"It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things." -Lemony Snicket

For all its ostensible simplicity, death is complicated for those of us who have yet to experience it. And while I appreciate Snicket's sentiment, coping with loss is not always this straightforward. It is not always possible to merely readjust oneself after the painful shock of losing someone we care about, simply because some relationships transcend illusory misstep; there are some people who are more to us than just the empty space through which we navigate and which confuses us and makes us feel silly when we realize that there was never really any reason to worry in the first place, and that we are going to be just fine.

In much the same way as realizing we've tripped over a non-existent stair, it is always uncomfortably surprising when we lose someone we know. It's a feeling akin to being suddenly and aggressively shaken awake from some mildly enjoyable, but generally monotonous dream. Like we couldn't have predicted as much, as if it were some exotic and unfortunate illness that only ever happens to people in newspapers. And whenever we are made to confront the painful yet obvious reality, it forces us take a step back and reevaluate things.

It makes us think of the deceased, and how we must readjust our view of the world to accommodate their absence. And yes, many times this adjustment amounts to nothing more than a brief moment of miscalculation and confusion. But there are some times when this is not the case, when the loss of a person causes an unmistakable and lasting difference in our lives. There is a rare and special closeness with certain people that some of us are lucky enough to experience, and which at some point causes us to unconsciously realize the verity and significance of these people's existence.

There comes a moment when a person ceases to be merely an imagined phenomenon, and forever becomes an integral piece of the staircase in the multi-storied building of one's life. The people who ineffably and eternally changed us; the people who inadvertently etched themselves into our framework and forced us to recognize their inextricable realness. These are the people for whom we do not become only momentarily disoriented when they leave. When they stop existing there is one less step, a permanent gap in the staircase. And no matter how much time passes, no matter how well adjusted we become, it will never feel quite right skipping a step, making the unnatural lunge over the empty space they've left behind.

I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table. I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of a vulture. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the ***** whale, and the ***** whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see.

I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.

I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world.

I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.

I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday.

Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.

Life will never end when you are in it.”

They’re really rockin’ in Bradford,
Off the Pennine Way.
Deep in the heart of Yorkshire
And round the Robin Hood’s Bay.
All over South Ossett
And down to New Farnley.
Roast beef and Yorkie Puddings,
God’s Own County, Yay!

Yull see ‘em rambling at Ilkley,
Right to the county line,
Sheffield steel and Wednesday –
A football team so fine.
Better still, Leeds United,
Greatest club of all time.

Yorkshire, Kings of Cricket,
Oh what a boon!
Get down that wicket,
We’ll be champs by June.
Down a ginnel or snicket,
See our Olympic Champs.
Coal Miner Picket,
Relight those lamps.

Racing pigeons and ferrets,
Stereotypes tha knows.
Over t’top in Lancashire,
Them there’s our foes.
We’re the greatest county,
Our pride really glows.
We know you all hate us,
It keeps us on our toes.

So we’ll be rockin’ in Yorkshire,
What more can I say?
Us Tykes 're as barmy as Barnsley,
So I’ll be on my way.

Paul Butters

(With due thanks to Chuck Berry and also The Beach Boys)

We writers are insane.
All of us.
We revel in our own sad mess
While picking green grapes
Off the wallpaper,
Smecking away like mad
At the wondrous juices
Of the imaginary, judicial
Forbidden Fruit.

We, like Hemingway,
Take our scotch in the morning
And our gin at night
And try with brutal, lashing effort
To make it through
Everything in-between.

We have put ourselves in shoes
We will never be able to walk in.
We must walk miles as
Linguists, as
Assassins, as
Outsiders, as
victims, as
AIDS sufferers, as
Brutalizers of women.
We must deal with their pain
As if it were housed in our own entity of being.

J.D. Salinger wrote that
His literary son, Holden,
Wore a “people-shooting” hat and
Made it **** clear that he suffered from wild
And erratic fits of overwhelming depression.
Writing from a bunker
Far from his wife, kids and home,
His stories sparked ****** in the hearts
Of already oppressed men
With “people-shooting” hats of their own.
We must toil with language;
Put it in the corner,
Love it, hate it,
Shift it and slave daily with it.
We must lose hours upon hours upon
Days of sleep
Before we find ourselves
Dangerously asleep at the wheel in front of us
In order to make the slightest change in our regular ways.
Even then,
Our handwriting only becomes sloppier
And our words,
Only fiercer.

Kaysen, alone in a psych ward
With women who slept around and
Tried to maul each other,
Wrote diligently
To try to release the the demon
Boiling the very blood inside her veins.
But demons do not disappear easily
And unfortunately,
Neither do the tortuous memories.

Even today,
They attempt to label me
With words of the disturbed.
Anxiety
Floods my synapses and neurons.
Depression
Happily urinates on my serotonin levels.
I bring myself to write
The effigy of the ******
Day by day
As my pen scratches paper
And the doctors expect razor to scratch skin
Though it never has
And never will.

Writers are psychos.
We all are.
We remain the mad, psychotic, literate monsters
Who worm our ways
Into your head.
We nestle beside your dreams and fantasies,
Waiting to strike
And tear them apart or,
If you’re lucky,
Build them up.
A woman writer named Sylvia
Once put her head in the oven
Because the writer-demons were driving her to madness
And they wouldn’t leave her be.

Handling us is a torture
Only the most eloquent and experienced reader
Could enjoy.

Love Always,
Salinger and
Plath and
Kesey and
Vonnegut and
Burgess and
King and
Sandburg and
Snicket and
Hemingway and
Palahniuk and
Kaysen and
Gaimen and
Green and
Trumbo and…

Holtry.

"Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night's sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too."

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 6, 2017)

This is a man who literally counts his dogs.
This is a man who knows geometry and trigonometry,
      casually.
There exists in Alabama a hedge maze of this man’s brain.
This is someone concerned about time trails and sun dials.
This is someone concerned about IPCC reports and drought.
This is a man who would literally sacrifice his skin.
This is a Shirley Jackson story.
This is a Lemony Snicket story.
This is A Rose for Emily.
This story will one day be a movie, no doubt.
The half-glass proverb was not a metaphor to this man.
There is a man in every town who shouldn’t be made to want to leave it.
Who tells his story?

They’re really rockin’ in Bradford,
Off the Pennine Way.
Deep in the heart of Yorkshire
And all round Robin Hood’s Bay.
All over South Ossett
Down there to New Farnley.
Roast beef and Yorkie Puddings,
God’s County Yay!

Yull see ‘em rambling near Ilkley,
Right to the county line,
Sheffield steel and Wednesday –
A football team so fine.
Better still, Leeds United,
Greatest club of all time.

Yorkshire, Kings of Cricket,
Oh what a boon!
Get down that wicket,
We’ll be champs by June.
Down a ginnel or snicket,
See our Olympic Champs.
Coal Miner Picket,
Relight those lamps.

Racing pigeons and ferrets,
Stereotypes tha knows.
Over t’top in Lancashire,
Them there’s our foes.
We’re the greatest county,
Our pride really glows.
We know you all do hate us,
It keeps us on our toes.

So we’ll be rockin’ in Yorkshire,
What more can I say?
Us Tykes're as barmy as Barnsley,
So I’ll be on my way.

Paul Butters

(With due thanks to Chuck Berry and also The Beach Boys)
© PB 2\5\2016.  Slightly Amended 14\4\2023.

The smell of fresh summer peaches fill the air,
a willow tree blows gently under a sunny abyss.
Silence fills the caterpillars cocoon and here I lay under the moon.
Hot night, soft breeze, smell of whiskey underneath the trees.
Crops are a grow'n' and the farmers fiddle sits on the hay.
Bonfires, beers and roasting fish on a smear rod snicket.
In the distance the scare crow stands tall and strong to protect the farmers land.
Animals squawk, hibernate and lock themselves in for a winter cold coming ahead.
Snowflakes fall, warm stew to be made by mom, morning comes, cup of chow time to relax with grandpa Jo.
Seasons pass and Spring is here at last,
muddy puddles, ***** feet, time to plant more growing seeds.
Life is beautiful, so is time, make it right and you shall find,
the touch, and warmth of every goodnight

Around 2008- Momma and I move into a rental house. I want to paint my room pink. She says no. I'm anxious at night and can't sleep. I memorize the creaks in the floor.

Around 2012-I take a wheel throwing class in the summer. The red clay hurts my hands. I mess up a perfectly good ***. It looks prettier that way.

Around 2003- I yell at the people I see smoking. I have just learned to speak and I wrinkle my nose into a coil, running around shouting "Ashes mom! Ashes!" I didn't just mean from the cigarettes.

May 27th, 2001- My family waits expectantly to see me. I curl myself into a smaller little fist. I don't come out for another 2 weeks.

Around 2009- I'm in a play of the 5th Harry Potter. I haven't read it. All the girls want to be Luna Lovegood. I audition because I don't know any other girls besides Hermione. I get the part. All the older kids tell me how jealous they are. I read a book upside down.

September 2015- I'm disappointed in the car. I think I've lost my earbuds. Mom whips the car around. Her face is very red. Her voice rings in my ears. We soar over the speed limit and she isn't looking at the road. I think we're going to die.

December 2008- We go to Paris for Christmas. We eat dinner on a boat. The engine blows out and something catches fire. We are stuck for 4 hours.

December 2015- Mommy tells me we stayed in a hotel that was the headquarters for the ****'s during World War II. I don't feel well about that.

Spring 2013- We go to Gulf Shores for break. I go in the ocean even though I come back blue. We visit a war fort. I fall in love with the grass and the sea.

Summer, some time ago- 3 little kids ask me how I exist. I tell them it's an operation. One responds "Like getting your tonsils out?" No. Not like that at all. My tonsils feel terribly large.

Around 2009- I pick up a book by Lemony Snicket. I make my mom read all 13 books aloud to me. I sleep through half of them. I still don't know what happened to the Baudelaire children.

June 3rd, 2015- I leave my home of 9 years. I think I'm sad. It happens too fast to remember. When did we grow up? No one answers. I don't cry like I thought I would. I mess up the one hug that matters most.

Some time in 2004- I can't sleep. I'm too nervous. I climb up the bars and sprint down the hall. My parents decide it's time to get me a real bed.

Some time in 2009- Momma and I move into our own house. I'm infinitely anxious at night. I warm my clothes by the heater. I memorize the creaks in the floor.

Spring 2014- I go to gymnastics on a Sunday. I do 50 back-handsprings in a row. I jar my brain and end up in the hospital for 5 hours. I suffer migraines. They ask me why I haven't taken my tonsils out.

High on the cliffs above Lake Lachrimose
Lived a dear old woman taunted by ghosts,
Some of her present and some of her past
Hoping that each episode would hurry by fast.
She could not bring to terms of her dear old Ike
Who died by the leeches, gnawing alike.
He went in the water too soon after eating
and soon became a memory that is any but fleeting.
But now she meets Olaf, spoken in lie
He promises pearls, but soon she'll die
by the same way Ike did, eaten alive.
(Based off of The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket)

What does it mean
To be a man
Or a woman
?
Does a man
Become less male
And more female
If an accident reminiscent
Of one Lemony Snicket
Led to the removal of
One ugly piece of flesh
?
Does a woman
Become more of a woman
When the internal organs
Begin reproduction
According to the textbooks
?
Which part of
You is wrong
When there is a discrepancy
Between brain and ******
?
Or is there greater beauty
In uncertainty and ambiguity
As liberal and conservative admit
In humility, that
In truth
“I don’t know”
?