The Walden of My Youth.

In the early days of my rambunctious and unrefined adolescence I often took to wandering through the ancient pine forest behind my family's hideaway cabin. The cabin itself was rustic and beautiful, picturesque even, a page from a northwoods memoir, and as inspiring a natural retreat as one is likely to find in the UP of Michigan. It possessed such a humbling beauty that my city-bounded aunts would often visit with us to relax and take in the calm and wilderness. As we drove back on winding, heavily shaded gravel roads, I often felt as if I were driving into a different world, more quiet and majestic then ours, and its dusty antiquated charm whispered of long nights reading near the black pot-bellied stove and serene Autumn walks on miles of trails and abandoned country roads. As we drove past the gate and onto our property the first thing in sight was The Barn, which housed a variety of old watercraft and its second floor served as a simple guest house. It was red, inherently dirty, and filled with mice. The cabin was a bit dirty and had mice as well, but somehow its coziness and enchanted air more than made up for the dust and regularly placed mousetraps. More than anything, the magical feeling came from the cabin's characteristic oldness. The faintly marred hardwood floors with so much character you could write a short volume about the generations of scratches, the peculiar stone sign that read 'Gandalf', left behind by the eccentric and Tolkien-obsessed original owner. The old-fashioned cloth napkins, bedsheets, throw blankets, comforters, towels and any other fabric you might find that radiated with this oldness but a sort of venerated and well-loved oldness. These things possesed a quality that deeply immersed you into the feeling of living in a history museum or a carefully weaved historical novel set in a peaceful cottage. Behind the cabin, running alongside the unperturbed lake and deep into the wilds was The Sylvania. The magic and primitive forest of my youth. The enormously tall and widely spaced trees gave a cavernous feeling to the forest. Huge aged trees bear down from all sides, blotting out the Sun and leaving in her place foreboding shades of gray and green. Its huge hushed openness and low light echoed the atmosphere of an abandoned cathedral. The ground was thickly piled with brittle orange needles that offered a stealthily muffled crunch. Actual living trees were relatively rare and always massive. The darkened forest floor was riddled with ancient fallen trees, slowly rotting at acute angles and covered in moss and fungus. One of the more ominous aspects: this forest seemed devoid of fauna. We rarely saw the ubiquitous whitetails that populate every forest and roadside in the UP and even seldom saw a squirrel. This reinforced the solitude and mystery of the forest. I think the man who built our cabin understood it, and I don't wonder that a reader of Tolkien would choose to settle here. The Sylvania feels like an enchanted forest in Middle Earth. And so I spent many hours ranging around in The Mystical Sylvania, and it became familiar to me. I played games and explored endlessly, wandering often and looking for animals. I had names for certain areas and odd tree phenomena. The bouncing log, the climbing tree, the deep bog, little hill, they were landmarks to show off to cousins and visiting friends but also important signposts in the labyrinthine Sylvania. We camped in the forest, but always within sight of the cabin, to go deeper at night was to risk the wolves we heard late at night.

The Levee may have been breeched.

Incurious politicians and poorly translated ad messages, flip flip flip, university pages on literary reviews and writers forums, flip flip flip, my needle rooting through riffraff, pining for true muse, flip flip flip, he lives inside of his own heart, that's an awful big place for a boy to live in -Billy Bob Thorton in Sling Blade, flip flip flip, Dr. Strangelove's nazi-mania and General Ripper's paranoia, flip flip flip, my own recognition that its not damn deep enough, flip flip flip, my own recognition that despite the typical comparison of the human mind to a computer, mine is functioning more like a rolodex, flip flip flip, random anecdotes from Herodotus, flip flip flip, and still I can't pierce my own mind's crust of sundry pop culture data, flip flip flip, Andrew Bird, professional whistler, deeper dammit, flip flip flip, I begin to feel it flow.... I've struck the vein I was probing, and I feel its warm gush. The fluid of inspiration isn't deep red like spilled blood or even purple like my coursing veins, it's electric and golden, specks of robin's egg blue, occasional streaks of tangerine and bubblegum pink, and at times like this, when it is fresh and splashes out of me, it seems to radiate, like plutonium or something, so that I can perceive the outline of it flowing from my chest and pooling on my desk even with my eyes shut tightly.
Tunesmith:
zoomed by tertiary roadblocks
rumbling scraping cast-iron constructions
Heat blasts from the grill
sturdy orange plastics shred
as cyclical steel zips and shears
control is failing and paint chips vilely
the wheel off the road bouncing wildly
and spins away
the pilot wails, fear in his guts
the carriage of new
wrecked and smoldering
still,
but the devil's breath is close.

Crackling spite,
rageful tunings of
well-defined wrath.
Swaying in and out of
catalogued outrages,
crack, crack,
and steam whistles
from red swollen ears.
Despotic ruinous ire,
how swelling ego binds
its master's fate
to its odious will.
Carried to undying hatred
on the backs of bitter beasts
sick coats green with envy
hooves of thieves' gold
eyes that tighten your throat
with greedy malevolence
Why mount these damned
creatures and ride to Oblivion?
They rob that which is good
and defines essence
offering cold vengance
and emptiness
in return.
Don't buy in
live your life
let not this blackness
touch your soul.

An Undeniable Failure.

Gray and hidden passion slips into my eyes, haziness defines my vision and crude blindness becomes me. I stare without discretion and my pupils must be huge by now. Trembling hands reach for the tin of mints in my pocket, something to distract me. As my chest pounds and my toe taps relentlessly, I suddenly realize where I am. I look up and see my thin, oily math teacher, the frame of her sharp, chic glasses being gently adjusted as she looks around the drab collegiate classroom. Shes Italian and willowy, with moderate olive skin, and I used to think she was alright. She has the sort of artless charm that comes from imperfect English and which is best paired with the inane quality of always sounding kind of funny. Now that I was doomed to fail her class, quite pettily I thought to myself, I truly hated her. I set my pencil down and cracked my knuckles nervously, glancing to either side. The guy next to me seemed to be at least as skittish as me. A scruffy geek with a beard and awkwardly proportioned limbs sits behind me, exclaiming his ire over this wretched exam out loud, "Well what tha--", he mutters. He is the insufferable jerk in class that constantly raises his hand to ask worthless and hateful questions and thinks himself rather clever for it. He typically makes a point to express out loud to no one in particular the score on his homework when it is handed back, most often in a faintly disdainful and snobbish tone, something like "Oh wow, I got a 37. Much better than I expected." As petty as it is, I hate him for it. But even hearing this snide billygoat of a kid audibly struggle cannot divert my senses from the dread and panic before me. The loathsome stack of papers laid messily in front of me, my futile attempts scrawled on each page, front and back, solely filling space. This test will be my undoing. I work to the bitter end and pass in my packet limply, my spirit broken and my will crushed by calculus.

It's a Wonderful (Really) Life.

Freed from parents and old friends alike,
without obligation or well-defined purpose,
thus we dully bob and drift through our best years.

Our broad preconceptions neatly packed away,
never to be seen again, along with old prejudices and strong-founded convictions.
A preponderance of complex thought and a paucity of simple context
the open mind expands further, it's seam stretched and strained
exposing young naive tissue, unperturbed by startling absurdity and paradox
more and more data's drawn in, too much to sort and compile
an overflowing bin of recycled ideas, each useless and indiscernible.

We are flung from the neat platform of adolescence, never looking back,
alas our descent is parachuted, its thrill stunted,
we drift awkwardly into our new existence, and there is no sink or swim,
no moment of powerfully executed self-preservation.
As misinformed and falsely reassured children we gently drift
on an endless and arctic pool of doubt and apprehension
alone in all things, but together in helplessness
our feet straining for the bottom
our arms outstretched, reaching for a ledge to grasp.

The lame black tube around our waist keeps our chest and head dry,
no real contact, the full shock of the freezing water denied to us.
How I wish I could plunge deep
freed from my acrid black inner-tube, my obnoxious and repulsive lifesaver
to feel the icy rush of desperately cold water all around me
to look in all directions and see naught but darkly blue
to shake my fist at it or to gradually perceive it
to face the dark abyss alone
and alone I might find myself.

summer adventures 1.

Vaguely felt rain drops drift across my face and into my eyes as I stare up the steep and foreboding path. A precipitous ledge bounds the path to my right and a rather uninviting and roughly sloping wooded plane that gives way to another precipitous ledge after about 30 yards lies to the left. I'm crouched under a small poplar, trying to protect my ipod from the rain and to decide the best course of action. My sister's purple mountain bike is a few feet away and my socks are now soaked, causing an wretchedly unpleasant squash each time I readjust my footing. I resolve to shove my ipod into my pocket and swing my leg over the high frame of the purple mountain bike and gut it out. It had begun to drizzle lightly as I started my ascent of this narrow rocky path that runs around the back of our property, up between two massive mine pits, one half full of water and the other dry and empty. About halfway up the path, nearly a half-mile from relative safety and the wide gravel roads that lead to my house, the rain decides to come down properly. Huge droplets hurtle down onto my shoulders and head in rapid succession. It feels like putting my upper body under a high-pressure shower head and I'm soaked under a minute later. My primary concern is my ipod, which seemed like a reasonable thing to bring on a short mountain biking excursion on a brilliantly warm and sunny day. But of course this life cannot (nor do I wish it to) be as simple as a short bike ride on a sunny day and so, after a brief respite under a pitifully stunted poplar, I pushed on, up the muddy and boulder-strewn ramp dripping with cooling rain and breathing heavily.