Dear _,

There's something that I'd really Like to say,
though I don't know how to start,
or if I even should.
In Fact, if we're being honest,
objectively I probably shouldn't;
because I'm worried it might
come off the wrong way;
or worse yet, get misinterpreted,
as something much more than it is-
simply a sentiment to share,
offered unconditionally,
as bookend to prop up a story
that we've shelved.

I AM going to say it,
so please pardon my intrusion.
I know that you need respite
from entangled inclusion in my
desperate emotionally confused conclusion
that a lifetime of romantic love could be hiding
just beyond the horizon,
and it's so near I can nearly taste
it but it's just out of reach.

So if you can wait for a moment,
just a minute,
or two,
before you walk away;
(maybe a day at the most,
i just need time hope)

I could run by the far side of the nearest horizon to see if it is
... and I'll bring as much
as I can possibly carry
to prove that it's there
and there's plenty to share...
on my way back home, to you.

(not my home obviously,
I'm just an wandering fool
who keeps falling in love
with anyone who can prove
that they feel for me
what i feel for them too.
Alas! It is true
you never did say
that you felt this same way
but thats fine
in my mind
i feel confident you
will eventually see I've got enough love for two!

See, my cup runneth over;
the well spring is new.
It flows as if endless
and collects in a pool
at the corner of my eyes
right on cue
when i think about living my life next to you.
So drink deep from this well
from which i am willing to share,
perhaps unsustainable as it may be
in the end.)

But if you can't ...
(and I know that you can't,
I heard you and believed you
but I can't just let loose
without at least trying
to hold on a few
extra moments to gaze
and admire your effortless beauty and poise
and your strength,
before inevitably the reigns are let go
and the horse I rode in on is finally released)

... i understand
and I can easily see that;
and furthermore
you were nothing if not perfectly clear
every step of the way
that this day would appear.
you already knew
you could not commit,
and i was fine with it then,
so I have to admit
that since nothing has change
in the tiny little bit
of time intervening;
that there is no reason for me to expect
that the terms are now different
or less circumspect
So I want you to know
there're no hurt or hard feelings
On my side of the street.
it was delightful to meet you
and spend the wintery-est storm,
the budding early spring
Snuggled and warm in your bed
and your orbit
circling around such a Beautiful view.

I see that you need to recover and reset,
and respond to the still recent personal upheaval
beset upon you by your last lover'sleaving;
that you need time to recenter
and refocus your vision
on your family, and steady yourself
both for them, and for you.
But Forgive me for how
this might sound coming out
- I do not Intend for it to come off rude,
to inspire regret
or review
of the decision you made -
but before I place the ball squarely back in your court,
and walk away from the dreams
I've dreamed of you,
I'd like you to know:
if you do come around,
and ultimately decide
you might like to try me
(and us) again in the future;
I'm open to the opportunity
and just waiting for you.
Obviously I can't know
what is coming down the line,
but if I'm here and still free,
I'll still be hoping to see
you coming back to me.
It might sound suspicious from a man
who appears as I do,
but I swear to you,
I mean what I'm saying,
and I hope you'll believe.

I'm not typically a man
of great plans or delusions
who sees his own future
and wishes it to be.

I've rarely envisioned a life for myself
that is calm and quiet and settled well down. However, with you,
from the moment we met,
I've been prone to romantic fantasies
And daydream of a life
made simple and steady and profound
by the sure hand of a woman
and A family of my own
and a home, (Not alone!)
with the laughter and noise of children at play,
and the comfort of knowing it will be there,
to stay.

Before -
I only ever dreamed of myself,
adrift on the sea, crashing
head-long into oncoming waves,
pointed towards god know where.
Far from land and from people;
solitary,
silent and weathered;
cracked like tough leather
tanned by the sun,
the salt air, and the suffering;
near starving and dehydrated,
quietly desiccating
On the deck of a ship at the helm
sailing endlessly off into
sea foam and brine
splashing up into view
with every sine-oscillating
rise and fall and repeat;
glad to be free
from the people I left
to watch from their widows walk
for the return of wayward man,
longing for their love, long lost to discovery, danger, distraction, and despondency.

Yet now, I've been given a beatific vision
of this life far less likely to be my destiny.
An adventure I never had fully considered;
at least, not with hope of it coming to be.
Perhaps once,
in some barren despairing moment
a half-hearted revery of a wife
and wedding and progeny befell me,
in madness, to lift from me some
unnamed uncanny sadness,
but never without the caveat emptor
of failing spectacularly,
or the derision of knowing
it wasn't for me;

... and this time I'm reminded
by one who knows me well-better than me
- who has suffered my love and still lives to tell - of my tendencies toward boredom
and desperation,
and selfishness of pretending that I can be still, when I know that I can't,
never could and never will.
When I asked her if I should tell you all this,
in response, She simply stated
(in no uncertain terms)
I should never be careless and wonton
with another good heart
just because I've been lonely
enough to promise anything,
even the impossible,
especially if it's impossible for me
to ready myself for the necessary drone
of a daily routine,
and of the imbecile's lust I constantly carry
for an easy end to ennui...

And all of a sudden
that tender pool breaks loose
and becomes a great river
and rushes right through
like a flash flood rising unexpectedly soon.
"Hell it just started raining.
It couldn't have been more than an hour or two.
How did this much destruction
come barreling through?
It was just ankle deep not ten minutes ago,
maybe fifteen, but ****,
how the hell did it already rise to the roof?"
Once water gets into the attic
you call it a wash and try not to watch
as the house starts to move
with the current,
downstream
a piece or two at a time
'til it finally lets go of its roost
on that hastily laid foundation you built
and you KNEW
you half-assed it,
its what you do:
you cut corners, take shortcuts,
and skip steps just to prove
that your smarter than everyone else in room
or the world or the nuthouse
or whoever it is you are trying to impress
with your witty repartee
and you smart-*** worldview
while you **** up the task
that they asked you to do.
Now look what you've done,
you stupid old fool,
you weren't paying enough ******* attention
while you were working on something
you don't know how to do.
Well you better get started on trying to fix it,
you know it might not still have all the pieces;
or worse yet, you'll finish
putting it back together
with what now seems
like more than you started with.
****** man, your seriously ******* this pooch!

Sometimes you can manage to salvage some bits
you can put back together
with whatever sticky goo that you happen to use.
(I like duct tape and super glue
but epoxy will do
even good old white Elmer's can prove
priceless in a pinch,
when you need it to stick quick,
if you got nothing to lose.
it's called field expedient,
when you use what you have on hand nearby
and you don't waste any time
trying to find the perfect solution,
you just stitch a quick fix to get you through
until you have enough time
to go back and re-fix it
with the right parts and knowledge
and a proper set of tools.)

Sometimes you can shape
those scraps
into whatever gaps
or holes ultimately show through
when you do finally manage
to get something done,
and have something to show
for all your foibles.
Sometimes they'll stretch a bit further than usual,
sometimes you gotta reshape the whole profile
and shave a bit here and there to remove
the evidence you ****** it up
in the first place
to keep up the ruse
that you knew what you were doin
when you told em you knew,
despite not having any ******* clue what to do.

Fake it til you make it
only works if you make it,
otherwise your just faking
your whole way on through.

And as you spiral around
outing fires you literally lit
and then wandered away from,
you often get lost and confused and forget
why you changed venue
and what you were going to do -  
so you're just vacantly searching
a burning house for clues
'til you get where you first had the thought
to move for whatever unknown reason
and then you remember
in flash as you enter the room
and re-see the trigger that set you in motion
but that summarily refused
to remain in your mind
more than a step or two;
so as soon as you walk through a threshold
its gone
like a ghost that can only haunt one certain room.

As you relight the fuse
on the sparkler that you
stupidly chose to use
as a torch to light your way
around the maze-like encampment
you constantly have to maneuver through
because you seem to bring it with you
wherever you go
whether you intend to or not,
and there's not a whole heck of lot you can do.

So instead making
these conflicting things a matter to consider
when thinking of me,
I've composed this letter to you
and now I'll seal it and send it to oblivion,
free of the burden of bearing
my lovelorn palpitations uncertainly felt
but certainly in need of a longer gestation
in the pit of my stomach
to see if I can stomach
the simplicity,
and the shattering specter of losing it all
even if I did give my best efforts
and try to do the good life honestly.

So I bid you farewell,
and bon voyage to me.
I hope you remember me well
someday long from now and think
back on our time together
ever fondly.
I know it was short
but for me that means more
it makes everything stand out
more poignantly.

Kind regards and true love,
though I never confessed that
and revealed the true nature of my feelings
to you - fortunately.

Smiles, Best wishes,
And lotsa hugs and kisses,

Love,
Yours Truly, (for now)
(but not later, not anymore)
(Nevermind, never say never)
(Yours forever)
(And a day)


Ps. This message is set for combustion
as soon as I finish rambling aimlessly.

Envisioned: 3/21/25 10pm
Composed: 3/22/25 6-10am
Revised: 3/24/25 12-4am
Published: 3/24/25 4:03am
Edited: 3/25/25 2:30-4:30
Destroyed: pending...

Much like Romeo,
with his yearning
and his poor-me soul,
my fickle heart
has led me astray
down a dark
and lonesome road.
Searching for
a certain door
beyond which I can find
the glint of cat-eye magic
I saw sparkle
that I've been chasing
this whole time.

The thing is, either I'm reallly wrong, or I'm REALLY right.
And I think I'm really right.
Yeah but you dont ever REALLY believe you're really wrong, so you really always think you're really right.
But I am always right. Every time!
I mean not... you are often right.
Right?!?
I mean... yeah...
You're right.

Everything happens the way that it should

[sometimes you just have to wait a bit to see,
but even bad can be good
if you give it room to breathe.
There's nowhere to look but directly at it,
and to face what's come be.]

It could not have happened any other way, because it happened the way that it did.

{You are who you are - and you did what you did - and you're the only place you can be; this the only life you live. There is no other you to compare yourself too. They are a figment. They do not exist.}

So you are where you are until you change something, kid. It is what it is. You get what you get, and you get what you give. 

(You want it different? Do it differently; otherwise, take it all for what it is: and either change what you need to change, or quit your ******* and settle in. There's Nothing to do about what you did. The choices made are set in stone, forgive yourself and start to dig.)

Often I've envisioned
The demise of man
And placed myself as patient 0
The vector of the plague

Pestilence on my finger tips and soars on my cheek, I stumble around and infect and decay and inoculate hundreds of people a day
I watch as the disease spreads and the ones you love die. And know it was my fault... at least in some Way.

And as we all slowly die, and join the wandering gangs, it's the ending we deserve for all our sins and disdain.

I was barely 21
when I ran with this older crowd,
(they were between the ages of 30-35,)
and I thought it was something cool,
something special,
I thought I was someone
real grown up and mature,
I thought age had something to do
with sophistication
so, I tried to impress them with Bach & Beethoven & Mozart
while drinking rotgut whiskey out of cheap tumbler glasses
because that’s what I thought grownups
were suppose to do
but instead they’d say,
“this isn’t that kind of party,”
and then they’d exercise their drinking prowess by guzzling down a whole bottle
of Rumplemintz and chasing it with a case
of Icehouse while blasting Screeching Weasel so loud that my neighbors couldn’t exist.
my forethoughts of adulthood had been marred by the stench of reality
and despite the headaches and hangovers
that paired with the morning sun,
I continued on anyhow,
matching them drink for drink
like it didn’t phase me
because I had something to prove;
I wanted to show them
that I was cultivated,
that I could hang,
that I was tough,
that I could run with the big dogs,
that I was all that was man,
(whatever that means)
all I wanted was their approval
that I was something
after so many years of being told
that I was nothing
and I wanted it to be known that I had endurance and stamina
but those addlepated simpletons were too vapid and clueless to notice the ****-stains
in their pants let alone what I was doing.
we were an odd pair, different yet the same;
we shared the same desirous need for intoxication yet our levels of class
were on a parallel universe.
but as time went on,
the framework of realization took shape
and I began to see they were just a gang
of losers with no place to go.
they used up my living quarters
as their party sanctuary:
people getting tattooed in my kitchen
people snorting coke in my bathroom
people ******* in my laundry room
people throwing up in my closets
people ******* in my living room
and it grew tiresome after a while.
so, I had to kick them out of not only my house but out of my life for good.
decades went on, I reached my 40’s,
they reached their 50’s,
and most of them are dead
but the few still living are more dead
than those buried in the ground.
they’re out there now,
enduring a midlife crisis
with bed-wetting regression;
peering down from the hills of nostalgia,
sprinting towards their
social media platforms,
losing their minds over
things they can not control,
smearing opinions around
like **** as if you asked for it
and gnawing away at the bars
of their enclosures for one last taste
of the honey, the pleasure, the folly, the glory
because they’ve become
embittered with world;
a world they hadn’t envisioned
a world they weren’t ready for
a world that’s changed forever
and after all the wild and lawless nights
and after all the rebellion against authority
and after all the broken glass & cigarette holes
they’ve became like everybody else:
unable to face the inevitable.