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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

My mistress wants me and my wife needs me, and somewhere between those two miserable truths I’ve managed to lose the bastard I used to be. One looks at me like I’m the last cigarette in a burning building, something worth destroying herself for, while the other looks at me like a house with a leaking roof, a broken furnace, and a mortgage that refuses to die. My mistress wants the man underneath the clothes, the one with the crooked smile and the dirty imagination, the one who still believes there might be something beautiful left to ruin. My wife needs the man who remembers to pay the bills, take out the garbage, fix the goddamn kitchen faucet, and pretend that growing old together was always supposed to feel like a slow execution. And me? I’m somewhere in the middle, chewing on the bones of my own contradictions, wondering when the hell I became a man with two women and not enough of himself to give either one.

My mistress doesn’t ask about the electric bill. She doesn’t care whether the lawn needs mowing or whether the refrigerator is making that strange noise again. She doesn’t want a spreadsheet of my responsibilities or a detailed explanation of why I came home late. She wants my hands, my mouth, my attention, my madness. She wants the version of me that doesn’t have to explain why he sometimes stares into the darkness like he’s waiting for somebody to come collect him. She makes me feel wanted, and there’s a dangerous difference between being wanted and being needed. One is a fire; the other is a funeral procession. One makes you feel like a goddamn king, the other reminds you that somebody has to carry the coffin.

My wife knows the geography of my disappointments. She’s seen me sick, broke, exhausted, angry, and defeated. She’s heard the things I never intended to say and remembers the promises I made when the world was younger and we still believed that love could outrun time. She knows how I take my coffee, where I hide my frustrations, and the particular silence that comes over me when something has gone wrong. She doesn’t need to ask whether I’m hurting. She can read it in the way I close a cabinet or how long I stand in the shower. There’s a history there that no stranger could manufacture, a thousand ordinary moments stitched together with invisible thread. And perhaps that’s the cruelest part. She needs me because we’ve built something together, and I know exactly how much destruction my selfishness could bring to it.

I hate myself for the arithmetic. I hate that I’ve started measuring affection like a fucking accountant, calculating what I receive against what I owe, tallying kisses against obligations, desire against responsibility. How many nights does a man have to spend pretending before he starts believing his own performance? How many times can he say everything is fine before the words become a prison sentence? I want to blame the women, naturally. That’s the convenient thing about being a coward; there’s always somebody nearby to blame for the mess you’ve made. My mistress is temptation. My wife is expectation. And I’m the poor son of a bitch caught between them, apparently unaware that I’m the one holding the match.

Sometimes I wonder whether my mistress loves me or simply loves the absence of ordinary life that I represent. Perhaps she loves the stolen hours, the anticipation, the secret conversations, the illusion that a man can be separated from his consequences. Perhaps she doesn’t know what I look like when I’m standing in the kitchen at midnight, staring at an unpaid bill and wondering whether my life has become a collection of obligations with a pulse. She gets the poetry. My wife gets the plumbing. She gets the whiskey and the midnight confessions. My wife gets the morning after, when the romance has crawled into a corner and left its dirty laundry on the floor.

And God help me, sometimes I resent my wife for knowing me so well. There is no mystery left to hide behind. She has seen the boy, the fool, the ambitious bastard, the man who wanted to conquer the world and the man who eventually learned that the world doesn’t give a damn about his ambitions. She knows the scars beneath my sarcasm. She knows the difference between my laughter and my pretending. My mistress sees a man worth chasing. My wife sees a man worth staying beside. I don’t know which one frightens me more.

There are nights when I imagine walking away from everything, leaving behind the keys, the photographs, the familiar arguments, and the comfortable little grave we’ve decorated with family memories. I imagine driving until the roads run out of names, finding some roadside bar where nobody knows my history, and introducing myself with a different face. But I know myself better than that. I’d take my ghosts with me. They’d sit in the passenger seat, complain about the music, and ask whether I remembered to lock the front door. You can change your address, but you cannot outrun the bastard in the driver’s seat.

And what of the mistress? What happens when the stolen hours become ordinary hours? When desire has to share a bathroom with toothpaste and unpaid bills? When the woman who once wanted every piece of me discovers that I come with a thousand irritating pieces she never ordered? Will she still want me when there’s nothing forbidden about touching me? Will she still find poetry in my madness when she’s the one cleaning up after it? Or will I become another man who promises the moon and delivers a dim porch light?

I am angry because I want everything, and I know that wanting everything is how a man ends up with nothing. I want to be desired without being destructive. I want to be needed without feeling imprisoned. I want somebody to look at me and see more than the responsibilities I’ve accumulated, but I also want to stop running from the people who have loved me through the unremarkable disasters of being alive. It’s an ugly appetite, this hunger to be both somebody’s salvation and somebody’s escape. It makes a man feel powerful until he realizes he’s simply become another source of pain.

Perhaps the real mistress is not a woman at all. Perhaps she’s the version of myself I’ve abandoned, the reckless bastard who still believes there is a life beyond the walls he’s built. Perhaps my wife is not merely the woman waiting at home, but the entire history I’ve spent years constructing, the promises, the sacrifices, the ordinary miracles that don’t announce themselves with fireworks. And perhaps I’m the one having the affair with the fantasy that I can have a new life without burying the old one.

My mistress wants me. My wife needs me. And I stand here like a beautifully dressed disaster, confusing attention with salvation and responsibility with a death sentence. I could write a thousand poems about desire, a thousand more about the cruelty of love, but none of them would absolve me. There is no romantic redemption in making two women carry the weight of a man’s inability to confront himself.

So tonight, I’ll sit with the uncomfortable truth. The mirror doesn’t care who wants me. It doesn’t care who needs me. It only reflects the man standing there, with his excuses hanging from his shoulders like a wet funeral suit. And for once, I might have to stop asking which woman makes me feel more alive and start asking why I’ve become so willing to make a mess of other people’s lives just to avoid confronting my own.

What a magnificent fucking tragedy.

Two women, one man, and not nearly enough courage to tell the truth.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

I still haven’t figured out why she said yes. Sometimes I look at her and wonder what kind of cosmic miscalculation brought her into my crooked little universe. I’m no prince charming, no polished gentleman with a pocket full of promises and a future wrapped in golden ribbon. I’m a collection of peculiar habits, unfinished thoughts, sarcastic remarks, restless nights, and a heart that occasionally forgets how to behave. I’ve got more rough edges than a barbed-wire fence and enough baggage to require its own damn airport terminal. Yet somehow, she looked at this beautifully dysfunctional specimen of humanity and said yes. I keep searching for the hidden clause, the fine print, the moment she might wake up and realize she’s accidentally adopted a grown man with the emotional vocabulary of a wandering poet and the common sense of a drunken raccoon. But she stays. And maybe that’s the greatest mystery of all. I don’t know what she sees when she looks at me, but I hope she never stops looking long enough to figure out what the hell she’s gotten herself into.

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Storm Fragments

ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

I am the author who can’t sell a poetry book, a goddamn architect of beautiful disasters building cathedrals nobody bothers to enter. I bleed metaphors onto paper, bury my dead in paragraphs, and drag the carcasses of my childhood through the printing press, only to watch the world scroll past like my words are another dead fly on a windowsill. I’ve swallowed enough rejection to shit out a library. My bookshelf is a graveyard of unsold dreams, every spine a headstone, every blank sales report another shovel of dirt. And still I write. Jesus Christ, I write.

I write like a lunatic setting fire to his own furniture just to see what the shadows look like. I write with ink under my fingernails and a cemetery rattling around in my rib cage. I’ve made love to language in the back alleys of broken promises, fucked around with punctuation until the sentences started bleeding, and given names to monsters that most people spend their entire lives pretending don’t exist. I’ve turned grief into architecture, loneliness into a crooked boulevard, and disappointment into a fucking ballroom where all my dead ambitions dance with their shoes on fire.

Meanwhile, the world is busy buying refrigerator-magnet wisdom from people who’ve mistaken a clever caption for a literary resurrection. Everyone wants a little heartbreak, provided it comes wrapped in pastel colors, a pretty font, and a reassuring reminder that tomorrow will be better. Nobody wants the ugly truth sitting at the kitchen table with its boots on, drinking cheap whiskey and explaining why the universe doesn’t give a damn about our carefully constructed dreams. Nobody wants the poetry that smells like cigarette smoke, wet pavement, hospital corridors, and the last breath of something that once believed in forever.

Maybe I’m too dark. Maybe my words have too many crooked teeth. Maybe I don’t know how to dress a wound in something fashionable enough to sell. I’ve never been particularly good at polishing the ugliness out of things. I prefer the rust, the bruises, the cracked windshield through which the whole goddamn world looks like a beautiful accident. I want my poetry to have dirt beneath its fingernails. I want it to stagger through a dive bar at three in the morning, arguing with God over a spilled drink and a lifetime of unanswered questions.

And there are days when I wonder whether I’m simply shouting into an abandoned warehouse, whether every book I’ve published is another message in a bottle washing up on a shore where nobody lives. I wonder how many more pages a man can fill before he starts mistaking the sound of his own heartbeat for applause. I’ve celebrated small victories in empty rooms, raised imaginary glasses to imaginary readers, and watched the numbers sit there like undertakers waiting for the next funeral.

But here’s the goddamn joke: I cannot seem to stop.

The words keep coming, unruly little bastards kicking down the doors of my imagination. They arrive in the shower, at red lights, in the middle of sleepless nights when the ceiling resembles an unfinished manuscript and the moon looks like a bad editor with a hangover. I write because the alternative is allowing all these ghosts to take up permanent residence inside me. I write because somewhere between the first sentence and the final period, the world briefly makes a crooked kind of sense.

So perhaps I’ll never be the bestselling poet. Perhaps my books will continue collecting dust while lesser sentences collect fortunes. Perhaps the only standing ovation I’ll ever receive will come from the radiator rattling in an empty room.

But I have never needed a bestseller list to tell me whether something is worth bleeding for.

I am the author who can’t sell a poetry book, but I am still here, still sharpening my sentences against the bones of yesterday, still turning the wreckage into something resembling art. And if nobody wants to read what I’ve written, that’s their fucking privilege.

I’ll just keep writing.

Because somewhere in this miserable, magnificent circus, there is still a poem I haven’t written, a truth I haven’t exposed, and a little piece of hell I haven’t yet managed to put into words.

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Storm Fragments

ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

I’m waiting for the day to never wake up, not because I have forgotten how beautiful the morning can be, but because somewhere between yesterday’s disappointments and tomorrow’s expectations, I became exhausted from pretending that being alive and feeling alive were the same thing. I have mastered the art of opening my eyes while keeping the rest of me asleep. I can smile with a mouth that has forgotten its language, answer questions with a voice that sounds convincingly human, and walk through a room full of people while feeling like a ghost haunting a house that no longer belongs to me. Nobody notices the little funerals happening inside a person who is still breathing. They see the body, the familiar face, the ordinary gestures, but they never think to ask what it costs to keep carrying a soul that has grown tired of its own weight.

There is a peculiar loneliness in being the person everyone assumes is fine. You become a dependable piece of furniture in other people’s lives, something they lean against when the world becomes unbearable, never considering that the wood might be splitting beneath their hands. You learn to swallow your sorrow without making a sound, to fold your disappointments into smaller and smaller pieces until they fit somewhere behind your ribs. Eventually, you forget what it feels like to speak without translating your pain into something acceptable. You become fluent in I’m tired, when what you really mean is that your spirit has been working overtime, that your heart has accumulated debts no amount of sleep can repay, that you are desperately searching for a reason to believe the next sunrise might offer something different from the last.

And the nights, God, the nights. They know everything. They know the names I no longer say aloud, the conversations I replay until their words lose their original meaning, the mistakes I have carried longer than some people carry their happiest memories. Darkness does not ask me to explain myself. It sits beside me like an old acquaintance who has witnessed every version of my unraveling and never once pretended to be surprised. I stare at the ceiling while the clock performs its small, merciless mathematics, measuring the distance between who I was and the stranger I sometimes find waiting in the mirror. Somewhere outside, the world continues its ridiculous insistence on moving forward. Cars pass. Dogs bark. Someone laughs. A refrigerator hums in the kitchen. Life carries on with an indifference that feels almost insulting when you are struggling to remember why you should carry on with it.

I wonder how many people have stood in the middle of an ordinary afternoon and quietly wished they could disappear from the responsibilities of being themselves. How many have sat at dinner tables, nodded through conversations, kissed the people they love, and hidden an entire universe of sadness behind the simple declaration that everything is okay. We are a species of beautifully disguised disasters, decorating our wounds with humor, dressing our insecurities in confidence, and calling our emotional starvation independence. We praise one another for being strong when perhaps what we need is permission to put the armor down. Sometimes strength is not another day of pretending. Sometimes strength is admitting that the weight has become too much and allowing another human being to help carry it.

I have spent too much of my life believing that I must be useful to be worthy of being loved. That I must provide something, fix something, create something, or endure something before I have earned the right to occupy space in another person’s heart. Even my sadness feels like an inconvenience, another unfinished responsibility I should have learned to manage by now. So I hide it beneath the ordinary debris of living, burying it beneath work, conversations, unfinished projects, and the thousand little obligations that keep a person occupied without necessarily keeping them whole. I become the architect of my own disappearance, not leaving the room but withdrawing the parts of myself that once made being there meaningful.

Perhaps that is what frightens me most: not that I have become sad, but that sadness has started to feel familiar. It has learned the layout of my house. It knows where I keep my memories and which floorboards creak beneath my footsteps. It sits at the breakfast table. It rides beside me in the car. It follows me into moments that should be happy, whispering that joy is temporary and disappointment has a permanent address. I know this voice is not the whole truth, but knowing something intellectually does not always make the heart believe it. A person can understand the weather forecast and still feel unprepared when the storm arrives.

Still, somewhere beneath all this accumulated darkness, there remains a small, stubborn part of me that has not surrendered its curiosity. It wonders whether there might be a morning when the light enters the room differently, when a familiar song reaches a place inside me that has been silent for too long, when someone’s unexpected kindness reminds me that I have not become as invisible as I sometimes feel. It wonders whether healing might arrive without trumpets or grand revelations, appearing instead as a cup of coffee shared in comfortable silence, a conversation in which I no longer have to pretend, or an afternoon when the future feels less like a punishment and more like an unwritten page.

I do not know when that morning will come. I am not going to insult my own exhaustion by pretending that a few hopeful sentences can dismantle years of accumulated hurt. Some wounds require more than patience; they require honesty, companionship, and the courage to ask for help before the darkness convinces us that we are beyond helping. I am learning that I do not have to solve my entire life tonight. I do not have to manufacture happiness or force myself to become the person everyone remembers. Perhaps I only need to make room for the possibility that the person I am today deserves the same tenderness I would offer someone else who was hurting.

So, yes, there are nights when I am waiting for the day to never wake up, when the thought of facing another morning feels heavier than the darkness surrounding me. But perhaps what I am truly waiting for is the day I no longer have to fight so hard to exist inside my own life. The day I can tell the truth without apologizing for it. The day I stop confusing silence with peace and endurance with healing. The day I understand that I can be exhausted without being defeated, broken without being worthless, and uncertain without being beyond redemption.

Until then, I will try to remain here for the unfinished things. For the words still waiting inside me, for the people who might need to hear that someone understands, for the small and unremarkable moments that have not yet revealed their meaning. I will try to remember that even the darkest chapter is still a chapter, not necessarily the final page. And if I cannot believe in a beautiful tomorrow, perhaps I can borrow enough belief to make it through tonight.

Maybe that is how we survive sometimes: not through grand declarations of courage, but through tiny acts of staying. One breath. One conversation. One honest admission that we are not okay. One hand extended toward someone who might understand.

I am tired of pretending the darkness does not exist.

I am tired of being the person who knows how to help everyone except himself.

I am tired of waking up carrying yesterday’s ghosts.

But somewhere beneath the exhaustion, beneath the sorrow, beneath all the words I have used to disguise what I cannot bear to say aloud, there is still a heartbeat. Quiet. Imperfect. Uncertain.

For tonight, I will listen to it.

Not because I have found all the answers, but because I have not yet discovered everything this life might still give me.

And perhaps, for now, that is enough.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

Some people grow older without ever growing. Time touches their faces, changes their bodies, buries people they once loved, and gives them years they mistake for wisdom. But beneath it all, they remain children in the darkest sense, ruled by impulse, protected by pride, and completely unaware of the damage they leave behind.

They walk through life carrying a mirror they never dare to look into. Instead, they hold it toward everyone else. They study the flaws of others with an almost religious devotion, searching for imperfections that might distract from the emptiness staring back at them. They can tell you everything that is wrong with another person, yet remain completely incapable of recognizing the poison within themselves.

They lack the awareness to understand that every wound does not make them a victim. Sometimes they are the wound. Sometimes they are the reason someone stopped speaking, stopped trusting, stopped believing, or quietly disappeared. But accountability requires a depth of honesty they have never developed. So they rewrite the story until they are innocent again.

They call their cruelty honesty. They call their anger passion. They call their selfishness independence. They call their inability to communicate a personality trait. They call their refusal to change standing their ground. They have a name for everything except the truth.

The truth is that emotional intelligence requires humility. It requires sitting alone with the parts of yourself you would rather bury. It requires asking what you did, what you said, what you failed to understand, and how much pain your behavior caused. It requires the terrifying realization that you may not be the hero of your own story.

Some people would rather destroy every relationship around them than face that realization.

So they continue. They repeat the same patterns with different people. They carry the same bitterness into every room and wonder why every room eventually becomes empty. They blame betrayal, jealousy, disrespect, abandonment, misunderstanding, and bad luck. Anything is easier than admitting that they have spent years becoming the very thing they claim to hate.

And perhaps that is the darkest form of ignorance. Not the inability to know, but the refusal to know. The refusal to look inward when the evidence is everywhere. The refusal to grow when life has given them every reason to.

Eventually, people stop trying to reach them. They stop explaining what should have been obvious. They stop offering pieces of themselves to someone who keeps breaking them and calling it misunderstanding.

And the person who never grew remains exactly where they have always been, surrounded by the ruins of relationships they could have saved, staring through a window at a world they believe abandoned them, never realizing that the door was never locked.

They simply never learned how to open it.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

Love Remembers the Soul

Sex isn’t love. Sometimes it is simply two people reaching for warmth in the darkness, trying to forget for a little while that the world can be a lonely place. It can be beautiful, tender, passionate, and honest in its own way. It can make the distance between two people disappear for a moment and convince you that you’ve found something deeper than the night itself. But when morning comes, the body remembers what the heart doesn’t.

Sex can make you feel wanted without making you feel known. It can make you feel desired without making you feel understood. Someone can know every part of your body and still never learn the language of your sadness. They can hold you close without ever understanding what keeps you awake at night. They can know how to make you feel good without knowing what makes you feel whole. Knowing someone’s body is not the same thing as knowing their soul.

Love takes longer. Love doesn’t always arrive with fireworks or passion. Sometimes it arrives quietly, almost unnoticed, in the ordinary moments that nobody writes songs about. It is making coffee the way someone likes it. It is remembering something they mentioned months ago. It is sitting beside them when they are sick. It is listening to the same story because you know they need to tell it again. Love is found in the mundane because love isn’t always looking for a moment; sometimes it is building a life.

Love stays when there is nothing to gain. It stays when you’re tired, angry, insecure, frightened, or broken. It sees the parts of you that you carefully hide from everyone else and doesn’t immediately turn away. It knows your failures and your weaknesses, the scars you don’t talk about and the memories you wish you could erase, and somehow still finds a reason to sit beside you.

Sex can say, “I want you.” Love says, “I am here.” There is nothing wrong with wanting someone. Desire is human, and when desire exists between two people who genuinely love each other, it can become something beautiful. But desire alone cannot carry the weight of love. It can burn intensely and still disappear by morning. Not every flame was meant to become a home.

And love isn’t sex either. Love doesn’t disappear because two bodies aren’t touching. Love can exist across a room, across a city, across years. It can live in a photograph, in an old voicemail, in a familiar song, in the empty side of a bed. It can exist in the quiet knowledge that someone matters to you even when they aren’t physically beside you.

Sometimes love is sleeping beside someone without asking anything of them. Sometimes it is holding their hand when there is nothing you can say to make things better. Sometimes it is kissing their forehead and letting them sleep. Sometimes it is simply saying, “Rest. I’ve got you,” and meaning it with every part of yourself.

We have confused hunger with devotion for so long that we’ve forgotten they speak different languages. Desire reaches for what it wants in the moment. Love considers what the other person needs tomorrow. Desire can be impatient. Love learns patience. Desire wants to possess the moment. Love wants to protect the person.

Sex can bring two bodies together, but love teaches two people how to remain together when the excitement changes, when the years become heavier, when life stops being romantic and starts being real. Love is what happens when you choose someone even after you’ve seen them without the illusion, without the perfect lighting, without the beginning-of-the-relationship magic.

Because the deepest intimacy isn’t always found beneath the sheets. Sometimes it is found in the silence after an argument when neither person wants to leave. Sometimes it is found in forgiveness. Sometimes it is found in vulnerability, when someone finally tells you what they’ve been afraid to say and trusts you enough not to use it against them.

Sex can make you feel close to someone, but love makes you feel safe being completely yourself. Sex can touch your body, but love touches the places inside you that nobody else can reach. Sex can give you a memory, but love can become the reason you remember an entire lifetime differently.

And perhaps that is what we’ve been searching for all along. Not someone who simply wants our bodies, but someone who wants to know what lives inside them. Someone who stays after the beautiful moments have passed. Someone who doesn’t measure affection by physical desire, but by presence, patience, kindness, loyalty, and the quiet decision to keep choosing you.

Sex can be a moment. Love becomes a history. Sex can make the heart race. Love can calm it. Sex can make you feel desired. Love makes you feel cherished. Sex can bring someone into your bed, but love invites them into your life.

And when the lights go out, when beauty changes and desire loses some of its urgency, when years have written themselves across our faces and life has taken away some of the things we once thought would last forever, what remains is not the hunger. What remains is the hand still reaching for yours in the darkness.

That is love.

Love isn’t sex.

Sex isn’t love.

They may sometimes walk beside each other, and when they do, there can be something extraordinarily beautiful about it. But one does not prove the other. You don’t have to give your body to prove your heart, and you don’t have to possess someone’s body to prove that you love them.

Because eventually, the body changes, the fire settles, the nights become ordinary, and the years move faster than we ever imagined they would. And if love was real, there will still be someone beside you when the passion becomes quiet, someone who knows your silence, someone who remembers who you were, understands who you’ve become, and still reaches across the darkness to find your hand.

That is the difference.

Sex touches the body.

Love remembers the soul.

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The Raven’s Poison
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

Every book has a beginning.

Sometimes it begins with an idea, a dream, or a single sentence. For me, The Raven’s Poison began long before I ever knew I was writing a book. In fact, it began before I even understood that what I was writing was poetry.

I grew up with my mother constantly in and out of the hospital. My parents were divorced, my sister was the oldest, and I was the youngest. My mother needed a liver transplant, and although the transplant gave her years she otherwise might not have had, the medications she took over time eventually damaged her kidneys.

When I was young, I remember being told, “She won’t live long.”

Those words stayed somewhere inside me.

Yet my mother defied that expectation. She became the longest-living recipient of a liver transplant at the time, living for twelve years after her transplant. She passed away in 1994.

I was twenty years old.

When I was fourteen, I moved in with my father. I still remember sitting in the car with my mother when she was crying and telling me that it made sense for me to go. I didn’t fully understand everything that was happening around me. I only knew that something in my life was changing, and I didn’t know how to process it.

So I began writing.

I didn’t call it poetry. I didn’t think of myself as a poet. I simply wrote down what I couldn’t say.

Those early words became a place where I could put my confusion, grief, anger, loneliness, and everything else I didn’t have the language for. Looking back now, I realize that poetry had found me before I ever realized I was searching for it.

Eventually, I dropped out of college. I felt lost, and I moved in with my girlfriend at the time. She was an artistic person studying photography in college, and she appreciated my writing. She encouraged that part of me.

But my life wasn’t in a good place.

Somewhere along the way, I became someone I wasn’t.

A few years later, I moved back home to try to put my life back together. I returned to school and began rebuilding myself. Eventually, I met a woman at my brother’s wedding. We fell in love, married, and began a life together. She had a daughter when we met, and over the years, our family grew in its own complicated way.

Throughout much of my marriage, I hid my poetry.

I kept that part of myself tucked away.

Over the years, my marriage began to unravel. My wife became an alcoholic, and somewhere along the way, we drifted apart. My father had also struggled with alcoholism, and I began to recognize patterns in my own life that I hadn’t understood before.

I also had to confront something about myself.

I was immature. I lacked the courage and confidence to speak honestly about what was happening. I didn’t know how to set boundaries. I didn’t know how to stand up for myself.

Then her daughter witnessed her mother drunk.

That changed everything.

During the divorce, my ex-wife attempted suicide while her daughter was in the house. Her daughter called me, and I walked her through what to do. At the same time, I was struggling to hold myself together.

That was when I realized I needed help.

I went to therapy.

For a year, I sat with someone and began confronting parts of myself that I had spent years avoiding. I continued writing. Slowly, I began understanding that writing wasn’t simply something I did—it was one of the ways I understood my life.

Therapy taught me something important:

You cannot change what you refuse to face.

I began setting goals. I learned to make short-term goals and long-term goals. I learned to be more honest with myself. I learned that healing doesn’t mean forgetting what happened. Sometimes healing means finally allowing yourself to understand what happened.

A few years after my divorce, I learned that my ex-wife had lost her job, lost her home, and ultimately died by suicide.

There are experiences in life that don’t fit neatly into words.

Grief is one of them.

Therapy helped me finally begin dealing with the grief of losing my mother—grief I had carried for years without truly confronting. I had spent so much of my life moving forward that I never realized how much of my past was still following me.

I learned that there is no expiration date on grief.

You can carry something for decades and still eventually find a way to put it down.

Eventually, I remarried. I found someone who supported my dreams, encouraged my goals, and allowed me to become more fully myself.

And somewhere along that journey, I returned to my writing.

That brings me to The Raven’s Poison.

This book isn’t simply a collection of poems. It represents the choices we make—and the choices we don’t make. It represents the patterns we inherit, the patterns we repeat, and the patterns we eventually learn to break.

There is darkness in these pages, but there is also growth.

There is pain, but there is also hope.

There are things I wish I had done differently. There are things I wish I had understood sooner. But I have learned that regret doesn’t have to become a life sentence.

We are never too old to change.

We are never too old to learn.

We are never too old to become someone better than the person we were yesterday.

The Raven’s Poison is, in many ways, a reflection of that belief.

The raven represents the things that follow us—the memories, mistakes, grief, fears, and patterns that can become almost like shadows. The poison represents what happens when we allow those things to remain inside us unchecked.

But poison doesn’t have to be the end of the story.

We can choose to confront it.

We can choose to heal.

We can choose differently.

Today, I am in a place I never thought I would be. I have a wife and a son whom I deeply love. I have goals. I have dreams. I write. And perhaps most importantly, I am still working on myself.

I don’t believe any of us ever truly finish that work.

The Raven’s Poison is my reminder of that.

It is a book born from loss, mistakes, grief, relationships, choices, and ultimately, growth.

It is a reminder that our past may explain us, but it doesn’t have to define us.

And sometimes, the words we write while we’re trying to survive become the very words that help us understand how we lived.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

The lie is never loud at first. It arrives in polished briefings, measured pauses, and carefully chosen words that ask a frightened nation to trust without question. It wears the costume of certainty, even when certainty does not exist. Behind podiums and television lights, truth can become negotiable, shaved into something more convenient than honest.

If history judges him as having misled Americans, it will not be because science change, that is what science is meant to do, but because trust fractures when confidence outruns evidence, when inconvenient questions are dismissed instead of answered, and when transparency becomes selective. A nation can forgive mistakes made in uncertainty more easily than it forgives the feeling that it was managed rather than informed.

The deepest wound is not disagreement over masks, mandates, or laboratories. It is the suspicion that ordinary people were expected to carry burdens while those in power carried narratives. Once doubt enters the bloodstream of democracy, every future warning competes with yesterday’s unanswered questions.

Truth has a stubborn habit of surviving every press conference. It waits beneath headlines, beneath politics, beneath the applause and the outrage. And when the lights fade and the microphones are packed away, history asks only one question of every public servant: Were you honest with the people who trusted you?

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

I have spent so much of myself believing that if I loved you harder, listened better, held you longer, or gave you every beautiful piece of my heart, one day you would finally feel full. But there is a quiet grief in realizing that I will never be enough to make you happy. No amount of tenderness I offer can reach the place inside you that I cannot touch. I could empty my soul into your hands, and you would still leave with room for more.

Perhaps that is the cruelest kind of love, not that I have too little to give, but that everything I have is still not what you need. And so I remain here, carrying a love that is endless, while learning that someone can give you their entire world and still never become the home you’re searching for.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

My son, you are the quiet miracle that gave my life a new horizon. Before you, I measured my days by time. After you, I measured them by your laughter, your courage, your dreams, and every step you took toward becoming yourself.

You are not simply part of my world. You are the reason it shines. Every hope I carry, every prayer I whisper, every strength I discover begins and ends with you. If I could gather every star from the night sky, they still would not equal the light you bring into my heart.

No matter how tall you grow or where life carries you, you will always be the greatest love I have ever known. My son, you are my heart walking through the world, my greatest joy, my endless pride, my everything.

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excerpt from “The Raven’s Poison”
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Once upon a midnight fear
She took a sip of corrosion
Debilitating manners and quirks
Fumbling through a frenzy
Gliding inside hallucinations
Staggering outside the commotions
A recollection of mourning


Stern exchanges melting
Comments and remarks growl
Sentiments dressed in black
Treasures whispering hush
Ripping dead skin with caution
Crumbling faith turns into dirt
A recollection of mourning


Hunger flexing with animosity
Greed panting with saliva
In holy matrimony with the raven
She tasted the hollow bitterness
Numb and disgusted by the poison
Infuriated with the toxic rants
A recollection of mourning


Provoked by exasperation
Anxiety wrapped around her neck
Choking on sour corruption
Addicted to the murmurs
Inhaling the virulent winds
Wounded by a malicious tongue
A recollection of mourning


A catastrophic touch bellowed
Infatuation hung as a disaster
Benevolence was a chewed up dog bone
Loneliness exhaled rapidly
Sympathy was a an old rag
Love was just mucus from a cough
A recollection of mourning

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

At 3:45 AM, the house was silent except for the tired hum of the refrigerator and the restless ticking of a clock I had never noticed before. Funny how certain sounds only reveal themselves when your illusions finally die. The darkness sat beside me like an old friend, patient and knowing, while I stared at the ceiling and replayed every conversation, every touch, every promise that once felt sacred.

I used to think love was hidden in the little things. The way you smiled when I walked through the door. The way your fingers found mine without thinking. The way your voice softened when you spoke my name. I built entire cathedrals out of those moments. I carved meaning into ordinary gestures and called it devotion. I turned crumbs into feasts and shadows into sunlight because I wanted so desperately to believe.

But at 3:45 AM, truth arrived without knocking. Truth is cruel that way. It does not storm through the front door. It slips through cracks in your heart. It waits until the excuses grow tired and the lies lose their disguises. Then it settles into the room beside you and asks a question you have spent months avoiding: what if she never loved you the way you loved her?

The question sat in my chest like a stone. I thought about the countless hours spent working late, convincing myself that sacrifice was proof of commitment. I remembered every exhausted morning, every missed opportunity, every dream postponed because I wanted to build a future sturdy enough for two people. I carried the weight gladly because I thought we were carrying it together. Now, in the dim blue glow of the clock, I realized I had been carrying both of us alone.

Suddenly, memories began changing shape. Moments I once painted gold revealed the rust beneath them. The excitement in your voice was brightest when money entered the conversation. Your affection seemed strongest after bonuses, promotions, overtime shifts. The arguments rarely centered on love, respect, or understanding. They circled finances like vultures circling a wounded animal. I hated myself for noticing, because once you see something, you cannot unsee it.
The realization felt like standing in a museum and discovering every masterpiece was a forgery. The colors remained beautiful. The frames remained elegant. But the authenticity was gone, and without authenticity, beauty becomes decoration. Maybe that is what I had become—decoration. A provider. A paycheck wearing a heartbeat.

The thought hollowed me out. Outside, the moon hung low above the sleeping neighborhood, pale and distant. Streetlights cast long amber shadows across the pavement, and for a moment I imagined my life from above. Years of effort. Years of loyalty. Years of believing that love was something earned through consistency and sacrifice. Maybe that was my mistake. Love should never have to be purchased, not with money, not with exhaustion, not with pieces of yourself surrendered one at a time until there is nothing left but obligation.

I realized I could list every bill I paid, every burden I carried, every problem I solved. Yet I struggled to remember the last time I felt truly seen. Not appreciated for what I provided. Not admired for what I accomplished. Seen. The difference suddenly felt enormous. A wallet is useful. A person is loved.
At 3:45 AM, I understood that I had confused usefulness with affection. And that realization hurt more than anger ever could. Anger is hot. It burns quickly. It gives you something to fight. This was different. This was winter. A cold settling over memories that once kept me warm.

All the moments I silenced my own instincts because admitting the truth felt unbearable. Hope is a stubborn thing. It keeps watering dead flowers long after the garden has surrendered. I had been tending a garden of ghosts. Yet somewhere beneath the grief, another feeling emerged: relief. Small at first. Barely noticeable. Like the first gray hint of dawn beyond a black horizon. Because truth, no matter how painful, is lighter than pretending.

For the first time in a long time, I stopped negotiating with reality. I stopped rewriting the story to protect my heart. I stopped searching for evidence that contradicted what I already knew. Maybe you loved what I gave. Maybe you loved what I could provide. Maybe you loved the comfort, the security, the stability. But love should reach for the soul before it reaches for the wallet, and if it doesn’t, then it isn’t love I was mourning—it was an illusion.

At 3:45 AM, I finally buried it. The clock continued ticking. The refrigerator continued humming. The world continued turning. Yet something inside me had changed forever.

The pain remained, but it no longer felt like a prison. It felt like a doorway. Beyond it waited uncertainty, loneliness, and healing. Beyond it waited mornings where I no longer had to earn affection through sacrifice. Beyond it waited the possibility of being valued not for what I could give, but for who I was.
And as the first traces of dawn began softening the darkness outside my window, I realized something surprising. The saddest part was not discovering that she may have loved the paycheck more than the person. The saddest part was how long I believed that was all I deserved. The most beautiful part was finally understanding that it wasn’t.

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Storm Fragments

ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

I call myself black, not as a surrender, but as a language I learned before I had the words to explain anything else. It is the color I reach for when everything feels too loud, too exposed, too eager to be understood. Black is where I hide my edges, where I fold my contradictions into something that looks simple from the outside. It is not emptiness to me. It is containment. It is the quiet decision to hold everything in rather than spill it where it might be misunderstood.

You laugh at my sickness and whisper “Fuck You” with a grin in my ear. Am I supposed to be rattled?

I have worn it in different forms. Sometimes as silence. Sometimes as restraint. Sometimes as the way I walk into a room and refuse to be rearranged by it. Black is not sadness in my story—it is structure. It is the frame around everything I have survived without naming each fracture out loud. It is what remains when I stop performing brightness for the comfort of others.

You stare into my predator like eyes and feel a closeness with your “Fuck You” tone.

But even in that certainty, there is a pull I do not always admit.

Because I do not only want to be what I am. I want, in the hidden corners of thought, to be the color you despise the most. Not because I crave your rejection, but because I want to matter enough to provoke something real. Indifference feels like erasure. But dislike, even resistance, means I have entered your emotional world in a way that cannot be ignored.

There is a strange honesty in being despised. It means you have been seen without softness, without polishing, without the convenient filters people use to make each other easier to tolerate. I do not romanticize that feeling, but I understand its weight. To be disliked is still to be acknowledged. To be remembered. To leave a mark that does not fade politely into the background.

I imagine sometimes being that color in your mind—the one you associate with a feeling you cannot quite settle. Not light enough to forgive easily. Not soft enough to dismiss. A shade that lingers after the moment is over, sitting quietly in the edges of your thoughts when you are alone and honest.

Come on say it again – “Fuck You!” I dare you.

And yet, even that desire is not really about hatred. It is about presence. About refusing to be temporary in someone’s emotional landscape. I do not want to be something you pass through without noticing. I want to be something you cannot fully unsee, even when you try.

Black remains my foundation. My beginning and my return. But beneath it, or maybe beside it, there is this quieter contradiction: the wish to be transformed in your perception, to become a color that carries weight in your memory, even if that weight is uncomfortable.

Because being forgotten feels like the only true disappearance.

And I would rather be a color you struggle with than a silence you never had to acknowledge at all.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

They speak to me as if I am less than human, as if my silence is permission and my patience is weakness. Every insult lands like ash on my skin. Every curse digs a little deeper, settling beneath the surface where bruises cannot be seen. I stand there, carrying words that were never meant to heal, only to wound.


Some days I replay the threats in the dark. The venom in a voice. The promise of harm disguised as power. “I will make you a widow.” “I will drown you.” Sentences that linger long after they are spoken, circling the room like hungry crows. They stain the air. They turn ordinary moments into shadows. They teach the heart to expect storms even beneath clear skies.


And still, I remain. Not untouched, not unbroken, but standing. A house battered by years of weather. A forest scarred by fire. The darkness has learned my name, yet it has not claimed me. The cruelty they offered became a river, and though it tried to pull me under, I learned how to breathe beneath black water and return to the surface carrying every wound like proof that I survived.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

There is a strange loneliness in being loved by voices that live hundreds of miles away while sharing a roof with strangers who know the shape of your face but have forgotten the language of your heart.


The people on glowing screens ask how you are sleeping. They remember the stories you told months ago. They notice when your laughter sounds forced. They reach across impossible distances and somehow find you. Yet in the rooms around you, doors open and close like quiet verdicts. Plates clatter. Televisions hum. Conversations pass through the house like ghosts through walls, never stopping long enough to touch you.


You sit among them and feel absent.
The couch beside you remains occupied, but the silence between you stretches wider than oceans. You learn that proximity is a poor substitute for connection. You learn that a person can be surrounded by family, by partners, by familiar footsteps, and still feel as though they have been abandoned in the center of an empty city.


At night, the house settles into darkness. You hear life happening behind closed doors and wonder when exactly you became a visitor here. When exactly your words stopped mattering. When exactly your presence became furniture.


The cruelest distance is not measured in miles.
It is measured in unanswered questions, in eyes that no longer look up when you enter a room, in the hollow ache of realizing the people furthest away know more about your soul than the people who pass you in the hallway every day.


And so you keep reaching for those distant lights, those names on screens, those voices carried by invisible signals through the dark. Because sometimes the only place you feel seen is somewhere you have never been, by people you have never touched, while the people closest to you remain impossibly, devastatingly out of reach.

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Storm Fragments

ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

At 11:45 AM he parks beneath a sun that hangs over the asphalt like a tired overseer. The morning has already spent itself. Meetings, deadlines, errands, obligations, phone calls, reminders scribbled onto scraps of paper and tucked into pockets. The weight of being needed has followed him since before dawn. Husband. Father. Provider. Problem solver. The man who remembers what everyone else forgets. The man who fixes things before anyone notices they are broken. By lunchtime, the hours have already taken their share from him. His attention has been divided a hundred different ways, pulled by responsibilities that never seem to end. He feels the familiar fatigue settling into his shoulders, not the exhaustion of hard labor, but the quieter weariness that comes from carrying a life filled with expectations.

The restaurant is nothing special, a fast food place wedged between a gas station and a pharmacy. The sign hums softly above the drive thru while cars drift through the parking lot beneath the heat of the day. Inside, the scent of salt and grease hangs in the air. A teenager wipes down tables with absentminded motions. The soda machine rattles. The fryer crackles. It is ordinary in every possible way, which is exactly why he likes it. There is comfort in places that ask nothing of you. He orders the same meal he always does. A burger. Fries. A Coke. Nothing expensive. Nothing memorable. Food that arrives quickly and expects no conversation.

Tray in hand, he chooses the booth furthest from everyone else. The seat creaks beneath him as he settles in. Sunlight pours through the window and stretches across the table like a warm blanket. He unwraps the burger slowly, not because he is hungry, but because he is savoring something else entirely. For the first time all day, there is no one asking a question. No one needs an answer. No one needs a problem solved. No one needs him to make a decision. The silence arrives gradually, cautious and unfamiliar at first, before finally settling beside him. He welcomes it like an old friend.

Outside, the world continues moving without hesitation. Cars pass. People hurry from one obligation to another. Someone laughs into a phone. Someone argues with a coworker. A delivery truck unloads boxes near the pharmacy entrance. Life continues its endless march. Yet inside this booth, time seems to slow. He takes a bite of the burger. The flavors are simple and predictable. Salt. Bread. Meat. Nothing extraordinary. Yet somehow it tastes better than meals served in nicer places. Perhaps because this meal is not simply about eating. It is about disappearing for a little while. It is about finding a corner of the day where he can exist without being responsible for anyone except himself.

His thoughts begin to loosen their grip. Not vanish completely, but soften around the edges. The mortgage payment due next week fades into the background. The repairs waiting at home lose their urgency. Work emails, school schedules, insurance paperwork, grocery lists, upcoming appointments, and all the countless details that fill every day retreat into the distance. For twenty minutes he allows himself to set those burdens down. They will still be there when he returns. They always are. But right now they can wait.

Most people would never notice the significance of such a moment. They would see only a man eating lunch alone in a corner booth. A forgettable figure among countless others. Yet there is something sacred hidden within the ordinary. There is a quiet dignity in giving yourself permission to rest before exhaustion hardens into frustration. There is wisdom in stepping away from the constant demands of life long enough to hear your own thoughts again. Solitude is often mistaken for loneliness, but they are not the same thing. Loneliness is an emptiness. Solitude is a refuge.

He watches sunlight shimmer against the windshield of a nearby truck. Dust drifts lazily through beams of light. An old song plays over the restaurant speakers, one he has not heard in years. The melody unlocks something buried beneath the surface. For a brief moment he remembers being younger. He remembers afternoons that belonged entirely to him, before calendars became crowded and responsibilities multiplied. The memory brings a small smile to his face. Not because he wishes to return to those years, but because he has traveled far enough to appreciate them. There is a certain gratitude that arrives only with time.

The fries grow cold beside him. Ice shifts quietly inside the plastic cup. He takes another sip of Coke and lets the carbonation sting his throat. Around him, conversations rise and fall like distant waves. None of them require his attention. None of them belong to him. The realization feels strangely liberating. For once, he is not carrying the emotional weight of a room. He is simply another person passing through the day.

Soon the meal is nearly finished. The burger wrapper lies crumpled on the tray. Only a few fries remain. He checks the time and feels the familiar tug of reality returning. The afternoon is waiting. Work is waiting. Home is waiting. There will be more questions, more decisions, more responsibilities seeking his attention. There always are. And he will return to them willingly because the people he loves are worth every sacrifice. Love is often less glamorous than people imagine. More often than not, it is found in consistency. It is showing up when you are tired. It is carrying burdens without complaint. It is choosing responsibility every day.

Before standing, he allows himself one final moment of stillness. He closes his eyes briefly and listens. The hum of the restaurant. The distant sound of traffic. The gentle clink of ice against plastic. Small sounds. Ordinary sounds. Yet together they create a rare and precious silence within him. A space where nothing is demanded. A space where he can simply exist.

Then he gathers his tray and rises from the booth. The spell is over. The world outside has not changed. The bills remain. The responsibilities remain. The endless motion of life continues exactly as before. Yet something inside him feels lighter. Not transformed. Not healed. Just steadier. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes all a man needs is a burger, fries, a Coke, and twenty quiet minutes at 11:45 AM to remember that even the strongest hearts deserve a place to rest.

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Storm Fragments
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

Apathy is an itch beneath the skin, a constant irritation no amount of scratching can soothe. It lingers in the quiet corners of conversations, in the hollow spaces between headlines and tragedies, in the tired shrug that follows another broken promise. Very few listen. Most only hear. Words pass through them like wind through dead branches, making noise but leaving nothing changed.

The itch grows. It crawls through crowded rooms and glowing screens, through prayers, protests, and desperate confessions. People nod, people agree, people move on. The world becomes a chorus of echoes, everyone speaking, almost no one listening.

And still the itch remains, demanding attention, demanding feeling. It is the discomfort of knowing something is wrong and watching indifference dress itself as wisdom. It is the ache of caring in a world that has learned how not to. It is the scratch that draws blood, the wound that refuses to close, the reminder that silence can be louder than any scream.

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April Winters
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I notice the exact moment your composure begins to fracture for me. It always starts in your breathing — slower at first, then uneven, little pauses caught between anticipation and surrender. I stand close enough to feel the warmth radiating from your skin, close enough to hear the soft sound that leaves your throat when my hand tilts your chin upward. That quiet, trembling noise is almost reverent, like your body is answering me before your mind can even catch up.

You obey so beautifully when I speak softly.

I tell you to stay still, and you try, though I can feel the effort shaking through you. Every breath turns fragile beneath my attention. Every glance you give me feels heavy with trust and hunger, with that deep craving to be guided somewhere darker than your own restraint would ever allow. I watch your lips part as another helpless sound escapes you, half moan, half surrender, and I swear I could live inside that moment forever.

There is something intoxicating about watching you yield willingly. Not because I force it from you, but because you ache to give it to me. Because every whispered command wraps around you like velvet chains, tightening slowly until all you can focus on is my voice and the heat building between us. You react to praise like it is oxygen. One low murmur of approval and your entire body softens, another shaky breath spilling from you as though you have been waiting desperately to hear it.

I move carefully with you, savoring every reaction. The subtle arch of your body toward my touch. The tiny whimpers you try unsuccessfully to swallow down. The way your pulse jumps when I lean close enough for my words to brush against your skin. You make the most beautiful sounds when you stop fighting your own desire, when you let yourself sink fully into obedience and trust me to hold the weight of it.

And I do hold it.

I hold every trembling exhale, every needy little gasp, every shiver that rolls through you when I tell you how good you are for me. I let the silence stretch just long enough for anticipation to consume you before I speak again, low and possessive, watching the sound of my voice alone pull another soft moan from your lips.

By then, you are already lost inside me completely.

Eyes heavy. Breathing broken. Every inch of you tuned to my approval like it is the only thing keeping your heart beating steadily. And when I finally praise you again, when I let my hand rest against your skin and tell you exactly how perfectly you surrender for me, the sound you make in response is almost enough to ruin my own control.

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April Winters
ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

Your beauty is dangerous in the quietest way. It doesn’t arrive all at once like lightning; it settles slowly into my bones, deepening every time you speak, every time you reveal another soft truth about yourself. The desire grows because it is not only your body that calls to me, but the way your soul moves beneath your skin. The way you care. The way your laughter lingers in my head long after the room has gone silent.

I think about you constantly, in fragments and floods. In the middle of conversations, in the silence before sleep, in the aching moments between one breath and the next. You have become a beautiful interruption to every ordinary thing. I crave your presence the way flowers ache toward sunlight, helpless to resist what makes them bloom.

And maybe that is what terrifies me most. Not how badly I want you, but how naturally it happens. How every piece of who you are pulls me closer without effort. Your beauty opened the door, but it was your heart, your mind, your softness, your fire that made me stay there, endlessly wandering the halls of you.

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ENTER THE STORM ON AMAZON

I move through my days like they’ve already happened, like I am remembering instead of living, untouched by urgency, untouched by fear. Time passes without asking anything of me, and I give it nothing back. The idea of an ending doesn’t disturb me; it just sits there, distant and weightless, like a horizon I don’t feel compelled to reach or avoid.

There is a quiet in not caring, a stillness that settles deeper than sadness ever could. No fight, no resistance, just a soft acceptance that everything fades whether I hold on or not. And no one will ever know if my poetry is me or something I invented to feel less invisible, whether these words are truth or just a shape I hide behind. If my name disappears, if my breath one day simply doesn’t return, it feels no more significant than any other moment slipping by unnoticed. I exist, and then I won’t, and somewhere in that truth is a calm I cannot quite explain.