You can drive forward looking backward — Screaming down the highway of life. Top down, singing badly. but oh so loudly. Dodging piles of fear, potholes of failure, zipping around haters like I own the damn road. Crashed a few times when I learned to drive. Dented a few fenders with arrogance, ran over a few morals here and…

What was, what will never be again — Speak to me woman, share your pain. Whisper to me again, as if we were still young. Remind me love of our songs once sung. Stories of who we were , stories of what remains. Wasted years, so much gained, everything lost. You found your way, found your heart. But your ways…

Remembering the lost city of my dreams — The bar… the Stud, Polk Street, San Francisco, 1980, all those clues, still didn’t know it was a gay bar. First day in town… new job, old friends, straight to the bar, $3.00 Long Island Ice Teas in Mason Jars, Strawberry Schnapps shots $.25, me fresh from Arkansas… hillbilly blinders in my head… never knew my friends…

Finding peace in what may never be — Poetry healed me, changed me, then finally failed me. I was darkness wrapped in blackness, not a particle of light could find its way through the madness of my youth. When I believed I had it all, I lost it all, starting life again when others were savoring their arrival. …

Only happy being miserable — They are only happy being unhappy. Their misery black paint on their souls. Their only happiness making others miserable. It won’t last they crow at weddings. The world is going to hell they scream at TVs. What is wrong with you they moan at their kids? Their spouse too fat, too skinny, too happy, too busy… stop having fun, you are ignoring me. When they die…

Being angry takes a lot of work — When you are too dumb to know you are dumb, you are still dumb. The earth is flat, John John never dies, babies are snacks for movie stars and welcome back polio, better to let kids die than save them with science. Angry takes work. I admire those who hate everyone…

I finally found out why I am an adulting mess — I found out why I am an adulting mess. It’s my brain, never matured, frozen at 18. My news feed said teenage brains do not mature at that magical age as thought, most not until their late 20s. Maturation happens when the brain accepts adulthood… and there’s my problem, I never accepted…

The obsessiveness of the great ones — Took Tolstoy 6 years to write War and Peace, freezing his ass in endless Russian winters, grinding a 1,000 page masterpiece no one reads now but wretched graduate students. Six miserable years… all in for a dream. Hemingway drove ambulances in WWI, ran with the bulls, screwed with the horniness…

And my nephew is a heathen in training — Cheap beer, bowls of peanuts in the shell. Coated in sticky salt, brown stains like a flatulent baby. All the shapes of a stripper gone soft, top too big and lumpy, bottom two years beyond “Oh my God,” too many fingers playing in the bowl, poking, searching for just the right…