He stood in front if the mirror to practice his speech. He stared at his own reflection, staring an intense stare into the mirror, looking at himself to shake away the nerves. He was a man in love. Before each rehearsal, he exhaled strongly through clinched lips, rounded as if he could whistle instead of exhale. He directed himself into action and then he preformed. Continue reading
From The Book of Firsts: The Snow
Saturday morning, January 23, 2016
This is my first snow storm living where I am in the mountains. The conditions on Spook Rock are as follows; winds are coming in from the northeast at 16mph with intervals of heavier gusts. Small snowflakes are coming down on an angle and moving quickly. Visibility is .3 miles and the streets are mainly white. As of now, I only have a few inches of snow. The weatherman and all of his friends told us to prepare for more than 12.
The old headstones in the cemetery at Wesley Chapel are laced with snow. Some of the older and smaller headstones will be buried in white before too long. The sky is a soft shade of pale gray. The cloud conditions are too thick for me to see the Harriman Mountain behind my house. The tall evergreens are the only color in an otherwise gray scenery. The evergreen branches look like outstretched arms with snow resting on them from the fingertips up to the biceps. Continue reading
From Bedtime Stories For The Insomniac
A Way To Play
I am alone, thinking, and sitting in the kind of quiet that makes my eardrums ring because there is nothing else to hear. In times like this, I realize that even silence comes with sound. In the quietest of times and in the absence of others, I can hear nothing but the high-pitched tone of an empty room.
I guess I might as well write about something . . .
Melany came through the Continue reading
Poem: The Draw of Mercury
The best trick the devil pulls
is not when he smiles to show
what he has for you .
His best trick
is when he pulls it away
and warns you not to Continue reading
Reflection in the Rain
Heavy rain falls in waves upon the roof of my house. I swear this sound is the opposite of an alarm clock. Teams of raindrops run down my rooftop like little footsteps running in big gymnasium. The dull roar of this pitter pattering on my roof, the chattering raindrops that hit my skylight above my head, and the droplets of rainwater that roll down the bay window in my loft; the view outside—the gray sky, the hardly swaying tree branches that move in a gentle rainy wind and the empty street known as Spook Rock are all so peaceful and quiet.
Today is Sunday.
The rain changes intensity and Continue reading
Friendship
I cannot say how friendships begin. I know they begin at early ages. They begin in classrooms and schoolyards. I am not how friendships take form, or why they can change almost suddenly, and those that we were so close to us are more distant than the deepest past.
Life evolves. I know this. And we evolve as well. I know this too, We either grow or stay the same. And when, or should I say if we grow, a piece of us remains as we were in the heart of someone we shared time with. To someone, we will always be that kid in the playground. To someone, I will always be that kid in a classroom, or that short little kid that lived down the street from the baseball fields on Merrick Avenue. To some from my childhood, I will be referred to as Benjy. Some call me Benny and most from my adulthood will call me Ben.
I know there is something more cosmic to this thing we call friendship. There has to be. I believe this is why we meet; we meet for a reason. It is fate, I say. It is a slot we fill for either a temporary or long-term commitment. And that is Continue reading
A Poem from Junkie Stories
The Injection:
There I was . . .
. . . I was lost in my own way.
I sat down to feel the warm slow rush
cruise through my body.
It was like a journey.
My mind drifted, and my body fell.
I sank into the soft daydream
of a long, but Continue reading
A Note to The Old Man
I was trying to remember the last time we walked on the beach together. I must have been 16 for that one. That was a tough time for you and me. I was in the middle of so much then. I was on one side of the argument and you were on the other. What I know most about that time is we both wanted to be closer. We wanted to get along. And we wanted this so badly too. We wanted to be close but something always had a way of getting between us. Either I said the wrong thing or you did. I could never do things as you Continue reading
From Sessions in the Balcony: Phone Fun
She answered the phone with the soft raspy voice of a woman sleeping alone. The light in her bedroom was off and all was dark, but the beam from the red numbers on her alarm clock gave a tinted glow across her night stand where the telephone rang.
She answered, “Hello,” with an unsure voice.
“Did I wake you,” he asked.
She cleared her throat. “What time is it?”
He informed, Continue reading
When The Change Began
After the long, uncomfortable hours in the precinct with angry desk cops and detectives, and after the questions that came while being handcuffed to the side of a gray-painted steel desk in a small detective’s office—after the yelling cops screamed, “Tell us what you did,” and after the detectives smacked me around, beat me, and played their version of good cop/bad cop; after the several rounds of different accusations and the phone call home to alert my parents of my arrest, the alcohol in my system gave way to the sobering moment that I was caught. I sitting behind a chain-linked fence on a wooden bench with my left wrist handcuffed to a pipe that ran beneath the seating.
After the hours of processing, and the trip to a holding facility where I went through the normal Continue reading
The Written Addiction 