You soften your eyes
Trying to hide your resent
As I do the same

We’re going through a transitional period
trying to be good friends to one another
yet overwhelmingly self absorbed.

We got no time to think about legacy’s.
Our future takes cover from
the worry of the present
kicking the shins of our courage.

We smoke to forget
Drink to muster the drive to begin
Eat out of pots washed in
gas station sinks.

We collapse each moment into a screen
capturing scenery with black boxes
documenting life behind pixels and glass.

We thrive on uncertainty
Middle fingers up
to the system
that gives us shelter
that we exploit to find freedom
overturning the stones of a complex world
looking for definitions and characters
to call culture.

Our lives move in waves of unimaginable excitement and waves of crippling boredom. Long rivers of suffocating incompetence leading into a waterfall of rapid evolution. Each day rides on the back of a revolving barrel of emotions. No matter how much we learn, how hard we try, how many years we put under our feet, we will never find a path of permanent confidence, happiness or success. Perfection is a mirage luring us deeper into an endless desert. Don’t chase it. Even if you believe with all of your heart, in your bones deep inside—it isn’t real. It never will be, and never was. Our lives move in waves. ride them with style. Don’t sit there, letting them hit you. Don’t drown in apathy. Ride them all. Each time you will fall, but you can’t ride forever. It isn’t up to you. The ocean isn’t yours. But so long as you have a life, you have a choice to use it.

Though the first carried more miles, the second day of the hike was totally and unapologetically uphill. 
When you ascend, hiking becomes the zen of endurance.



First, you are stripped of all the pleasures of hiking. Your excitement is boiled into lactic acid. Your love for the trail is baked, hardened and dehydrated into thoughts of laying down in the sun until the heat shrivels you into an unconscious raisin.



Try as you may to put on your “isn’t hiking just a slice of heaven?” face, strangers passing you on the downhill stride can only see your “PLEASE GOD, HELP ME OR ******* **** ME” face.

As much as hiking really is a small slice of heaven, there is no denying the living-death of taking 10 straight miles to the knees under the chaffing hell of a 50 pound sack in the relentless sun. 


But when you’re back in an office, sitting on your cushy little ergonomic chair, you long for the sweat and the torture that forces your mind to the ankle deathtraps of mountain terrain. To the deep valley behind and below you, and the crystal basin at the foot of the granite Giants.



The worst thing you can do is ignore the pain—that makes it relentless. Instead you focus on the pain until you become it. The only thing left is the moment between each step, when you remember why you are here and what it is worth. Every time your foot touches dirt, it leaves twice the footprint. One on the mountain and another in your memory where you will safeguard the misery of your ascent and hold on for dear life. One day, when your knees are too weak and your body can no longer table your pack, all the pleasures and joys of the trail that you once thought dissipated in the steam of uphill toil will come rushing back with the magnified strength of every year between you and the present you once knew and respected enough to actually live.

And if you didn’t, if you let it only be pain to get through and not to focus or dwell on, then that is what it is and will always be. A dull memory of pain, dark and somber and incomplete.

The new family dog
sits at the table
with sugar in his cereal

I talk to him so he won’t be lonely.
I ask him how his day was.
He looks at me
through his brown dog eyes
sitting in the chaos
of a hallucinatory disease.
I sit at the sidelines
of gradual Death.

I babysit him on weekends
and even from the shore, i can see him
on his island
chasing the tail
of dissipating thoughts.

He wasn’t always a dog.

He had a big bushy afro.
And a truckers moustache
that got him attention from the ladies.

He managed an automotive parts franchise
and travelled often.

He owned twelve of the worlds finest tobacco pipes, and
smoked *** out of all of them.

He married the love of his life
at 19 years old.
When the doctor told them, she would never bear children.

But he watched
four boys become men.
And only two were adopted.

He became a grandfather
and every passover, he sat in the throne
of a kingdom
he built.

His grandchildren
loved him
unconditionally.


When he tells me these stories now,
he sits behind glass, where he watches the kingdom.

Without him.

Sitting at the breakfast table, I want him to know:
I love you, I can’t help you.
I love you—
Goodbye.

In Algonquin, before the dawn
before they’re clouds, the fog rises
tucked under the echoing loons
above the fat smell of wet soil
before the day becomes day
before you are a person
and the light of day breaks
the green sky casts a hue
incubating the lake
until life becomes life
until you become human

In the hollow space inside the soul
It is the universe and the atom.
In a space of good fortune and rebirth, so close to death—
It is present moment and past; divine and crippling; boundless and mortal
Golden with ecstasy and layered in the decay of sorrow  
For a brief moment we are able to see it.
Silently we stare at everything that is
Nostalgia already dripping from every moment
pooling at our feet in the regret of lost time.