And when we reach the edge.

As I look over the best things I have had in my life, it would be safe to say that among them are raging at the thunder storms over the great plains, the feeling of her head on your chest and her arm around your waist, a perfectly bent cross to the back post of the goal, the feedback coming through the pickups, the exhaustion of a hard day spent in the dirt, and the tears in eyes of friend when your affirmation sinks in. These things and more are the first things that come to mind when I think of my own hope and love of life. These are the seconds of clarity at the top of the falls just before you drop over the edge. This is why self-medicating will never do, why the numbness, the high, the crash, why they will never work when gotten by some method other than simply living. If I were to guess, I would say that most addicts care about each one of those things, but have lost the ability to savor them. Each day I fight to keep the the reality in mind that what is usual matters, and like the sunrise, each faithful repetition is just as important. With each one of those days, comes a certain anxiety because we can't stay in free falling anti-gravity portion of new events and fulfillment, that moment of clarity, with a clear mind and sense of purpose. Pascal said all of the world's evils could be solved if a man could figure out how to sit alone in a room with his thoughts; a psychologist named Yalom called it "existence pain". The Apostle Paul said he found a secret to sustain him through abundance and hunger, and called upon a strength far beyond his own--what they would call in AA "being in touch with your Higher Power".

Whether numbed to the ache of breathing by Oxycontin, the thrill of watching the slots roll, or the dull light of the T.V., it's all the same failure of being unable to hold a balance.

A Soul Sucking Jerk at 4 In the Morning.

I'm not really sure why it was that I stopped writing. At some point life became so full, that the need to express something about it dried up, and was replaced a desire to simply sit in it. Blaise Pascal once said that "most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room". So it is that I feel I have been attempting to stay still more metaphorically within the space I occupy; not explain or give meaning to my life, but sit still in the moment. Driven by a hunger make my years count for something, and a realization that against the props and settings of time my life is but one single tree falling down in the forest, what is meaningful and what is insignificant seem more or less like the same things. And so I pull together the meaningful and the commonplace, watch the grandiose needs I have to say something never before said disintegrate, and get life with real days, real pain, real people and the joy that comes from experiencing them.

Exibit A:
Work has always meant suffering to me. Like the "ah shit" Adam uttered when he first failed to break the hard-packed ground within sight of the gates of Eden, or that sinking feeling Sisyphus probably got in his gut every time the boulder reached the peak of the hill it would eventually roll back down, every job I have undertaken has left me believing that contentment with one's work was the practice of inane, hopeless shit-eating, with only the hope that the daylight broke before your back did. Somewhere along the line, I heard the message the work was redeemed and redemptive, included in the Christian story of the souls who had found their worth. But the evidence was contrary, and while my father destroyed his body behind the wheel of a semi, I tried to memorize John Donne as I stocked the ailes of a supermarket straight from a zombie/slasher flick, filled instead with the Walking Stupid.
It isn't that work was so difficult to find, it's just that, as Beck would call it, the "soul-sucking jerk" was everybody's boss, and the dregs of society oozed past like the hours. Perhaps now my cynicism is based upon what was perhaps an unhelpfully optimistic teenage mind. Those I was repulsed by, I attempted to place the face of Christ upon. If I have learned anything since, it is that sometimes ugly people are just ugly, and that hoping to see Jesus on the face of a homeless man or alcoholic woman is more about me hiding my own fear, than it is about showcasing my magnanimity. So it is now that I work with drug addicts and I still have the same fear, but their worth to me is in their humanity--not potentially, but as it is right now. I used to see "rehab" as almost ignorance of the present state for the sake of the future, but rehabilitation is done with the same human, start to finish. An old gentleman with a long history of alcholism said to me the other day, "some days I'm Xerxes, some days I'm Pericles, some days I'm in the treatment center". Though I too am a victim of the "feelings disease", I see that days spent in an attic, wearing a HAZMAT suit while fighting off bats, or feeling my brain-stem go numb after bouncing across Montana prairie on a John Deere tractor, my burden that of being unable to engage part of myself. People have told me that I am too quiet, could have smoked weed, don't have much of a personality, am too relaxed, and yet now, my peaceful demeanor is in a place where I can push back, be ornery, recieve other's hurt, cut up, be angry, be sad, or just be. Now instead of being yelled at by old ladies who can't get their damn cupons to work, I get to face down 19 year old coke heads who are pissed because they can't smoke their cigarettes whenever they feel the slightest bit of anxiety.

a king's speech

it's so hard to contain

no reframe, no burden, no stain.

if i was free as they say

at long last as the gull,

who's wing tip skids the crested wave

i would write my fame out

try the suit on for size

and bring the hammer down

just to see if it fits me

but i am the words never spoken

the gravel road that the pavement leaves

untamed and unbroken

i would bring the hammer down

if it's your face i see again

and again

no fame and re-broken,

as a light that has no tunnel

and speech that is unwritten

i would fill my mouth with rocks

just to channel the hurricane into

some place untaken

i'm sorry.

it's the last place alive on the burdened bank

the only window pain unshaken

so goddamn sorry

like a dead man who needs sleep

and here i am face up at the stars

retraced and nearly certain

and again

i'm sorry that this word

was a dry well in a desert,

that treachery clothed in scales,

breathed out like a Dane's firecracker.

a kiss that is sober

and a terror, as light flickers

in the corner of a hotel room,

or on a desert highway as we're carried

away by japanese manufacturing

and here we are,

the horizon still hasn't crested

i see that look in your eyes

and i still see them puddled blue

like the ripples arrested.

if what i called love

was more bunker than home

if i wasn't so close

to your body i'd never have known