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
Thanks for reading y’all!
Please let me know what you’d like to see more of — poems? essays? nonsense?
And if you enjoyed reading this, then I’d love for you to share it with someone else who would like it too!
Hi Alex
What a joy to read your words, direct from your heart.
‘Being pretty is no way to live’ really got to me. So much conveyed.....it spoke volumes. It’s conveys my own feelings perfectly, too.
I would like a pocket size book of your poems to carry around 🙂
Keep writing................
Wonderful words, wonderful writer!
Keep it up, Alex!
😍