Howdy internet,
It is mid-November and somehow we are still on the road. Still tired and treaded and touring. Still not sure where we’re going or why, but we sure are getting there slowly, huh?
This trip has been bliss and blessing hid neat in the long loop of highway lonely. Lots of quiet questions tossed careless cigarette, a whole heart full of forest fire driving through the thick of it.
Are we finding what we are looking for?
Are we happy?
Are we supposed to be?
I don’t want this newsletter to be depressing, but I do want it to be honest. And some days depression is just the window dressing, just better metaphor for self-reflection than “undiagnosed unraveling.”
It is not the painting, but the frame from which we gather final context and perspective.
And lately the frame for my writing has been this vague sense of melancholia. This looming-gloom is the necessary skeleton from which I am making or writing anything these days.
Even from the open road, hot dog bellied and kite high, doing mostly nothing, in my favorite places in the world, “depression” is still there, cleared throat and chatty.
Never the whole story, but always the opening line.
It is hard to make art without its influence, hard to write the work I want to write without its heavy-handed bias.
Often I sit to write bubbles of light and leave later weighty and wordy and wet in weeping.
These poems are of this kind.
Honest efforts at hopeful
but still tethered to where they came from.
I hope you enjoy 🙂
Thanks yall,
Alex
The heart a bully
the heart
wants
what
we all do
a quiet
space
to matter
in
the soft
echo
of familiar
pace
a warm
cup
of whatever
we’re
toasting
the heart
a bully
the belly
a home
Being pretty is no way to live
To paint a pretty picture
of depression
is to leave the tea on
thoughtful, maybe
helpful, sometimes
It is not that being depressed
can’t be romantic
it is
that depression is not a good lover
Clumsy in its ever-presence
looming until
we boil over
There is nothing
not pretty
about being sad
It is beautiful
almost always
but being pretty is no way to live
The roadtrip didn’t work
I cried from Portland
all the way
to Boston
90 miles
wet eyed
and distant
brain too
slow to keep
up with
this highway
healing
goodbye
Maine
hello
headed home
still not better
but out of gas money
and patience
not an obvious
doctor but
the roadtrip
didn’t work
and this
is turning around
to admit
it
what
we always
saw coming
the same tired bodies
drug back
to the two-step
screaming
no
coastal swing
worth dancing
forever for
happy
still
a stretch
but
depression now
euphemism
for day
light
not
a diagnosis
just a dry
sense of
humor
and
bad taste
in self
care
Texas
here we
come
careful
re-seasoned
and
moody
Why is every poem still a lost love song
Why is every poem
still a lost love song
peanut butter tongue
stuck singing
to the roof of my
mouth
Still an homage
to old neighborhoods
with new names
grey paint and a pay raise
no one got
Why is every poem
still a love letter
read backwards
mumbled secrets
and inside jokes
stuck stuttered
in metaphor
still haunted
and holy
and telephone news
Still a lost cause
on burying this body
of work
without another poem
about god,
huh?
bad habits
keep resurrecting
keep me
honest
ly
don’t bother
heavied psalter
Saṃsāra over
dose
over done it again
on getting
higher
to heaven
Still a poor conduit
this ritual is
this wax museum
in crisis
heat waved and
still holding
old bodies
in a rising
ocean
Why is every poem
still love
still love
still love
