And then the quiet sneaks in again

I was not made for the quiet

I was not meant to sink slowly into the darkness of some corn field

I am to be seen and heard

Somebody notice me

At 3, I broke my leg
And again at 5.
This would cause my leg to be an inch shorter than the other the rest of my life.
7: My brother pushed me into a wall and cracked my skull
Somewhere near that same time, I shattered a pane a glass in my hands, requiring stitches
At 15, I thought it was smart to push a bag of broken beer bottles into a dumpster with my hand.

I set a car on fire hitting a deer at 70 mph, his antler coming inches from my lung
I fell asleep behind the wheel of my truck and totaled a mini van
I drove someone else’s truck off the road getting a new engine for the other
But it was better than the ice, the oncoming car, the gas main, or the fence post
I snapped the front axle of my rainbow Buick twice before I finally killed it
Each time, I walked away with just scratches

In 2006 I cracked 2 of my vertebrae taking a snow boarders jump with a sled
I sliced myself on metal tracks at one job
Even plastic containers have left their mark on me

I tore my ACL, trying to be stronger
(And because of that former leg injury)
And added a hernia appetizer

I earned carpal tunnel, trying to be brilliant
And just make more sense of all the broken

What hurt most were the 2 who wrecked my heart
Deeper and more scarred than any other pain

I am covered in little visible and invisible scars
The older I get, the more I collect,
The more stories I create

I did not slow with age
Just kept ramping up,
Making more as I give less ****
I am always littered with scratches, cuts, and bruises
Because I never stop long enough to worry about what damage I am causing

I’ve don’t bother with stitches anymore
I am held together with pure will and imagination
That old adage, “What happens when an unstoppable force meets and immovable object…”
I refuse to yield
Surrender is not the answer to that riddle

It’s to go around
I bypass
I imagine it doesn’t hurt
I find every other way

I’d rather keep going. I’d rather keep racking up battle damage
I go through my life with a sledgehammer
Knowing full well how many times it comes down on me

I am so very broken
I am always just barely holding it together
When all I want to do is fall apart
I keep putting the pieces back together
I am a maker
Filling in the holes with stories

Today, I walk with a lean, sometimes a limp
And ignore how often it hurts
My body is deformed and full of tally marks for every decision I have ever made

One day, my body will fail me for the last time
It will yield long before I do
All those cracks will finally show
And out of me will leak
All those stories
For everyone who helped me make them

Saudade (Portuguese)
Literally means longing
The missing of something that's always been absent.
A melancholic longing for an unknown (mistake) (nostalgia) that may have never existed

The Missing Moment
by Ryan P. Kinney

The Dress:
“I know she was wearing a dress, the dress. The one she never got to wear. Working 60-hour weeks on top of nursing school. I was trying to help her keep up her nightmarish zeal to be anything better than herself. I got a second job. I worked with her. I wasn’t enough. That night, she just wanted the dress and to drink and forget. But I was too tired helping her bend into the new shape she was desperately trying to be. I left. Fearing I’d be too tired to make it home, to get up in the morning for my other job. To be strong enough for her.
And I knew when I walked out, the mistake I had just made.
It was the night she broke. The night she broke me.”

The Answer:
“There is another missing one. The night I made the mistake of asking another her if she even wanted to be with me. Again, I knew my mistake the moment it left my mouth. Voicing the question already predetermined the answer. I spoke reality to truth. And once again, the void of timelessness swallowed me.”

My Sins:
“I miss them both.”

The road to approval is paved with rejections.

Original sin wasn’t the apple. It was the woman. It was *** and the fear of the power of creation.

Just because I’m lonely doesn’t mean everyone else has to suffer. I’m not out to punish the rest of the world for my mistakes.

If you keep bending her into what you want her to be, eventually you’ll break her

What if;
Those little specks you see flying in the air
When light passes though dust
Are all alive

What if;
They are all angels,
Gods,
Souls of lost ones

Echoes of our own thoughts, memories, ideas
Feelings;
Here, there
Forgotten, Cherished;
Never fully formed

Just made of all the bits and pieces
Of all the Worlds’ minds
Waiting for us to put them together
And make them real


Inspired by
the second iteration of FRONT International, a multivenue exhibition that embraces art as an agent of transformation, a mode of healing and a therapeutic process. The title is an homage to the 1957 poem “Two Somewhat Different Epigrams” by Langston Hughes.

Excerpt from Two Somewhat Different Epigrams (1957):
Oh, God of dust and rainbows, help us see
That without dust the rainbow would not be.

This friend of mine,
Like me,
Grew up on Lake Erie
Albeit a different part
He wrote of the significance of the beach break wall
That he’d walk along as a child, teen, budding adult man-child
And how it was there when his life changed
As the turbulent, always shifting water would crash
He’d reflect how it was nice
To have someplace to catch all that strife
Where he could just sit and ruminate

Where I grew up
There were no break walls
Instead, we had long concrete piers
Although some of the waves would break upon them
Mostly they just showered the violent acquiescence all over you
You either stood there and took it
Or learned how to protect yourself

As an adult,
My friend went back to his break wall
After so many years of navigating his life
He found his comforting thinking spot
Was still there
Still blocking the shore from being dragged into the lake
He remarked how his journey had come so far
From that awkward, mumbling kid who sat upon it
And how much of himself was still there
Still him, but not the same

Our lake was always there
But never the same lake twice

I went back to my concrete piers too
But they were no longer there
The years of being battered had shattered them
Until the township had to give up
And broke them into pieces

It’s kinda funny
Or is it ironic?
What they built out of them
A break wall

Not as neat as my friend’s
Ragged chunks loosely stacked together
Built out of the broken pieces of everything I once stood upon
Fought against

As I stood, marveling at the sins of the past
My son took my hand
And asked what I was staring at
“Well, kid, this was once something much prettier,
Much different
But I think it’s better this way
It was worth it.”

So, I would ask my friend
What would happen if he went back to his break wall
And it was gone
Life and time change even the most stoic of institutions
The next generation will always see the same differently than we did
Will what comes next be worth the price?

Maybe there never was a break wall
It was just him
Standing there
Waiting for the future to take his hand

May the power protect you
Because I pity the foo’
Who doesn’t freak out
When they hear, “Transform and roll out.”
It’s your move creep
Just another body on the heap
The power is yours
To understand that this nerd is *******
What I call Beast Mode
Is a transformation access code
I’ll generate way more than 1.21 gigawatts
Till I make your mind rot
Now, don’t you slack
Cause you know, I’ll be back

Here comes this serial killer looking creep
Thinking he's here for just a little peep
He just a little whacked out manic
Energy spurts come in an inconsistent panic
But I promise I'm an all right dude
Even though I act a little rude, but crude
I'm the leader who takes apart machines
Been my own man since I was fourteen
He's the maniac creator
Makes all the world his theater
In his head lives every world
Swirling around in a surrealist twirl
He's a trash picking racoon
Looking like a tin foil hat loon
Now here I go making another promise
I'm a monstrosity Frankenstein colossus
I build dreams out of your waste
Assembling beauty with a fever pitch haste
Don't ever doubt what I say
Even if it sounds preposterous and risque
I make some of the weirdest things
Meant to illicit grins from my deepest sins