I have unfortunately been broken,
Though I am certain that
has been an over played card;
It still happened.
Over and over again.

Love became a myth.
Family became war.
Friends broke my heart,
and even though the fire
in my heart almost went out:
It didn't.

That was two years ago,
when I was only an after image
of life experience that belonged
to everyone but me.
So I decided to live.

Maybe not the right way at first.
Maybe the fear and loathing in my own heart
led me away from everything that ever mattered
so that I could remember why they mattered
in the first place.

I remember walking across
the bridge with my best friend.
Sending cryptic messages
that change was coming.
I don't think he understood what I meant
that cool evening.

I started my journey into myself alone.
Many times down the path I thought I wouldn't make it.
But at the end of everything, I have come to understand
Myself and my existence. I even made friends.
Though the journey is far from over,
The miles ahead will be on new soles.
Maybe even a new soul.

Because it's only after you lose everything
that you begin to appreciate what is given.
This is progress.

god bless america
and the free men shackled
in chains we deny ourselves to see,
and bullets that cloud our vision raining rivers of blood
that we wash off at night so we can sleep in peace
because we'd rather not believe that bad things happen here,
that a black man can be shot down because his blackness was too suspicious to be ignored,
so let us pledge our allegiance to silence
let's hold our tongues
and maybe we'll survive this corporate jungle,
and live the American Dream


A L Daniel

Train 85 leaves the station and bursts into the blinding sunlight with a surreal suddenness. Below, to the left of the tracks, a field of wheat sways as though still under a summer sun. Golden-brown and lively in spite of the snow resting at its roots. The blinding sun hangs high, glimmering on the water. It gives me a headache. I try to ignore it.

Ahead of me, the laughter of two young people fills the car. I wonder if they are strangers, engaged in conversation just minutes after meeting. I wonder if they have the same destination, if they are each equally happy to be heading towards it.

To my right, across the aisle, a woman no older than fifty talks loudly on the phone about her father’s tumor and the biopsy that will soon determine if it is cancer. She sounds optimistic, and I am happy for her. I tread lightly on the thought that maybe her loud optimism is a front. I want to be happy for her. But in an hour I will get off this train, and if her father dies, I will never know.

The woman sitting next to me returns from the café car with a Dunkin' Donuts coffee and takes out her laptop. I turn down my brightness so that she can’t see that I am writing about her. Even though I write nothing bad, it feels like some sick invasion of privacy.

My fingers feel heavy. This train feels heavy.

I want to be outside, before the sun sets, while the golden-brown wheat is still bathed in light. The sun is going to set without me. I try to be okay with that.

The last time I ever wrote on an Amtrak — the last time I can remember —, it was a song about loneliness and self-destruction. It was more than two years ago. I want to be able to say that I have changed more than I actually have. But even as the world rushes past me, snow and wheat and house and sun, I still feel impossibly lonely. The heaviness from my fingers is in all of me now. I can’t shake it.

The young people ahead of me, the woman across the aisle, and the woman next to me all begin talking at once now, and I feel hot. Their words bounce back and forth off the walls, and I need to get off of this train. Receiving these airborne snippets of other lives feels wrong, feels overwhelming.

Anyone who reads this piece will think I’m insane.

The woman next to me stops speaking. The young people ahead of me quiet down. The woman across the aisle is engaged in some other conversation that I can’t exactly make out. It’s quieter. I might still break the windows of this train if I could, but it is quieter. My fingers feel a little less heavy. It is quieter. At least the insanity is in words now.

I think my problem, in relation to last year’s writer’s block, is that I wish to write about me, and I wish to write about the world, and I’ve been waiting all this time for these things to extend beyond you. It’s as if I had been waiting for this poignant moment where someone—anyone— would announce that my life could begin again, as if continuity would seamlessly occur once the halt in time had pursued for long enough.

What a shock it would be to discover that the world waits.

(It doesn’t.)

In this time, I cut my hair and I let it grow. I looked in the mirror, hair falling halfway down my back like velvet drapes, keeping the sun out of my space and solitude, and I felt the power slipping away from my body. I knew that I needed to find a way to hold on to this power, one that was rooted in my own flesh and my own vision rather than yours.

(I did.)

I don’t get as lonely when I see crowds or busy streets or lights that remind me of you, drunk and obscene — laughing with your head thrown back, eyes glimmering like the Vegas strip. We slipped into an intimacy that, in retrospect, was simply me having a first-time love affair with myself. No hands were strange hands up until this point— no hands except my own. Trembling against my collar bone, realizing that what you gave to me was a home to live in. I look up. No ceilings, no roof, just space. The wars, they’re far away from here. I look up, find my power. It’s been here all along.

Resting in the unclenched fist, in the phone that remains unplugged on the bedside table. My power is in the hand that brushes the inside of my thigh, my power is in forgetting how to say I’m sorry when I’m less than quiet, when I forget how to bite my tongue. I keep looking up.

Blissful starry skies,

Atomic wasteland,

Wonder and boredom live side-by-side.

I am in you. You, in me. Open those velvet drapes you used to hide behind, child-like, curious but afraid of your own flesh, of your hot temperament.

The Sun goddess is rising in the East, raining on the wild seeds of May. I, body of water, offer myself to a new seed, grow like the deciduous plants of the Northern world, a whole forest dizzy from bliss and impermanence.

Thank you for visiting.

You checked my pulse
If I slept too
Silently.

April doesnt hurt here
Like it does in New England
The ground
Vast and brown
Surrounds dry towns
Located in the dust
Of the coming locust
Live for survival, not for 'kicks'
Be a bangtail describer,
like of shrouded traveler
in Textile tenement & the birds fighting in yr ears-like Burroughs exact to describe & gettin $
The Angry Hunger
(hunger is anger)
who fears the
hungry feareth
the angry)
And so I came home
To Golden far away
Twas on the horizon
Every blessed day
As we rolled And we rolled
From Donner tragic Pass
Thru April in Nevada And out Salt City Way Into the dry Nebraskas And sad Wyomings Where young girls And pretty lover boys
With Mickey Mantle eyes
Wander under moons
Sawing in lost cradle
And Judge O Fasterc
Passes whiggling by To ask of young love: ,,Was it the same wind Of April Plains eve that ruffled the dress
Of my lost love
Louanna
In the Western
Far off night
Lost as the whistle
Of the passing Train
Everywhere West
Roams moaning
The deep basso
- Vom! Vom!
- Was it the same love
Notified my bones As mortify yrs now
Children of the soft
Wyoming April night?
Couldna been!
But was! But was!'
And on the prairie
The wildflower blows
In the night For bees & birds And sleeping hidden Animals of life.
The Chicago
Spitters in the spotty street
Cheap beans, loop, Girls made eyes at me And I had 35 Cents in my jeans -
Then Toledo
Springtime starry
Lover night Of hot rod boys And cool girls A wandering
A wandering
In search of April pain A plash of rain
Will not dispel This fumigatin hell Of lover lane This park of roses Blue as bees
In former airy poses
In aerial O Way hoses
No tamarand And figancine Can the musterand Be less kind
Sol -
Sol -
Bring forth yr Ah Sunflower - Ah me Montana
Phosphorescent Rose
And bridge in
fairly land
I'd understand it all -