Killing Myself to Sleep

I’m not complaining about being sober. The benefits of sobriety alone completely outweigh the losing prize waiting for me at the end of the bottle but fuck if I can’t sleep, I’m a miserable bastard. Sleeping sober is a trying and enduring problem of mine, and these troubled roots go Read more

Five Year Gap

Five-year gap It could have been ten, I was so young then Just sixteen, you were just ‘old’ Policing my youth, like you always knew better Me and Molly, your mall rats We partied late into the night and brought you coffee at sunrise You scolded our morning-after-those Wildberry Vodka Read more

I Was a Fearless Little Girl

I’ll never know if my mother thought that she might have had a cross dressing pre-teen son, or maybe she just thought that I was just a theatrical kid. After a quick costume change out of my denim bugle boys and into her brazier and favorite silver and turquoise jewelry, I was the most fearless little girl on the North Side of the Bronx, and that helped keep me alive.

Whirlpools and Windmills: I Choose the Present

I can be like a boat passing by and flowing onward or get mired in it trying to make it what it is not, and whirl around and around wandering in an endless thought process of, “If only.” I then get stuck on the rinse and repeat cycle, living reactively all the time, falling blindly into the holes of my history, until I give up altogether and get stuck on the riverbank of hopeless despair. OR, I can see. Recognize. Steer clear. Float over. Dance through. On, into the vast river of life. Mistaking the whirlpool for the river, I am doomed. And yet the only way out is to realize that the whirlpool and the river are made of the same substance, dancing. I am whole.