I can't help but wonder what you will remember of me.
That's every man's fate, isn't it?
To become a scrap of detail that snags or escapes a stranger's memory,
Stuck in a grate in the floor where it fluttered, discarded,
Or lodged in a permanent frame, dusted off every so often
to be a reference point
or to be a defining moment.
It isn't up to us how we are remembered -
- what is a rainbow to the blind but a refreshing mist on the skin?
And that's why we obsess: we have no control,
hard as we try, contour, conceal, and coordinate.
And that never stops us from trying.
But for a moment, consider this superpower that others will never have:
You can remember them.
You can't escape yourself, but you can remember them.
Will you remember them kindly? Will distaste be tattooed in your mind?
The things that are going to happen will happen.
And we can act according to how we want to be remembered.
But we cannot change it.
But our remembrance cannot be changed either.
It's a little spiteful optimism, isn't it?

The biggest struggle
I have with the concept
Of death
Is that one day I’ll die
And leave some
Piece of writing unfinished.

The kingdom rejoices
The prince has found
A maiden to marry.
But she wasn’t the first.
We all know the story
About the innocent
Young girl the prince
Fell in love with and
He is a hero because
She is telling the story.
She doesn’t know better.
He loved another, you see,
And she who would have been queen
Gets shuffled off to somewhere quiet.
Told to never tell
And left to obscurity.
That was their mistake.
Princes are born,
Born into privilege
Born into power
Born into position
But queens are made.
Made from steel
Made from secrets
Made from smoldering ashes.
They are royalty of themselves
In whatever domain
And they rule.
The point of this tale is:
The kingdom threw away a princess
But they made a queen.
Long may she reign.

She held a hurricane
inside her heart.

And yet,

They wondered
why it rained.

Once upon a time,
I knocked on the gates
Of paradise and asked for a secret.
Saint Peter said to me,
"Live boldly, youngling.
Evening stretches on
Longer than the daylight."

Awake again, I smiled
Because I had indeed
Been given a secret.
But it wasn't what old Saint
Pete had told me.
The secret was
That I already knew
And I smiled anyway.

I watch the sun and long for the moon,
Endure the night and crave the dawn.
Their eyes were watching God,
With their minds upon themselves.
Angels newly fallen from heaven,
Climbing onto a shelf as ornaments.
We scream for progress in one breath,
Then lament the past with the next.
Give me your burden and your blame
So I can pass it along to someone else.
Give a man a fish to feed him for a day,
Watch him steal one tomorrow morning.
Go with the flow, take the easier road.
Get what you want in the moment, but
Never satisfied for longer than a heartbeat.
Take no risks-life under an outcropping
As wilder spirits dance in the rain.

In loving memory of Kurtz's last disciple:

Welcome to the circus,
A three-ringed show in
The center of the dark.
In our multifoliate arrogance,
We seek out a familiar face
And forget to turn on the light.
Fumbling by touch,
Grasping at straws,
When faced with the truth,
We crave the lie instead.
Each and every one of us
The architects of our own catastrophe.