How much of what we write versus what we truly think and truly feel is true? How close do these things run in parallel? How often do we lie to ourselves for the sake of presenting ourselves more human in the eyes of our peers than we really are?
  How many truths have I forged to seem less animal than I truly am?
  Do I do it on purpose, or am I just as much a victim as the public who reads it?
  Where do I really begin once my ego ends?

Drunk to the point where I can't stand and still the feeling of missing you holds more president than standing. I'm not certain that I was built to sustain this existence in your absence, yet still I try to go on, all the while, watching unfit humans start anew... Watching the dealers and the ****** turn new leaves over in the wake of the new lives granted to their care... watching the parents of future presidents pace the halls of their wallpaper-peeling abodes, smoking and drinking and swearing and cursing and hating while the greatest gifts that God should ever bless them with cry out in the dark not ten steps away, unnoticed and unloved...
 Life is unfair, little one and Death, Death is unkind... why has he not come for me, come to ease the isolation of my broken heart, which beats in maddening defiance of my broken existence...
You are six now, and life is growing ever closer, threatening to clamp it's jaws around your jovial throat, while she teases me with release... I have missed so much. I will miss so much more before there is an end to my suffering, yet still I must soldier on... On towards a fitting end that I can only hope awaits me. On towards the end of pain and the balm of eternal rest, for I have not SLEPT in years and I have not LIVED in lifetimes... for I have missed all of yours... yet I wish, nay, pray, to go no further...
 Your life and your happiness keeps me sustained and moving forward, all the while haunting me in every waking dream...
Live, my Angel. Live for yourself and to keep me alive.
I love you. God's speed and good luck, good night and sweet dreams...

I have intentionally tried to fill the hole inside myself that your smile holds, my sweetest Angel. For that, I am ashamed. But there has been only the feeling of emptiness residing in that cavern since last I looked upon your smiling face and held you close to my heart.
The sun has risen and set, the seas have ebbed and flowed, the winds have blown, hither and yon. Yet, still I stand, unmoving through all of it, for the pain of not having your tiny hand in mine has left me cold, battered by the waves and fossilized by the sands carried upon the winds.
My eyes have withered from too many unhappy tears and nowhere near enough tears of joy, made all the more optically diuretic by my inability to look upon your face as you run and play and sleep and dream.
I am sorry, my truest of Loves, my Only, that I have chosen to ignore these feelings of longingness for so long. I could touch the pen to paper a million times, writing odes to your face and sonnets to your smile, but the distance that I feel has forced me to lull my heart into a coma. I have intentionally medicated my heart in an attempt to stop feeling (to stop all feeling), yet I cannot.
I feel the sunshine on my face and I pine to see the sun’s rays dwarfed by the radiance of your dwarven smile.
I feel my heart hang so low and wish against hope that I could pick you up while you raise me.
My soul cries out to replace you, yet my heart is merely attempting to survive. My soul screams for only you and the chance (nay, privilege) to shield you from the fears that cause you to scream in the middle of the night.
Why have I chosen to harden my heart, my Love? Why have I allowed myself to stifle my screams, when in all truthfulness, I only dream of easing your own?

Why do I insist on looking for solace at the bottom of all of these bottles?
I know full well that nothing in this world, nor in Heaven nor Hell, can fill the small, Gavyn-sized void in my heart and in my soul, yet still, in vain, I try to drown my misery in the suds and decanters of inebriation…
I have dreampt of you twice in the last week. That is more than my dreams have been graced by your countenance in the last year. Each time, upon waking, I have been found with a smile, painful in its hope, for waking brings the end of the dream. I spend my time chasing dreams, for dreams are so much more hopeful than the reality that my sleeping brain awakens unto.
In these dreams, I have seen your face, heard you laugh and cry and call for me. Seen you run and play and question, seen you witness the sun and the World. I have held you in my arms and felt you wrap yours around me.
This alcohol numbs the sting of this unreality, for when I awake, it is in the sobering arms of loneliness and longing and emptiness. My heart beats for you, and in your absence, continues to beat, labored and heavily.
Every fiber of my being cries out for you, every second of every day. I see my failure in the smiles of children, in the hands of Fathers and Mothers and Children entwined, for mine clasp only the pen or the pillow, the bottle or themselves.
I want to heal the pain of this world, yet I cannot find inside myself the focus to care for anyone other than you or myself, nor the capacity to heal your world, or my own.
My hope continues, beaten down and suffocating, yet alive; the hope of the ******.
Whilst ****** I may not be, the excommunication from you is damning…
Am I dying, my Angel?
…Maybe.
Or am I just not living?
Try as I might, I cannot find the answer to this question. Perhaps, it is both. Dying while refusing to live.
For there is much to live for and much to die from.
Yet, my heart beats and my hope, my hope screams in whispers. Because of you.
I love you, Sweet Angel. With more than I ever knew that I possessed. These unshed tears are nothing more than unsung songs and unpenned verses in your name.
Sleep sweet, my love. Don’t forget to say your prayers. Daddy will be here when you wake up.

Friends, strangers, empty-men. Lend me your fears...
People ask us why we keep these pages. Why we cling to these words. Why we hold on to the pain that we felt in these snapshot moments of time.
The answer may not be simple, but the real truths seldom are; we are holding on to the hopes that kept us going in the darkness.
We all pen our words to express our deepest selves and to expose our darkest corners in the hopes that one day they will help someone. And secretly, we hope they will save us.
The following poems were written for my daughter. Today, she turns six, and, while I am still trying to live my life in her absence, I hold strong to the hope that one day she will read the words on these obscure pages and know that I have loved her more than life itself from the first time that I held her tiny frame in my arms. And that the same tiny frame has continued to make my world spin round and kept the garden of my eyes damp through the droughts of longing.
Maybe, one day, she will stumble upon these verses and know that I was thinking about her. Know that my heart has been with her, always. These words were not written to make me feel better, except they might make her feel better. Maybe one day, these words will keep her.
Happy Birthday, my sweet angel. These simple words are only for you. Blow out your candles and may all of your dreams come true in time...

... or, Smoke 'em If Ya Got 'em...

You can't argue or reason with Life or with God; you can't call it on your own terms. You just have to call it in the air, accept it as the chips fall...
The moon would rise over the obsidian roof, but until it did, there was just the black sky and the matching shingles...
It's easy to believe that there's no hope when all that surrounds you and all that you can see is darkness...
While the light in you says that it can't be dark forever, that the moon will come, and with it, the light...
But knowing and believing are two completely separate things when the only light that you can truly see comes from the cold embrace of the Winter Hunter...

And then, just by chance, you step back. One step, two, then four. And the moon becomes visible through the leaves in the trees and over the eaves of the roof.
It's then that you realize that the only thing that separates the light from the dark, the hope from the hopelessness, is just four small steps... and the limitless perspective that lies within.

Like most writers, I like to think that I know everything there is to know about the relationships between people and the way they interact  when, like most writers, I just make it up and really know nothing about the way it actually works.
We always want to show the characters that we create as completely independent entities but we can never create someone who isn’t inherently us, or a version of someone that we know. I cannot write a heartfelt male that doesn’t struggle with his own morality or fear or self-doubt because that is what I know; it’s who I am, and it’s who my characters always emulate. My own worst enemy and my greatest companion.
I watched my mother chase after my father for 24 or so years. All she wanted was his love. His attention. She just wanted to be his friend. And I watched my father grow more distant with every “Please,” more interested in his hobbies or his career. In himself. But she never stopped, and I don’t think she ever would have if he hadn’t found in someone else what my mom was looking for him to find in her.
These are the people who taught me my first lessons about love. They showed me that love is not give-and-take, not a two-way street and never equal. Love is an unbalanced scale, a one-way lane, where one person gives everything while someone else takes even more.
And, try as we might, we all become our parents. My relationships are one twisted form of this or the other. Trying too hard to win the affection of someone who takes or selfishly ignoring the adoration of someone who gives.
I don’t know how to tell the truth. I have grown up hearing that honesty is the best policy and that lies are the Devil’s gate inside, but people have never truly shown me what it is to tell the truth. My father never once, in all those years, said “I am not happy.” Instead, he showed me how to repress. To push the truth down and cover it over with gravel and cement. A foundation built on un-truth is a foundation built on lies. My mother never told me that she was unhappy with herself, insecure and depressed. Instead, it was all clichés and self-diluted hope through unexplained tears. Rose-colored glasses over watering eyes.
So now, I am able to see the beauty of the world in the mundane or the tragic, but I am also very untouched by it. I don’t know how to feel happy. I don’t know how to be angry. I don’t know how to grieve. I don’t know how to ask for help when I need it because I almost never know when I need it. I spend my time telling myself that everything is alright and it is just my perspective that is flawed.
I am bound by my fears. My mother left my father to try and start a new life for herself. My father left my mother and did start a new life for himself. But my mother hasn’t found anyone else and my father is miserable. One made no decision and the other decided and went for it and neither one have found any more happiness than they had when they were miserable. I don’t see how I can avoid that fate. So I continue to make choices (or make none) that leave me continually unhappy.
I have a daughter that I cannot have. She lives on the other side of the country with her mommy and a man who is not her father but is her daddy. While here, on my side of the country, I am daddy to a little girl who is not my daughter. I love her but I resent her for something that she knows nothing about. And as much as I dream of being her daddy, I cannot commit to her for fear that I will leave her without me.
I am constantly plagued by my morality. I want to do things (or not do things), but the morals that were instilled tell me that those things are wrong (or that I need to do them whether I want to or not). So, I try to live piously, holding firm to the ideals that my heart was founded on, and fail. Because I am a human, and humans were beasts before they were civilized. I live a life that is torn, tortured by wants and desires and captive to what is right. It has made me cynical, and I doubt very much that it is possible to exist happily as an optimistic cynic.
I know it sounds like I am trying to blame my parents for the way that I have turned out, and by rites, I guess I am. At the same time, I haven’t mentioned any of the things that make me, in spite of all of this, a pretty great person. But those aren’t the things that I have qualms with right now…
I am uneasy with what I know. And even more-so with what I do not. Knowing may be half the battle, but not knowing how to win is the harder half…