It’s a strange place to be. This in-between time.
A time when the hours creak. And the days rattle unpredictably. When the nighttime fucking hurts. Because the emptiness echoes hard against the mittened backdrop of broken Michigan asphalt. When the hazy hours before the brittle dawn get drunkenly muddled. And bleed into just another boozy haze of better forgotten stupidity.
But something has to numb all the fucking hurt. So it may as well be that green glass devil. Because I’ve learned to love that affordable burn. And embarrassingly would do anything to actually feel something real again.
It’s a strange place to be. This in-between time. Because I’ve never once been on the side of more agreeable angels. And I have never been one comfortable with the embarrassment of tender exposition.
But there they are.
All of my horrid sins. And all the little white lies. The catalog of my clever deflections. And all the pointed accusations, cutting hard with targeted intent.
There are the stories I will never actually get to write. And all the memories of the girls I will never get to kiss again. Ghosts, old and new, line up outside my rented window. The one overlooking the dirty Boulevard bisecting this city in a neat North-South scar. The one cut right across the heart of a city I have come to despise.
Because we never really understood one other.
And that’s probably the only honest emotion left inside the weakening heart of a wounded fox.
But even that is a lie.
Because there is always room for more hurt.
And the damaging blows just keep fucking coming.
So it comes as no surprise that I find myself in such unlovable territory. An honest accounting of my offerings leaves me wanting; the robust inventory of my many fallibilities makes me blush.
Because I only ever wanted to live clean. But somehow, I only ever found myself on the side of causes lost long before they ever knew my fucking name.
But I still fought.
Because it was the only option available to to the wordy fuck fool like me. The silly fox armed with only a typewriter. And a burning, naive desire to not let the darkness win.
I fought for the rights of people I would never actually meet; I took to streets where I was tear gassed. And had rounds, both lethal and non, shot at me.
I put meat up against metal for the sake of a tenuous promise of a better tomorrow. And raged hard against every injustice I could find. Simply because I thought those sacrifices would somehow absolve me of the naked brutality of having to be…me.
But just like that math class spent in a sweltering room in the summer of 1988, my calculations were wrong. Probably because I was never properly wired to understand numbers. Words were the only addition that ever fucking mattered to me.
So I made them my life.
I pushed in all my literary chips; laid down all the bets on the table of unifying language. And invested myself in the promises of a dying art.
But who really reads anything real anymore?
People would rather gobble down the click-bait bites of instant gratification rather than open themselves to something real. And that leaves precious little for wannabe writers to flourish.
That was just the first of a great many mistakes that came to define me.
And I am sure that there will be more.
Because I’m still fucking here.
And I am still writing my heart out. At least when I am not caught out on that damn 517 ramp, doing battle against all those tin monsters that try their best to kill me with shocking regularity.
I have to believe that the right combination of words is out there—I just haven’t found them yet. The words that will justify every fucking lonely night. And every heart I inadvertently broke.
And if I can find them, well, I guess maybe then it will all be worth it.
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Because my heart is for sale.
And I wonder if there are any takers….
