I have done many exceptional things in my life.
I have traveled to far-away worlds with effervescent seas.
I have fought alongside rebels and mutineers: against oppressive dukes and deities.
I, so vividly, remember the times I danced on the tops of skyscrapers. Thereafter howling at the moon with my fellow gypsies. But more than that, I remember the gentle laughter of friends.
I remember the soft hands of those I love on mine, while the sunsetted on an entirely unforgettable day.
I find my grandest adventures after the sun has dipped down out of sight, and the moon has risen to illuminate my so out of focus world.
I find them as I’m hunched over in my bed.
I find them as my fingers are trembling over the keys of a laptop; the glow of the screen burning in my eyes.
As I rip post-it notes full of ideas off my walls and mesh them together, I become some sort of enchanter; thus beginning yet another journey.
Although I may have not truly gone on such adventures, the feeling would remain the same if I had. Because, as I’ve come to realize, the truest of grand adventures starts with simply a single blank page and the desire to tell an earth-shattering story.

I have always been in love with you
Though I've never seen your face
Rivered streets and thoroughfares
Cathedrals and marble shining glaze
Burgundy, sunsetted copper walls
Slanted clay tiles that shine like flame
Thick lushes of emerald'ed halls
Weaving into arcs of grape'd frame
Vineyards pouring over daykissed hill
Wine as red as dye and rich as gold
Flesh of bread, warm, at corners spill
Into the walks where it is sold
Dear Italy, my love, you torment me
Slipping your fingers 'round my heart
And all I have is pictures yet to be
And hope that we shall not long be apart

This is life?
Starting the journey
with a rough beginning,
carrying a turning mind
within a sunsetted body,
some kind of a self.

And this is the self?
Carving through life,
carving through the body,
on the streaking journey
into the mind?
It's a beginning.

Or something like a beginning.
I'll pick up this self,
clean out this mind,
baptize a new life.
Go on a long journey,
remodel the body,

the aching body
right as it's beginning
to stray from the journey.
Guard the self
against life.
And the mind,

be careful with the mind,
more than even the body.
Because this wild life
is only the beginning.
The roles of the self
change so much on the journey.

No, plural - the journeys.
Likewise, the minds,
and the many selves
you'll have. The bodies,
the beginnings,
the lives.

Because the body and mind
are always beginning. The self
is a journey. That's life.

The king of what was stands in silence
and surveys his sunsetted realm.
His spine is straight in stiff defiance
of the twilight of the kingdom he’d helmed.

On a plastered pedestal high he stands
surrounded by the waste of his times.
Carved into it, once acclaimed in his lands,
was his name, now covered by vines.

The pale sheen of low sun as winter nears
casts shadows across his etched face.
Its grooves grow deeper year after year —
he’s the gnomon whose shade this sundial has traced.

He takes no note of the thorny brambles
that have entangled his fixed stony feet.
With flinty gaze and wrapped in a mantle
of granite, he keeps watch through storms and sleet.

Now stripped of his titles and even his name,
the proud king of the ruin’s still there.
For while the long night has broken his fame,
still he stands, marked by his unbroken stare.