lead my skeptic sight.

words can't explain what happened.
but words are all I got.

some folk might see a waste of time in 'em.
they don't look past the surface of things,
too busy with the What to find the What For.

power.
there's great power in words.
don't need no dragon blood to know that.
the shapes a mouth makes can lay a body low
or set a flame to a kindled fire, even on the coldest of nights.
they can call down salvation and glory
or lash a heart like a cat o' nine.

yeah. words got power.
but they got no say in the matter.
can't help what they are, words, or what they do.
ain't but futile devices, noises and nothings.

unless they got a voice.

and sometimes

This is how I broke your heart.

-----------------------------------------

I wrote about you once before, almost exactly two years ago. You remind me of autumn, of red leaves and frost and lingering, lengthening evenings. (Your smile says more of summer, of brightness and warmth and daylight. But I never knew you then. I never will.)

So I wrote about forgetting. And I did my part. I just didn't account for yours.

-----------------------------------------

It was your eyes, mostly. You never looked at me, because you knew what it would do. But I held you close that night, your golden curls woven through my fingers and your lashes on my cheek. And I kissed you, and I looked.

And you didn't look away.

Here's the part you don't know about: My heart broke first.

I couldn't bear it. Because I saw beauty there, and kindness, and the shaping of a helpless joy. Like a dying man in reverse, I saw the rest of my life flash before our eyes.

And I knew it didn't belong to me.

-----------------------------------------

So my heart broke. It grabbed my tongue and wrested words from it, words that even now I cannot comprehend. I will not. They are too painful to consider.

They did the trick.

-----------------------------------------

You have a new heart now. You need one, of course, to shine as brightly as you do. And as your helpless joy is shaped by another, you must be brighter than ever.

I broke your heart to save mine.

I just didn't expect you to break it again.

if you want to know what it's like
then don't go to bed
learn how to cook
watch the red and the blue
and share your joy with the dawn alone

sleep in the sunlight
and travel at twilight

speak to all you read and never see
give your words away
and take them from those who know you least

see your love before you
and name its beauty
and never hold it again

close your eyes
and listen to the light
listen to the warmth and the cold
and the pain and the impossible
and clench, and cry, and burn, and shine
because you don't know how to stop.

it's like that.

I went to the theatre alone.

I kept the ticket in my pocket. I didn't know what else to do with it. I had bought it on faith, and that didn't seem to be enough, but I clung to it anyway, if only to prove to myself that I tried.

I went to the theatre alone, but I met myself there.

I had stood above the entrance, looking down at the bright-lit tree and the bright-faced people and the wintering city outside. I wore black and wine and I sang. I was good.

I entered the theatre alone, but I met others there.

I took my seat on the wrong side, examined my ticket, and sheepishly moved down the row. I stood to allow the young couple passage. His hair spilled over the tops of his ears, and her shoulders glowed with beauty. The ticket's empty seat sat between us, a barrier separating life from life.

I sat in the theatre alone, but I met the drummer there.

He hammered out beats with stick and brush and hand and wrist. I could see him better now than then; the days of a decade lay in the grey of his hair and the size of my waist and the eyes of us both. But we traveled, he and I. We were younger and we were older and the music was the same, ageless.

I closed my eyes in the theatre alone, but I met her there.

I was a fool. I was out of my depth, and she well knew it. I just wanted her close, and I didn't know how to tell her. I was bumbling, honest, desperate, fierce, shy, strong, loving. And she leaned her head on my shoulder and the scent of her entered me, filled me, warmed me.

I opened my eyes in the theatre alone, but I met the song there.

I have forgotten the music. It used to fill me like her scent, but they both belong to others now, and I can only look on, absent, as they live on. But I saw the name of the song, and for a moment, I remembered. And I held the brass, deep and vibrant, in my hands again. And I expelled breath, and polka dots appeared, and I moved my fingers, and moonbeams shone. And I sighed, and was glad.

I left the theatre alone, but the song goes with me. I hope it never leaves.

A strong late summer breeze met his face as he opened the door. It passed between branches and shook leaves with a firm but gentle force, and he welcomed its embrace as he walked down the path, avoiding the fallen, shriveled plums that littered it.

He didn't know where he was going -- only that he felt like driving. Most nights that was enough, especially when it was by choice instead of by necessity. He had read somewhere that, if you stood at the South Pole and faced away from it, every direction was north. This was like that.

He plugged in the device as he settled into the driver's seat, turning the volume up. An electric guitar melody, rhythmic and thrumming, began to spill from the vehicle's speakers. He rolled down the window and sat for a moment, enjoying the feel of the wind. He turned the key. The engine quietly roared to life.

He'd have preferred some company. He thought about the friends and acquaintances he had allowed himself to lose as he drove. He thought about the times when he could have asked any number of companions to join him on a quick run to the fast-food joint or the gas station or the 24-hour grocery store. He now made these sojourns by himself, and sometimes that was okay but sometimes it wasn't. He wasn't sure which kind this was, but he allowed as how it might be a third option: he felt lonely but enjoyed feeling it, like stretching out a muscle hours after a long run. The soreness was sharp but pleasurable.

He turned the volume up louder.

"Tonight bright stars
Are shining for you.
Oceans and big clouds,
Deep midnight blue."

He pressed the accelerator and thought of the day when he would sing that for her.

He cradled the boy in his arms, feeling the softness of his cheeks as they listened to the band rehearse. Any son of mine, he thought, had better learn to appreciate jazz. And bluegrass. And Chopin. And good music in general. He turned the boy around to face him a moment, their noses touching as he regarded his father seriously. Who cares what he likes.

He deposited the boy in his grandfather's lap and walked across to the ladder where she was hanging decorations. She smiled down at him as he climbed up each step until they were face-to-face. Her arms snaked around his neck as her eyes, green as an ocean, locked onto his.

"I love you," she said.



He opened his eyes a squint. It had gotten dark. He fumbled for his phone on the nightstand next to him to check the time, then rolled over and closed his eyes again. But hers were gone.

He once heard it said that every plan was a tiny prayer to Father Time.

Maybe that's why he didn't make plans. He and Father Time were not really on speaking terms. He preferred to think of the future only as much as the present required him to. It made the connections he didn't form, the friends he allowed himself to lose, the life he saw others living but that he could not find himself, all seem easier to bear. If he made no grand design for the next month or year or decade, then no matter what happened, he would always be surprised. Pleased. Content.

The truth was, he had no concept of the future. Perhaps he lacked the mental acuity to envision it. He could not conceive of any existence other than the one in which he presently found himself. To pretend otherwise was silly, fruitless, puerile.

His possessions, however, told another story. Stacks upon stacks of comic books, their covers creased and worn with repeated use and travel. Novels of brave deeds and biographies of braver ones, of heroes and villains and those that refused to join either camp. Stories of far away lands and dangers both real and imagined. They draped the walls of his room in wonder.

Yet as he read, he never pictured himself in the places of the characters. He had no part in such adventures; he was an observer, not a participant, not even in imagination. The journey of his life, he posited, must surely be better than the ones of which he read. Because it would belong to him.

And any minute now, his ship was coming in.

you once wrote about how you use crutches.

Not, like, metal things
that help you walk.
I'm talking about

flaws
excuses

the things you point to when things go badly.
or even when they don't.

you have this idea
that you could fix everything
if you wanted to
which makes it easy not to bother.

you cling to that
you wrap yourself in your shortcomings
so that if you fail
you know why
and how.

it makes you feel like
you can control something
even if it's something bad.

but I've got news for you.

you can't fix everything.

you will fall.

you will not be better than everyone else.




but you gotta try.

i just saw
a picture of your face
an image i once envisioned
every time i closed my eyes
it left me gasping for breath
drowning in the memory i made

and i remember your scent
and how it lingered on my clothes for days
and i remember the songs i wrote but never played
and the thoughts i thought but never spoke
and the life i never told you i wanted

and i flail in the flood of you

the you that i dreamed

the you that did not exist

the you i will always love.

I haven't written here in a while.

It's not that I haven't had things to write about. I could have, if I forced myself. But forcing myself has never been a way for me to produce my best writing.

My best writing always seems to strike when I least expect it. She likes to sneak-inspire me, clutching me from sleep and pulling me close in an embrace of words until my brain is buzzing and my fingers are shaking as I type.

Writing without that never seems as good. I guess I miss her when she's gone. And she's been gone for quite a while.

-----------------------------------

I have a small black notebook. It's partially filled with old, incomprehensible scribblings from when I served as a ward clerk. But it also has a few verses, random lines of thought, moments when inspiration didn't clutch at me so much as brush past me on a busy street. Many of them come from the creative writing class I took in college, an entry-level course I considered somewhat beneath me (call it curse or blessing, but I can produce iambic pentameter as easily as breathing) but which had a greater artistic effect on me than I anticipated.

The notebook, which I used to take around with me to school, to work, to church, now lies mostly blank. I take it out and look at it sometimes, but she doesn't seem to live in there any more.

-----------------------------------

I had a dream a couple of nights ago. I don't remember much of it now. I wrote seven words on the back of an envelope on my desk when I woke up: "Bookstore scene. Star Wars book. Holding hands."

I think she wanted me then. I think she was trying to reach out to me, trying to tell me to get my fat ass out of bed and come to her, trying to give me a gift that I'm not sure I deserved. At least, I seem to have refused it.

I wanted to write about that dream, and that scene. I wanted to narrate it, to flesh out the characters and emotions a little, to try and describe the comfort and love I experienced in that small gesture of taking a woman's hand in mine and knowing, somehow, that we were feeling and thinking and living the same thing at that fictional moment inside my head.

I think that's about as close as I can come tonight. Maybe that's close enough for now.

Maybe she was the one holding my hand.

If a dream is a wish your heart makes, then my heart is seriously messed up.

Either that, or I've been watching way too much Buffy.

You know what, it's probably both.

If what I can sense with my senses is all there is to life, I'd be pretty unhappy.

I do more than see, touch, taste (too much of that one). I think. My boy René got that one right. And I feel. And you will never tell me that the things I think and feel are not valid, that they can be callously tossed aside or ignored or treated as anything less than what they are: proof of Life, and More Than Life.

Sometimes I have these moments where... I dunno, they're not out-of-body experiences... but they're just moments where I realize that the me I see, the meatsack in the mirror, the biped with the opposable thumbs wearing the Green Lantern t-shirt -- that's not really the Me I am. And I feel like Me is looking out through my/his/our eyes and everything becomes not quite there, and Me is just inhabiting me for a little while before moving on to someplace else. And then it suddenly becomes too much to take, the idea that I'm living this life on behalf of this other organism that is fundamentally identical and completely different and I think, if I could just get out of this me-ness and see that other life, just for a second, that I would change everything forever.

And I know that has all sorts of religious undertones (or other implications regarding my sanity, or lack thereof) and that's really not where I'm trying to go, exactly. Smarter people than I have got this sort of thing down to a science, quite literally -- several of them, in fact.

But I'm still here. And I still feel. And most days that's enough for me.

Henley knew it, and Madiba learned it.

I am the captain of my soul.

I'm driving tonight.

It's a little after 2am.
I drive past the coffee shop, the one that always seems to have people sitting outside late at night if the weather is good, and since it's mid-March the weather is getting much better, and I wonder (as I always do) how late the shop stays open and what the people there talk about and how badly I would stick out if I ever tried to go there since I don't drink coffee and I don't socialize late at night and I don't do well in large groups.
I drive on.

I pass train stations on my left and fast food on my right.
I get to the bottom of the hill and start up the S-curve, the one that I usually take a straight line through, crossing and re-crossing the lanes at will because there's no one else on the road.
Except tonight there's someone else on the road.
I guess it's you.

I stay in my lane and you stay in yours.
Actually, you stay in yours for a little while, then you merge left into the center lane, closer to me.
You are a silver Kia and you have soft, unobtrusive headlights.
You seem to match my speed, staying just behind me on my right, as if you did not want your presence to be known, as if you were trying to stay unnoticed, as if you wanted me to notice.

We pass through intersections.
We pass under lime greens and stop at fruit punch reds.
We pass beyond shadow and into light and back again.

We see a shape.
Then three shapes.
The shapes are moving.
The shapes are alive.
The shapes canter across our path, and we slow to grant them passage.
They give us no sign or acknowledgment.
This is their time and they are unaffected.
Even though we turn our heads as we pass, the shapes are vanishing; they have permitted us to share for a moment but no longer, and they must press on.

We look at each other.

You are no longer a silver Kia.
You are young, and you are beautiful, and your hair is shadow and your expression light.
And you smile as you turn your head back from the shapes now behind us.
You smile at me, in delight at the sharing, and I wonder if you now see my expression, if I have stopped being me and become something other, the way you have.

I have to turn now.

You drive straight.

It's not, like, a fantastic idea, as a general rule, to live in the past. I do think I've figured that much out.

I mean, it's just sort of... there. Whatever happened, happened, as Daniel Faraday would say. They are matters of record, even if the only record that exists is in your head, or someone else's head.

Except those two records don't always see eye to eye, or synapse to synapse. (And now I sound like Ben Gibbard.) There are events in my life of cosmic magnitude and limitless significance, and these chapters, essays, dissertations which I study and analyze and deconstruct in an effort to figure out What The Hell My Deal Is... those same events are mere footnotes in the ongoing autobiographies of the other parties involved.

It's probably better that way.

And maybe those events aren't quite as significant as I remember them to be. A guy named Leonard (just to round out the pop-culture references) once told me that memories aren't that reliable, that they're not even that good, that they're an interpretation and not a record. Maybe that's for the best too.

We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are.

-----------------------------------

My mirrors suck, though. In my mirrors I'm always having a bad hair day, it's always the not-so-good side of my face, the lighting's all wrong, I'm squinting, and I didn't have time to shave.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in these mirrors and the recollection is so sharp that I gasp for air as the embarrassment and the pain and the shame and the guilt flood over me, drowning me, battering me like that time I went down that one water slide at Seven Peaks and I wasn't ready and forgot to cross my arms and legs and cover my mouth and I ended up with a bellyful of extra-strength chlorinated water and I was seeing spots in front of my eyes from the lack of oxygen.

It's a lot harder for me to find a good mirror. They're there -- but they're hazy and indistinct, and it usually takes some sort of external stimulus to resurrect them: the scent of a perfume (they say that olfactory recollections are the strongest), the taste of a certain dish at a certain restaurant, any number of pieces of music (my first kiss: "Jeremy," by Pearl Jam, and it wasn't on purpose, I swear, it was just on the radio).

Maybe that's why I like re-reading books, re-listening to favorite albums, re-watching TV shows where I know all the lines. Those are mirrors where I don't have the burden of a reflection.

-----------------------------------

It's been said that we all reach the future at the rate of sixty minutes an hour. But some of those hours contain more minutes than you might think.

There's a lot of things I can stand. And a couple things I can't.

I'm only too aware of my faults. Boy, am I.

Some of them I can change, and I'm working on those.

Some of them I can't change, and I accept those as part of who I am, and make peace with myself, secure in the knowledge that I have other qualities that compensate.

(Some of them I can change, but I lack the courage or strength or willpower or desire or motivation to do anything about it. So I keep them around as a ready excuse, in case anyone ever asks; I can point to them and say, "See, that's why, and I'll do something about them someday, and then everything will be great." They're my crutch.)

(That's another post for another day.)

-----------------------------------

Here's the thing: I know I have strengths, too. I'm good at lots of things. And I'm not just talking about skills like playing the piano or quoting lines from movies (or writing obscure cathartic late-night missives that no one understands but me). I'm talking about qualities, traits of personality, things about Me that are Mine, that are Good.

There have been times in my life where I was more sure of that, and times when I was less sure. But by now I'm pretty confident in the qualities I have. And in the shadows I don't have.

So when someone takes those very qualities -- things that I've spent a lifetime cultivating, things that I use to buoy myself up when I remember all those faults, things that I remember when I get two flat tires in a week and another late night at the office and another meeting in the morning that I'm not getting paid for and a cold that won't go away -- when someone, someone I care about, takes those qualities and accuses me of not having them, of being the thing I always hated and tried with all my heart not to be, and then runs away, shuts down, prevents me from doing anything to prove that someone wrong, to show that I'm not That Guy...

I can't take that.

-----------------------------------

And yeah, I know it's not really my fault (and I can't help but think of Matt Damon bawling his eyes out on Robin Williams' shoulder when I say that, even though the comparison is silly and the difference in degrees is gargantuan). But it sure feels like it is. It's all my fault. When the chips were down and someone needed me most and I had the perfect opportunity to utilize 26 years' worth of compassion and empathy and love, to utilize Myself in the way that only I can... I blew it.

And I think, maybe I never had it in the first place. And that absolutely kills me.


-----------------------------------


 I don't truly believe what I just wrote there.

But tonight I do.

I was just leaving the bathroom for the evening, having taken my customary seat on the toilet (even though I didn't need to actually take the seated position but I wanted to read a few pages in the David Sedaris book that currently rests on the tank) when I happened to look myself dead in the eye.

I saw Age there.

It was no more than a glance, a fleeting passing wisp of a presence that I don't know if I've ever felt before.

Like most people, I don't feel old. More to the point, I don't feel like an adult. I feel like I got to about 19 years old and then went to South Africa and skipped a couple birthdays while I was there and when I got back I forgot how to remember the years I was gone and so I'm stuck in this anomaly in the space-time continuum where my hair gets grayer and I get fatter but my Me-ness never changes. It's like the inverse of Groundhog Day -- everything around me is altering, shaping, progressing, decaying. Somehow my body left my soul behind -- just after high school, I think.

Except when I caught that glimpse of Age in my eye in the bathroom mirror at 3:30 a.m., I suddenly saw and sensed and felt every one of my 26 years.

I guess I am an adult. It must've happened when I wasn't looking.

I wrote this on the blog I write for at www.deseretnews.com. It's about the value of video games (if they have any [I think they do]). You should go read it.

It's hard to tell.

I've got all this... something. Love, I guess. Compassion. Empathy. Charity. Something.

I'm like anyone else; I've been fed (gorged, really) on modern romantic comedies and Disney princesses and classics of unrequited-ness and fantasies that transcend time and space and dimension and (like Rob Fleming/Gordon said) thousands of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. I don't think it has made me miserable, though. It's just made me confused.

It's not that I expect fantasy. I don't. I want reality.

I just can't tell when reality is there. If it's there. If it ever can be.

Everyone else seems to know when it's there. They don't just believe in it; they know. They can tell their eros from their philia, their agape from their storge. They have experience -- real-life, this-actually-happened proof. I don't. I've been close. But not close enough.

I can't tell if I'm living an unwritten life or just writing it myself, but badly. Or maybe the writing is there, but the performance is off, the emphasis all wrong, the metaphor over my head, and I stumble through the reading, uncomprehending, unfeeling, dull.

Because I know not what I do when all this... something, that I have, comes out. There are reasons there, obviously, somewhere inside my psyche, if you'd care to poke around in it (and I'm not sure why you'd care to, but some days I wish I knew how). But there's one reason that should be there. I'm not sure I can identify it.

When you're already willing to do anything for anyone, just because they asked, how can you tell when the asking is more important than the doing?

When everyone means the world to you, how can you tell when someone means the sun and moon and stars?

I don't know.

Yet.