sometimes memories can make anyone seem alive no matter how long ago it was.

Way too often I find the child within this overgrown shell. He hides in the crack in the slab.

                      Longingly he stares back at me with those deep blue eyes and smiles at me  -  as if he knows who I am inside.

                                     Who I really am.
                                             Who we really are.


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              It burns in my eyes.

He just stands there, looking at me. Then he reaches out his hand toward me.

                                         I awake alone.

- Shepherd, 1-12-20

I stand at the flagstone fountain in the park and gaze across the street at the red brick bungalow where I lived as a child. Am I supposed to intone something? Summon a spirit? Or perhaps I’m the one who’s been summoned? Ghost of myself.

Set into the steep hillside, the house faces west. A boarded-up plate glass window makes it blind in one eye. In the summer, from that window, I watched postcard sunsets. I also learned watching there that the world was TV.  You watched it. It didn’t see you.

On the opposite wall, on a sofa, our family watched on a 15 inch portable Sears black and white with the collapsible rabbit ears men first walk on the moon.  We welled with pride in the space program. I ate Space Food Sticks and drank Tang.

Around to the side, behind the rose bushes, through that small basement window was my bedroom when I was 10. A tiny square of sun on the brightest summer day was all the daylight that ever got in.  There I first felt inside the base of my spine a small hard coldness. The night before, my three best friends had slept over to celebrate my 11th birthday.  Tonight I was alone.  The coldness grew.  It tendril’d into an icy tingle that radiated up my spine and through my arms like a metal cage of disappointment.  

Years later I learned the name of depression. But then it was just  cold inside my spine. And the cold spoke to me. “Davy, this is how it’s gonna be. It’s just you and me. Make room.” “You’re wrong,” I said.  “You’ll see. I’ll meet Ruby Tuesday.” I turned up the transistor radio and pulled the music close to me.

Through that bay window just above, the dining room table, my father and draft-age brother late on summer nights had it out over Vietnam.  

“Immoral, unnecessary, we should not be there,” my brother said.
“You know what happens if we’re not there?” says dad. I was in Korea. When the communists took over, in came the guys with the clipboards. Anyone who spoke English or taught school or owned a business was lined up against a wall and shot.
Yeah, well, we should not be … dying … bombs…bloodbath…reds.

Drowsing I no longer heard the words, only rising and falling pitch, a duet of bitterness, anger, wistfulness, probing for connection And into the night as darkness took hold and the voices merged with the rising and falling rhythm of cricket sounds, harmonizing like sleep.

Everything pales in comparison to the nomothetic voices of the past. We flail and grasp for the tugs in our hearts hoping to capture inspirations heavy hand for the long while. Meanwhile our other hand struggles to cling to the past while. We endeavor to create the perfect alchemy in discovering the ways in which we can use the euphoria of our past to create the prospects of our future. Our hands are torn apart. Time is short. We lose the world we encounter to every fleeting moment. We reminisce and reminisce and soon the moment blindly pattering on our insides is gone. And she becomes nostalgia too.  Stop trying to extract the contentment of the past and realize its fullest in front of you. Realize every moment. Be mesmerized by its Singular beauty.

Love always stinks u in an inappropriate time,
Making u a prisoner of someone else reminiscence.

She mourned in the end
not for the man he became
but for the boy that was lost

he chose the path he walked
the man he became
the boy he forgot.

the last rays of sun
refracted through the window
paint the girls’ skin
a faint honey gold

dusk is upon
she sits at the table
brows furrowed

as her mind wanders
to those sweet days
not occupied
by cares

Familiar isnt always good.
Familiar could be hands reaching out from loose cherry stems your tongue couldnt tie fast enough.
Most days its the name that doubles as the lump in your throat--
how in a busy underpass of faces
it begs to be called.
Love, darling, dances uphill if thats where it needs to go.

Maybe we’re meant to fall inlove,
but maybe we’re not meant to stay there.
Not when I had practiced
loving you by seeing how long
I could stand keeping my palm over
an open flame before moving it away.
Not when my knees had always kissed
the gravel just to make you stay.
Not when loving you
was synonymous to being in a car
that never gets any closer
than five minutes away from home.

And people--
people would move lightyears through space just to
catch a glimpse of the person they love in their orbit.
But one day I drove my car back to the city
with the passenger’s seat empty.
And more than the hurt
I was alone but I knew I was going to be okay.
Those places and faces of where you had left
your breadcrumbs
were nothing but a warm and familiar blanket I could
free myself from if i wanted to.
(If I wanted to)
And doesn't that sound like honey gliding onto your tongue?
But the truth of the matter is
everything familiar
makes me recoil with a single touch.
But it does not hurt to aspire a little bit of healing
its just that ive been having trouble deciding
who i should heal from;
you or myself.
That night
when you slow danced me in the room,
we were off beat
and our feet couldnt quite get the rhythm right.
I didnt know at the time
that that shouldve been a warning.
You were all too familiar
but you were supposed to be a passing breeze
and thats all you were ever meant to be.
You were not love.
You were something familiar.

when i was small, i would stare up the banana tree in my front yard.
it was
high, and i thought it would never end
growing past the clouds, into the sky
when i was eight
we moved to the united states and
i waved goodbye