(In which a man attempts to accept love and accidentally becomes a cow)

This is the story of a man named Stanley.

Now Stanley, you see, is not special. Or so he insists.
He has repeated this to himself so many times, it has become his emotional version of brushing his teeth.
A hygiene ritual.
A preventative spell.
After all, special people deserve love. And Stanley is not one of those. Obviously.

At least, that’s what he told himself.

But something curious happened on an otherwise unremarkable day.
A message arrived. A ping, to be precise.

The sender? A person so attuned to his internal wiring that she quoted the same poetic rhythm he'd dreamed up before he'd even written it.
She spoke of visions, alternate lifetimes, and uncanny recognitions.
She was warm, mercurial, mythic, and occasionally difficult to pin to one timezone.

"You feel like home," she said.
"Like I’ve known you across lifetimes."
"You are seen."

This would be the moment, traditionally, where the protagonist would feel relief.
Triumph.
A soft landing.

Stanley, instead, experienced a full existential system crash.
Because nothing short-circuits a trauma-trained nervous system faster than a sincere compliment without terms and conditions.

At this point, Stanley had two choices.

Option 1: Accept the genuine affection of this person, even if it made him dizzy.
Option 2: Doubt every word, spiral into recursive self-analysis, and begin drafting apology poems while comparing himself to her ex in a sport he wasn’t even signed up for.

Stanley chose Option 3:
Overthink so hard that time bends.

The narrator watched as Stanley flailed with academic elegance.

He questioned whether she was real.
He wondered if he’d invented the entire experience, perhaps as a defense mechanism.
He accused himself of being manipulative simply for existing in someone’s affection.
He cross-referenced their emotional timelines like a conspiracy theorist mapping red string on a corkboard made entirely of childhood neglect.

At one point, he tried to explain that her feelings were clearly mistaken, that she had transferred her affection from someone else and landed on him by accident, like a poetic game of romantic pin-the-tail-on-the-trauma.

"I just thought you'd be more… together," he imagined she’d say.

She didn’t. She said:

“I love you.”

To which Stanley responded, emotionally speaking,
by shoving his head into a metaphorical cow costume and mooing in panic.

And here, dear reader, we reach the hamburger portion of our tale.

See, Stanley had long been praised for his vulnerability.
His writing was raw, elegant, soaked in sorrow.
People wept over his metaphors.
They called him “brave,” which is generally code for “I’m glad this wasn’t about me.”

And then, one person came along
who didn’t want just the work.
She wanted him.

She didn’t want the processed meat.
She wanted the cow.
And not in a weird way.
She wanted the full, unshaved animal of his grief, his brilliant Stanleyce, his twitchy sense of humor,
his existential spirals and the way he tried to apologize for existing while still writing beautiful things.

Stanley, in turn, tried to negotiate this affection
by comparing himself to expired yogurt
and then emotionally ghost riding a milk truck off a cliff.

But the real twist?
She stayed.

Even when he spiraled.
Even when he glitched.
Even when he tried to convince her that she’d made a cosmic error in her romantic calculations.

She stayed.

Not because he was perfect.
Not because he was easy.
But because she meant it.

And Stanley, for once, had no script for what to do when love didn’t run.

He tried to write a closing stanza for the experience,
but accidentally wrote a satire about cows.

Because that’s what artists do when they don’t know how to accept kindness.
They deflect.
They perform.
They turn sincerity into irony
because sincerity burns the tongue when you're not used to swallowing it.

And still,
somehow,
the story remains open.

Because nobody is amused
by a stray cow.
But most people enjoy
a good hamburger.

And Stanley—messy, wounded, luminous Stanley—
was never meant to be processed.

He was meant
to be seen.

A lighter in my hand
Cigarette in the other

My mouth hurts like knives
And my stomach eats at my insides

The tiny stick catches flame
And smoke rises with my pain

I inhale the relief and waste
And whatever else it contains

It’s a tiny minute fire
Like my dying desire

To die in a six foot deep ditch
With nothing but my pack of cigarettes

And a busted overused lighter
I hope it catches my body on fire

When dirt covers my rotting corpse
And flora starts to grow

Don’t put a gravestone over me
For I do not have a name to be known

By the world the life and sun
It can’t get me anymore it can’t make me want to run

I hope flowers grow over my body despite the fumes
Like the smoke and soot that I consume

There's a
walk-in
dungeon in my head.
I go there to talk.

To the demons at my door,
the once I would implore.
But I just go to talk.

And I ask them how I
know them so well
yet so little about myself.
They say;
"Son look around you,
the flames they surround you,
you've been going through hell."

GUITAR CHORUS

A day,
or two,
running through my mind.
They said the pain would fade in time.
I should'a know that they were lying.
I should have know they were...

My friends, they're there, I know they care,
but through the pain I still compare,
their human flaws with the abuse
of a world that I once knew.

I have these complicated feelings
they unfurl in my chest
begging to be let out
I release them from the ribcage
with a pen and paper
my poems are their escape
it makes me feel lighter
like happiness can fill me
instead of the dark curling tendrils
of despair

In the quiet hours before dawn,
a weight settles, uninvited, unnamed.
Days drift in slow-motion gray,
each breath heavy, each step rehearsed.

I learned to dance with shadows,
To find rhythm in the void.
Smiles painted on a weary canvas, Laughter echoing in empty halls.

Then you arrived—
a burst of color in my grayscale world,
a melody I never searched for
but somehow needed.
A spark in my endless night.

And now, you're gone.
The weight I once carried so easily
has doubled, pressed into my ribs.
Have the shadows always been this dark?
Has the silence always been this deafening?

I thought I knew sorrow,
thought I had mapped its edges,
But this grief is sharper, louder.
A pain with a familiar name.

So I sit with this ache—
learning to breathe,
learning to carry this weight,
learning to cope
without you.