Tell it to my heart...

As the wheel of time turns, places and people wear many names. Many different faces that disguise themselves as hope and grace and freedom. If you are not careful, they can easily fool you. Set you on a path of falsity and despair. It's so hard to stay the course, because no one knows the great pattern the wheel weaves, or even the pattern of an age. We can only watch, and study, and hope. Yet we shall be born to face our fears, born once more as we were born before and shall be born again, time without end. So let us weep for our salvation.

Down by the river...

Sweet time is on my side...

Ragtime fast lane, 

another overdose.

You know James Dean wasn't playing the role.

I said hey, you, what you gonna do,

when time runs out on you?

Angels don't always have wings...

All I ask as I move forward from what feels like an extremely long and arduous journey, is to fall silently into the spaces that have been left empty so far. The ones either forgotten or destroyed by my blind chase towards my ambitions. My wish is to fill them with a hope that tells me gently at dawn that my simple love can cure even the most extraordinary heart and that my broken past is enough for each tomorrow that follows. Maybe it will even remind me that all the mistakes I will collect over the next year are not as bad as the chances I missed in the last one.

Another one for me...

Wash my soul again...

But why have you fallen - you? What fatal, diabolical causes hindered your life from blossoming into full flower? Why, almost before beginning life, were you in such haste to cast off the image and likeness of the universe, and to become a cowardly beast who backs and scares others because he is afraid himself? You are afraid of life - as afraid of it as you ever were.

I've spent so much of my life wondering why I am here, feeling this ache behind my eyes that my life isn't for anything, that it doesn't mean anything, that the hurt hurts too much and the joy gives too little. But in the shade of a pine tree overlooking the ocean, I'm able to feel, if only in moments, why I am here - that I am here to pay attention. I am here to hold my partners hands and tell him it's going to be okay, even though I have no idea if it will. And most of all, I am here to be. I am here to be with you, to be with my family, and even to be with the sea. The gift is being itself, and who better to show me that than she who left so long ago. 

Don't get angry at me...

Devils roll the dice...

In my mind, I built stairways. At the end of the stairways, I imagined rooms. These were high, airy places with big windows and a cool breeze moving through. I imagined one room opening brightly onto another room until I'd built a house, a place with hallways and more staircases. I built many houses, one after another, and those gave rise to a city - a calm, sparkling city near the ocean. I put myself there, and that's where I lived, in the wide-open sky of my mind. I made friends and read books and went running on a footpath in a jewel-green park along the harbour. I ate pancakes drizzled in chocolate and took baths and watched sunlight pour through trees. This wasn't longing, and it wasn't insanity. It was relief. It got me through.

Barefoot, walking in the grass...

Whether rain or snow, 

you know I'll follow your lead.

I know that you're the one that I need,

When I'm lost in my thoughts, 

you're my wildest of dreams,

and I've found it in you, 

you're my missing piece.

Down comes the claw...

Time passes so fast. I really try to make time to be still. And while I do, I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It's not sadness, though it may sound like it. I'm thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it's hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.

Paint the town red...

Perhaps life's simplest and most frequent mistake is to take who we are for granted in our anxious anticipation of who we might be. I came to a place where I am completely done with being someone who would turn to all the empty things of this world to satisfy my innermost needs. I was through fabricating solutions of my own devising, crafting makeshift concoctions that never hit the mark.

Anticipating sorrow to neutralise sorrow - that’s paltry, cowardly stuff, he told himself, knowing he was an ace practitioner of the craft. But he was happy for other things too: that he'd be doing something he'd never done before, that his days would be spent in a world that was so different to him that he could feel a sheen of anticipation crawling all over. Thoughts could no longer keep themselves in a critical equilibrium. The silence was oppressive; the occasional sounds of birds and cars struck him as unnatural, out of sync. Every sound was twisted and crushed beneath the weight of some unstoppable force. And in the midst of this, he waited for something to happen. Something's got to happen, he felt sure. It can’t end like this.

Use it or lose it...

East side of sorrow...

I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead head on, heedlessly one might say - or even fearlessly - into my own future: this time of utter raw anguish. And I am finally starting to understand why all my recent fantasies are about tragic loss. Because even though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of anti-hero journey, I had in fact not experienced much. At least not when it comes to the inevitable realities of life. Age, illness, the deaths of my loved ones have escaped me as of yet. I am ill-prepared, so every conjuration of such circumstance keeps me battle ready. The saying goes, that we play at paste until qualified for pearl. So I brace myself, so I am sturdy for when, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with me.

Leave him better than he was before...

Cutting my losses...

So take me down a road

that's a little bit windy.

You can drop me off anywhere,

this lonely way too long.

All the love I've had worth giving,

gambling with more than just my cards,

with bottles and some drugs,

and my stories and my heart.

It's time we had the talk...

The summer ended. Day by day, taking its time. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall - they fell unnoticed - seeming to promise, to try and survive one more round of death and rebirth. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. And I caught myself staring down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.