Smooth, rich flavor
Strong enough to put hair on your chest
Velvety enough to put a glide in your stride
People come and go, wisps of their conversations still linger in the aroma-filled air
Coffeehouse music resonating over the mild loudspeakers, doing acoustic covers, rounding out the sharp points of edgier songs
Heys and Hellos from the staff, me grabbing a Cubano sandwich or lunch wrap on wheat tortilla
I remember you.
For years, you were my go-to, surefire, Johnny-on-the-spot sanctuary of writing/thinking/citing/drinking
It would be unfathomable to calculate the amount of words I wrote, scribbled, crossed out, erased there
I remember you.
To ice cold days to sweltering heat to rainy mornings, we saw it all, but always had more to see and explore.
Because the mind’s eye engulfs unchartered landscapes that all feel like home when you allow yourself to soak and simmer. Your threshold was the archway to those worlds for many of me.
When hard times befell the world, you managed to tough it out and stick around for the community.
Change happened. Even though you smelled different and looked different, I knew you were still in there. The soul of the place that greeted me that first day I drifted off the boulevard into the next twin decades.
I remember you.
Now, something new is in your old hallowed space. I saw the signs, read the signs. A sign of the times.
Even though you’re no longer here, you have my eternal thanks for being there for me when I needed a place to land.
So I’ll raise a glass of wine to my favorite cup of coffee and the men and women who brewed it, fed me, and welcomed me with open arms, open doors, and open minds.
I remember you.
Six-Country Blend Dark Roast and Black Dog Coffee.

Shift I space j a m space o n space t h i s space r u s t y space k e y b o a r d space l i k e caps lock Q W E R T Y space j u h dash j u h dash j u h dash j a m space o n space i t period

Across time and space and everywhere in between
Against the grain and the laws of nature
You will look up one day and realize that the love you seek was there alongside you the whole while
And by the time you reach out to secure it in your grasp,
An empty handful of once-endless soul-love will be lost.
Cause I’ll be gone.

“When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time. ”
–Lady Gaga

“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.” 
–James Baldwin

After all the rain, there’s always the silver lining
The bronze gods will guide us down the golden path
So keep shining

Days melt into weeks
Weeks melt into months
Months melt into–
After so long, time becomes abstract
Incomprehensible and immeasurable
At that stage, you only feel the fingertips of Father Time rubbing your head, massaging your temples, trying to soothe you, move you, distract you from your pain
Even though the pain is what’s killing you, it’s also what’s keeping you alive. You have to feel something. Otherwise, may the gods help you.
Because God left this conversation a long time ago. Couldn’t bear watching her creation atrophy into a puddle of damp, dank hopelessness.
You’re on your own.
That’s why you built this solitary confinement, this SHU, this box.
That life of yours on the outside is the prison you were escorted away from, in chains and restraints. You always felt suffocated, asphyxiated.
That corporate tie around your neck was an Italian-made, silk woven noose.
Manufactured of the finest quality.
Sucking the souls of a mindless quantity.
Soulless indoctrination.
The whole cell is your shadow. Darkness everywhere. You can’t tell where your feet are, and you forgot what hands look like.
It mimics your soul. The interior of your inner being. And that’s all you got, because that’s all you’ll get.
So as you sink deeper and deeper into your imprisonment, as you become more entrenched in the quicksand of this despair and brutal isolation,
You tell yourself, with a slow smirk and a quickened heartbeat that runs a race with no destination,
“At least I’m free.”

“When you are Old” by William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

-–Margaret Atwood

Yesterday has passed
Tomorrow isn’t here yet
So all I hold is today.

Sitting here
Not actually feeling like here is here
A crown of fire keeps me warm, burning up
I can’t take this crown off…yet
The type of royalty no one truly wants
The type of royalty that gruesomely haunts
Thought that wisp in the air was from the hard hats down there
Ripping up chunks of asphalt, blacktop
Causing fire and smoke to tango in the firmament
But that’s not what I smell
The stench of chemicals and burnt plastic is coming from me
Internal prestidigitation
it’s an strange trick I play on myself
sleight of hand, slight of mind, light on time
hope this doesn’t last forever
it’s a peculiar sensation, it is
an oddness
within that crown of fire lives a fog
my thoughts get lost in the misty hall of mirrors
which way is which?
feels like I’m across the room, across space and time
viewing myself through a hazy dimensional wall of cloudy regrets
Cumulus concerns under cirrus psychological phenomena
Nothing’s quite clear, and nothing’s everything
but there’s one thing that comes through in sharp focus
if I ever make it out of this fog
i’m never coming back through here
as the fog thickens and thickens
i wonder where my last step was and where my next step is going