other
states. Mutual support needed & rendered.

One of my son's firemen is his own son,
and my 21year old rookie grandson
with a little over one year on the job.
His seasoned father has fought many
battles with all kinds of fires, he set to
retire in May after 30 years on the job.
He has seen it all, with never a scratch
or a "singe", but my grandson has never
experienced anything of this magnitude,
being one of a 4-man truck crew battling
side by side in the belly of a raging beast.

All these 30 years I've worried for my son's
safety, now it starts anew, for our boy barely
a man that now walks in his father's shoes.

I will not sleep well until they are all
home safely. I grieve for the victims
of this awful tragedy.

Could leave this world peaceful and shriven,
Be glad somehow those old debts of mine
Must now be ledgered and forgiven.

Watching loved ones work their sad old days
The land of death now beckons and sobers me
Enough to think I will follow in their way;
And to consider how I might leave free.

Of more than the sins Jesus has taken,
And more than payments owed to friends.
No, how to leave a sweetness unshaken
In my loved ones, my wife, and my kin?

I think I've some letters I need to compose,
Some arguments I've held too close to me,
And any odd embroilment that rose
While I was on my earthly power spree.

I'm 65, a scant ten years from average death
Of men my type and height and weight.
I'm sobering quickly as I count my breath
And know re-calibrating cannot wait.

These halls seem somewhat hollow
A certain sense of sorrow
Now graces ancient stone.
Replacing familiar faces
With defaced family paintings
And cold ancestral bones.
Thrones thrown upon a pyre.
Fate becomes the folly
Tomorrow the unknown,
The brows of time are furrowed
Past spent, lost, or borrowed
Flowers forever bloom alone.
Rats, the last lords of ruin
Rule cruel shadows from the walls.
Twilight sighs at daylight's rise
All seems dark till darkness falls.