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The bar breathes like an old animal—slow, practiced, familiar with survival. Not alive in any holy sense, just functional. Lights dim enough to forgive faces. Music limps between songs. The floor remembers every spill better than the people who caused them. This place doesn’t ask why you came in. It already knows.

Maynard Wells sits three stools from the end. He learned long ago that the end is a confession and the middle is a lie. He chooses the space where no one expects anything from him. His glass is whiskey because whiskey doesn’t pretend to be anything else. He didn’t need it. That never stopped him before.

Mara works the bar like a priest without absolution. She slides napkins under glasses the way you might tuck dirt over a grave—neat, respectful, temporary. She doesn’t ask Maynard how he’s doing. That’s how he knows she sees him clearly.

To his left, a couple dismantles their life in whispers. The dangerous kind—the kind sharpened over weeks. They smile for the room, but their eyes don’t participate. The man worries the rim of his bottle like it might answer back. The woman studies her drink as if it owes her instructions. Maynard doesn’t know their names, but he knows the posture of people realizing love has become labor.

Across the room, laughter blooms too loud and too fast. A cluster of friends leaning into one another, pretending gravity hasn’t started its work yet. One of them—red jacket, restless hands—keeps checking his phone. Waiting. Everyone here is waiting. They just use different excuses.

Loneliness doesn’t announce itself. It sits down beside you like it’s always belonged there. Orders what you’re already drinking. Says nothing. Maynard respects that. Silence, at least, doesn’t argue.

He tells himself he came here to write. That’s the version he prefers. The truth is messier: he came to be seen without being known. There’s a notebook in his jacket, thick with intention, thin with follow-through. It weighs enough to feel like hope without demanding proof. Writers carry notebooks the way some people carry prayers—unspoken, unfinished, still believed in.

The man at the end of the bar breaks open mid-sentence, spilling a story about a job lost or abandoned. The details shift, but the injustice remains solid. He gestures at empty air, arguing with something that left him years ago. No one interrupts. That’s the rule here. You let people speak until they’re done bleeding.

Maynard wonders what would happen if he spoke. If the truth would come out as poetry or complaint. If it would sound brave or just tired. There’s comfort in staying quiet. Quiet doesn’t get corrected.

Memory shows up wearing a familiar face. Orders the drink she used to love just to see if it still hurts. It does. She believed places like this were confessionals. Said you could hear the truth in how people ordered—neat if they were hiding, on the rocks if they were stalling, cheap if they’d already surrendered. She laughed with her whole body. Leaned in when she talked. Made strangers feel chosen. Maynard loved her for that. Hated himself for needing it. They were good until they made a sport out of wounding each other.

A song everyone knows finds its way out of the jukebox. Heads nod. Someone hums. For a brief moment, the room aligns—strangers stitched together by a chorus that once meant something in another life. Bars are good at compressing time. You can be young and old and heartbroken all at once if the music hits right.

Maynard writes: The mask slips here, but no one notices because everyone is busy adjusting their own. He doesn’t fix it. Overwriting feels like fear.

The door opens. Cold air follows a man who looks like he’s already lost something tonight. He orders a double without looking. Scans the room for a reason to stay. Doesn’t find one. Sits anyway.

Hope is quieter than people expect. It doesn’t shine. It doesn’t ask. It sits in the corner pretending it’s fine either way. Hope has learned manners.

The couple beside him stops whispering. The silence is surgical. The woman delivers a sentence she’s been sharpening for weeks. Clean. Accurate. The man nods like gravity has finally won. They don’t touch. That’s how you know something is finished—or close enough to mourn.

Mara wipes the bar, listening without collecting. Maynard wonders how many versions of the same story she’s heard. People explaining their loneliness as if it needs justification. As if it isn’t just another weather pattern.

He drinks. The burn proves he’s still capable of feeling something sharp. The glass leaves a ring on the bar—evidence that will be erased without ceremony. There’s a lesson there. He ignores it.

The red jacket starts talking about meaning. About how everyone is just trying to be less alone. His friends nod like this speech has been rehearsed in a hundred bars. He means it, though. Meaning doesn’t require originality. Just sincerity.

Maynard writes again: Loneliness isn’t the absence of people. It’s the absence of recognition. That one stays.

A siren passes outside, distant but insistent. The world hasn’t stopped just because they needed a pause. Inside, last call looms. The room groans. No one is eager to return to what’s waiting beyond these walls.

The man at the end pays, tips heavy like an apology, and stumbles toward the door. For a moment, Maynard worries about him. Then he remembers: everyone makes it home somehow. Or they don’t. Worry doesn’t change the math.

He thinks about who he’ll be tomorrow. Which stories he’ll tell. Which ones he’ll bury. This night will shrink into something manageable—a glass, a song, a feeling he never quite named. He’ll describe the bar someday and leave out the important parts because they’re too quiet to explain.

Maynard closes the notebook. Some moments don’t want to be captured. They want to be endured. He pays, thanks Mara, means it. She nods, already turning toward the next confession.

When he stands, the room tilts—not from the drink, but from the weight of everything unsaid. Outside, the street is colder and more honest. Neon buzzes behind him like a dare. He pulls his jacket tight, the notebook warm against his chest, and walks on.

This kind of night doesn’t stay behind when you leave.

It follows you.

My books are available here .

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I fear of never being read.

Once upon a scattered verse, I woke inside a sentence that refused to end. Ink dripped from the ceiling like old rain, letters crawling the walls, whispering my name as if they knew me better than the world ever had. The room was built of margins, left and right pressing inward, and every breath tasted like dusted books that had not been opened since their spines learned how to crack. I could not tell if I was young there, or old, or neither at all. Time doesn’t matter when no one is watching. I carried a pen like a dull blade, hoping if I pressed hard enough it might finally cut through silence. Outside the window, the moon hung crooked, a pale editor with nothing to say, and the stars looked like misplaced punctuation in a sentence no one bothered to finish.

I wrote because the quiet was too loud. I wrote because the walls leaned closer every time I tried to speak. I wrote about rivers swallowing names, about lovers who forgot the sound of their own laughter, about graves filled with unread prayers. I wrote until my fingers bruised purple, until the paper drank me dry, until my heart learned the steady rhythm of erasure. But no one came. There was no knock, no breath beneath the door. The world moved on with cleaner hands, scrolling past my life like an advertisement they could not skip fast enough. My words lay stacked in neat little coffins, titles etched like headstones, waiting for eyes that never arrived to pronounce them alive.

I imagined readers the way children imagine ghosts, half-hoping, half-afraid, convinced they were near. I pictured someone under a dim lamp at midnight, finding themselves inside my metaphors, feeling less alone because I had bled honestly. But imagination is a cruel lullaby. It tucks you in and leaves the window open for despair to climb inside. The nightmare deepened. Libraries turned their backs on me. Bookstores locked their doors with polished smiles. Even the wind refused to carry my lines, dropping them in gutters where rain smudged meaning into gray apology. I watched my poems age without witnesses, their voices cracking like neglected instruments left to rot in quiet rooms.

There is a special kind of decay reserved for unseen art. It does not scream; it wilts. It curls inward, questioning its own worth, asking if beauty exists at all without a gaze to confirm it. I felt that rot settle inside my chest, a slow mold growing over hope, soft and persistent, impossible to scrape away. I tried to write lighter things—sunrise, redemption, hands finding hands—but the words knew better than I did. They sagged, heavy with the truth that joy still wants to be witnessed. Even happiness grows lonely in a vacuum. Even miracles want applause, or at least a quiet nod from someone who understands.

So I returned to the dark. I described nights that chew on your spine, mirrors that refuse to reflect anything kind, dreams that end right before salvation. I became fluent in grief, conversational in despair, because sorrow, at least, kept me company. It sat beside me like a loyal stray, sharing its bones, never asking me to stop. I wrote my name again and again, afraid it would disappear if I didn’t. I tucked it between metaphors, hid it under enjambment, hoping someday someone would find it like a pressed flower in an old book and wonder who I had been. Legacy is a fragile thing when no one is listening.

The nightmare showed me the future. My notebooks boxed and labeled miscellaneous. My hard drive failing without ceremony. My words dissolving into obsolete formats. There was no obituary for the poems, no footnote acknowledging their effort. Just silence, vast and unmarked, stretching farther than language could reach. I screamed, but it came out as sentence. I begged, but it shaped itself into paragraph. Everything I felt turned into something beautiful, and that was the cruelest part of all. Beauty with no witness is still beauty, but it hurts like loving someone who will never learn your name.

At the center of the nightmare, I met myself as a child, holding a notebook too big for his hands. He looked up at me and asked if anyone heard us. I searched for an answer strong enough to survive the question and found none. So I lied. I told him yes, someday, because hope, even when false, is gentler than the truth. When I woke, the room was the same. Morning did not change anything. The world still spun without my voice, and my poems still waited, patient as graves. But I sat up anyway. I picked up the pen. Not because someone was watching, but because stopping would mean the nightmare had won.

I write for the unseen. For the maybe. For the never. For the chance that one day a stranger will stumble into my darkness and recognize it as their own. Until then, I haunt the page, a ghost made of ink and persistence, dreaming of eyes, dreaming of touch, dreaming—still—of being read.

My books are available here .

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My best friend is a blank page.

Once upon a broken heat I learned that loneliness does not arrive loudly. It does not knock or announce itself with ceremony. It seeps in, quiet as dusk, and takes a seat beside you as if it has always belonged there. I remember thinking that friends would come naturally, like breathing, like weather, like something no one ever had to explain. I did not know then that connection was a language I would struggle to speak, that depth would be my native tongue while most people preferred simple phrases and quick exits.

I tried to make friends the way everyone else seemed to. I smiled at the right moments. I laughed when laughter was expected. I learned how to talk about nothing at all for long stretches of time, though every word felt like gravel in my mouth. I wanted to ask the questions that mattered. I wanted to talk about grief and meaning and the way memories can bruise you without warning. Instead, I learned that too much honesty empties rooms. People like the idea of depth until they feel the pressure of it pulling at their lungs.

Some friendships began brightly, full of promise, like candles lit in dark rooms. We shared music, secrets, fragments of ourselves we did not show the rest of the world. I believed that meant permanence. I believed that once someone saw you clearly, they would not leave. I was wrong more times than I can count. People drifted. People changed. People decided my sadness was too heavy to carry, my silence too loud to ignore. They left without cruelty most of the time, which somehow hurt more. There is nothing to fight against when someone simply fades.

I mourned those friendships in private. There are no rituals for the loss of the living. No headstones for people who stop calling. No ceremonies for being replaced quietly. I replayed conversations late at night, searching for the moment where I became too much or not enough. I wondered if depth was a flaw, if craving meaning was something that needed to be cured. I tried to make myself smaller. I tried to speak less, feel less, need less. It never worked for long.

Then came the deaths. Real ones. The kind that do not return your messages because they can no longer hear them. Names that once filled rooms reduced to photographs and past tense. I watched people I loved disappear into the earth and into memory, and something in me hardened and hollowed at the same time. Grief rearranged the furniture of my mind. Every loss taught me how temporary everything is, how fragile every connection becomes once you understand it can vanish without warning.

After the funerals, the world expected me to continue as if something fundamental had not been removed. Conversations returned to normal. Laughter resumed. But I carried ghosts with me everywhere. I heard the dead in quiet moments, felt them in the spaces between sentences. Their absence became another companion, one that never asked me to explain myself.

It was then that the blank page became my closest friend. It waited for me every night, unmarked and unafraid. It did not judge the darkness of my thoughts or ask me to soften them. I could tell it everything. I could confess the resentment, the envy, the exhaustion of trying to belong. The page absorbed my words and held them without recoil. Ink became proof that I existed, that my inner world had weight and shape.

I began to understand that writing was not a hobby but a form of survival. When people left, the page stayed. When voices went silent forever, the page listened. I poured my losses into sentences and watched them transform into something almost bearable. Metaphor became a bridge between my pain and the possibility of being understood. Symbolism allowed me to say what I could never speak aloud.

I crave depth because shallow water has never taught me how to swim. I crave conversations that leave marks, that change you slightly after they end. I want connection that acknowledges suffering instead of avoiding it. I want friendships that understand silence as language, grief as history, and sadness as evidence of having loved deeply. This craving has cost me people. It has also saved me from living half awake.

The solitude did not leave, but it changed. It became quieter, less cruel. I learned to sit with it, to let it speak. In the absence of others, I became a witness to myself. I documented my own survival in paragraphs and fragments. I learned that being alone does not always mean being empty. Sometimes it means being full of things no one has asked you to share yet.

I still lose people. I still grieve. The blank page is still my truest companion. But within this solitude, I have found a strange, aching honesty. I write to remember the dead, to honor the friendships that could not stay, to speak the truths that make others uncomfortable. I write because depth demands expression, and silence would kill me faster than loneliness ever could.

My books are available here .

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Every drink has a confession

At the Jackknife Tavern sits a man, drinking his loss of love away. Beside him come and go a myriad of faces, men and women with lives sometimes down and out, perhaps sad, at times inspirational, always human. These are friends and neighbors, acquaintances, coworkers… Each with their own story to tell. The poet remains on his barstool, taking notes and creating art from life. Award-winning author and poet Braeden Michaels treats us to his eighth collection of prose poetry.

Available on Amazon! 📚

My books are available here .

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My love,

There are nights when language collapses under the weight of you. When every word I try to write turns into a trembling pulse, and the ink itself seems to breathe your name. I sit beneath the faint hum of the lamp, thinking of your mouth, your scent, the curve of your breath when it brushes against the idea of me. You are not merely a person anymore—you are an atmosphere I enter, willingly lost, deliriously drowning.

I desire you in ways that silence cannot disguise. You move through me like a fever I’ve stopped trying to cure. Every thought becomes your echo, every moment your shadow. I dream of you in pieces—the way your neck bends when you laugh, the way your lips seem to hold secrets that would burn if spoken aloud. I imagine tracing those secrets with my tongue, word by word, until truth and pleasure are indistinguishable.

Sometimes I think of you in the quietest parts of the day, where restraint pretends to live. But even then, I am undone. The thought of your fingers—how they might travel across my skin, searching, knowing—turns the air into fire. I would let you burn me down to ash if it meant being reborn inside your breath. I would trade a thousand calm lifetimes for one storm with you.

You haunt my imagination like a beautiful sin. Every fantasy begins with you walking through the threshold of my mind, uninvited yet expected, your presence an electric omen. I want the collision, the chaos, the unholy tenderness of our undoing. I want to forget where I end and you begin—to dissolve into the rhythm of your wanting until the world itself forgets to spin.

You are the poem I cannot stop writing, the one that ruins all other verses. I crave the weight of your gaze, the gravity of your silence when it settles on me. I love you in the way a starving thing loves its first taste of rain—wild, unmeasured, desperate to consume. There is something sacred in this madness, something pure in how unholy it feels.

When I close my eyes, I see us—not in perfection, but in ache. Your body against mine, not as conquest but as confession. Every sigh a psalm, every movement a prayer against loneliness. I want to memorize you in touch, to know your skin the way the night knows secrets: intimately, endlessly, without light.

Do you feel it too, that invisible tether pulling, tightening? It’s as though the universe stitched our hunger together and dared us to survive it. My love, I don’t want to survive it. I want to live inside it, to build a home in the wild pulse between your heart and mine.

If I could, I’d press this letter to your chest and let it melt there, word by word, until it became heat. Until all that remained was the truth beneath all language: that I desire you beyond thought, beyond restraint, beyond the limits of the human tongue.

—Yours in hunger, always.

My books are available here .

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Prologue to my new book coming out soon!

Jackknife Tavern

11:32am, situated on the corner of James Madison Boulevard and Whitman Street. I am sipping emptiness on the rocks in the scowling part of town, Jackknife Tavern. I’m sulking in the chestnut colored booth throwing darts at the bombastic God I use to love. I continue to taste the kisses of my skeptical past and shake hands with the skeleton of my future. I raise my clenched fist, “Hey brother, can you pour me another? If it’s not any trouble, make it a double.”

A Marylin Chambers look a like tapped me on the shoulders with an indecent proposal. I shook my head with a chuckle and a sleazy grin. “This isn’t a joke, I can only pay by the minutes or the number of strokes.” She disappeared like a magician with the smell of her perfume turning into an aphrodisiac. I swallow loneliness like an amber ale. Isolation is my best friend without a voice. I tend to make a midnight rendezvous with yours truly but my left hand shouts “I’m quite over zealous” and the right hand whimpers “I’m quite jealous.” I only tend to acquire sparks with jumper cables.

Between noontide and the teardrops of the moon, the carnival weaved in and out of the cavern. The hooligans are tap dancing next to the jukebox, the husbands are window shopping, the cut throat whistle stoppers are juggling negotiations and plastic speeches. The jamboree was full of exaggeration, plagiarism, copycats, and satan’s storytellers. I could hear them drinking the tears more than the alcohol.

2:35pm, the regulars and bystanders strolled in with folktales dripping grief. Cigarette smoke reeked of melancholy and satire. The ambiance was filled with extravagant bar tabs, sobbing cliffhangers, romantic comedies with the mourning saxophone playing in your left ear. If you listen close, the excuses and irritation can be heard in your right ear. A pint of desolation will taste sweet and a shot of despair will run down your throat faster than a horse at the Kentucky derby. It’s a relief and a head scratcher that we call it happy hour.

5:45pm, the eyes are dry and my stomach grumbled. The gin mill is as empty as my crooning soul. I can never make out the lyrics but I get goosebumps when I hear the sorrowful piano. Harper Guthrie struts in with his graveyard black t-shirt with the phrase “You can get this body for $19.95 for one hour, but if you act now I will make you as happy as a sunflower” printed on the front. Harper is jammed with acidic antidotes but will sell you antidepressants, antibiotics, and antisemitism.He talks with his wandering hands and pleads innocent until proven guilty. He will boast about his latest purchases, meaningless job title, and the abundant cash flow problem. He serenades to the audience that he drinks to happiness. Unfortunately, he’s been charged with terrible humor and convicted of lying to himself.

7:15pm, Jackson Bryant fumbles in with his auburn acoustic guitar. He glances at the minimal crowd from the undersized stage and begins to strum. Out comes a raspy but yet a smooth sound “You can find me in the dark trying to grip the wind, you can find me feeling lost not knowing where to begin, you can shout from the depths of your lungs, you can point your fingers at me and forget the person you’ve become.” Heads turn and faces become pale as if they seen a reflection of themselves. The song ends with the spectators clapping their hands rapidly and shouting out his name. He continued to play his set as the crowd was quite allured by his presence.

As the night begin to fade, the exchange had less of a bounce. Solitude was a fog prancing in front of our bloodshot pupils. I wrote “Goodbye, Goodnight” on a vanilla napkin and handed it to the gargoyle next to me. It was time for me to face the chorus in a song I didn’t want to play. Thirty five years ago on this melodic day, I married a ballerina that is still spinning on her tip toes of my crippled heart. The King of kings took my queen away. She was plagued with a disease that had no cure. I’m done praying to a God that doesn’t listen. All I know how to do is to fill up my glass with destitution to try to take away the overwhelming misery.

My books are available here .

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Headstone Prophet

Greetings taxpayers, screen wanderers, and head nodding citizens, let’s dive into the ramifications of ignoring the siren of western civilization, where the infrastructure has had a crack for generations, the colors of the flag have become evanescent, where celebrities are glorified more than soldiers, where the all mighty dollar has more value than life,

Let me introduce myself, I am the Headstone Prophet, the accountant of distractions and destruction, I don’t see black and white, gender, classes, or status, I see authority and figureheads with meaningless titles serve themselves rather than society, I see inflation and corruption welded together to spark the genocide, I am the soothsayer that is gawking at the cemeteries, counting the caskets, I wear a tattoo on my middle finger that reads “The new world order doesn’t deserve a quarter,”

Behind closed doors, the henchmen are sipping on wealth mumbling “if you aren’t rich, you will become my bitch” and the others are ranting “if you aren’t in the grave, you will be my slave,” the catchphrases are lightning and the thunder to their ears, the powers that be want division among the dwellers, they crave disunity and friction, for every label there is a asterisk and a war,

It’s time to pay close attention to these staggering numbers, human trafficking is up twenty percent, the dishonesty among politicians is up a thousand percent, the media will twist the truth fifty percent, the longer you are glued to a screen the quicker you will forget the american dream, in the end the government cares about you is zero percent,

I am the headstone prophet, I stand before you to be the alarm, I stand here to wake up for those who are asleep, I stand here to deliver the most important message of your life, I stand here to hopefully avoid counting your coffin,

My books are available here.

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Growth is powerful. Often times you can’t see how much you have grown until you look back at who you were or what you have decided to let go. I have been writing for decades and have kept it a secret. Why? The reasons why I write are endless. It’s therapeutic, mentally stimulating, challenging, a place where I can voice my opinions, and today I believe others can find others or themselves in my poetry.
It can be a place of self discovery and reflection.

Generally speaking, the perspective of a poet by society is someone who is broken, emotionally sensitive, and their voice is better articulated through words on paper than being spoken. To clarify this, written words are better used to express themselves emotionally. I can relate to this part. I am an emotional person and often times I cry because I have no words at times. Today I write with more of bigger purpose. I want to show the world that you people are not broken, they are just misunderstood. They are not surrounded by the right people.

At the end of my first marriage, I took it upon myself to attend therapy. I knew there were some things about me I needed to fix. I am a work in progress, in fact we all are a work in progress and under construction. Two of the things in my marriage that I needed to work on was speaking up for myself and taking control of certain aspects of my life. I was married to a woman who was overbearing, domineering and controlling. She was also an alcoholic. On my end, I wasn’t mature enough to walk away and sought out attention in the wrong way ways. I hid my writing at this time. Therapy gave me guidance and direction.

One of the things that I learned in therapy is that my growth was limited due to my surroundings. My father is quite judgmental and critical. Once I remarried and moved away, my confidence in myself flourished. I saw that I needed to move away. I will never tell my father that because I know that would hurt his feelings. I appreciate all that he is given me and the love that he knows how to give. He doesn’t just seem to care how to present sensitive topics, and how you present them often times is more important than what you say. As I get older, I’m trying to be aware of how I present subjects as well. There is a time to be straight forward, direct and there is a time to communicate with compassion.

In the end, I have grown to try to see the world and life through others eyes. I am not dead set on being right and if I am wrong, I will own up to it. I write poetry from the clouds with eagle eyes and try to embrace humanity. I see humanity without labels. There is a long list of individuals who want the world to change and I stand in a small line where I want to change the world. Everything is perspective and perspective is everything.

My books are available here .

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Beauty of my Chaos (Brittany Waters)

I stopped searching for answers in the corridors and the empty halls. I stopped searching for whispers where my frustrations growled. I stopped searching for innocence where scars burned. I stopped searching for the lullaby on the carousel and in the carnival. I stopped searching for the exclamation point in this longwinded sentence. I stopped searching for the dreams that evaporated and the hollow river I never felt. But I struggled to find beauty in my chaos.

I stopped searching for the acknowledgement from the copycats, finger pointers, and instigators. I stopped searching for my identity within the affection of lovers and takers. I stopped searching for pieces in a whirlwind of anxiety. I stopped searching for forgiveness from acquaintances with an image. I stopped searching for devotion from perfectionists. I stopped searching for laughter in cursed temptations. I stopped searching for beliefs with the unblemished appearance. But I struggled to find harmony in my imbalance.

I stopped searching for approval from rambling critics. l stopped searching for flames with sky-scraping expectations. I stopped searching for peace where there was social combustion. I stopped searching for engagement that turned lethal. I stopped searching for
supremacy within my crumbling doubt. I stopped searching for loyalty from nonbelievers. I stopped searching for kindness from callous hearts. But I struggled to find charm in my flickering character.

My books are available on Amazon.

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On Monday, the garbage men didn’t arrive
and the sun hid behind the unbiased clouds,
the jalopy on Crescent Road sang a piercing tune, the widow across the street glared at old photographs and the newspaper was thrown into an oak tree, and the mime laughed until she cried

On Tuesday, the wallpaper pleaded guilty for bad taste and the cinnamon rolls were hard as hockey pucks, the taxi drivers were riding unicycles, and the truth cracked the widescreen TV’s, the preacher’s sermon was written by an atheist and the raven sipped on the concoction just like humanity has for generations

On Wednesday, there was no lumber at the construction site and the henchmen counted their bullets, the playgrounds are now empty malls, California morphs into an exotic island,the register is as desolate with dust, and the politicians are suffering from withdrawal of greed, the drug pushers reside in mansions, and the moneyless become the majority

On Thursday, prejudices and pregnancy rise ten percent, paradigms dissolve and systems fail, symbolism becomes a lost diamond necklace that no one wears, ignorance is a bag of sugar that millions consume, education is no longer a pillar but now a pile of rocks, authenticity is rare and mindsets are stuck in a ten by ten box

On Friday, fools prance on the sidewalk and allegations disperse, heathens scoff and judge, Christianity wears a band aid that you can’t see and God is playing a violin for non believers, no one drinks the water they paid for and the porn that is free rest in their palms, the backward society is quiet and the questions are camouflaged in the answers

On Saturday, plagiarism is on sale and sarcasm is a $10.99 subscription, adultery is on the side, and sincerity was removed from the menu, I can pick up a prescription for a lack of integrity and sell a bottle of lies, the catatonic grin is plastered on every mannequin and the rain washes away the stench of civilization for a split second

On Sunday, the fears turn into rubble and the conscious of mankind fades like ink on paper, the echoes of society feel like a non stop siren, the static in the air tarnishes souls, the earth is decimated by dollar signs and all that is hidden, and the agendas are carved into invisible laws, and the cycle continues without stripping the labels

My books are available here.

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Islands of Freedom

Let’s flood this nation with aliens, bystanders, heathens and blood clots
Let’s flood this nation with bold face lies and twenty two percent truths
Let’s flood this nation with confusion, transgenders, mimes in prison, and collusion
Let’s flood this nation with division, animosity, hate, and pedophiles
And may the 1% live in the islands of freedom watching the collapse with a grin

Let’s flood this nation with brittle bones, empty minds, and scavengers
Let’s flood this nation with warlords, mediocrity, and simpletons
Let’s flood this nation with crippled tongues, segregation, and scammers with a smirk
Let’s flood this nation with ayatollahs of assassins, pitch black cartels, and fear mongers
And may the 1% live in the islands of freedom watching the collapse with a grin

Let’s flood this nation with barbaric corruption,
executive orders that benefit the suits, self serving congressmen and uncontrolled borders
Let’s flood this nation with fear instead of hope,
darkness instead of light and poverty
Let’s flood this nation with empty wallets, ignored rights, and senseless propaganda
Let’s flood this nation with a lack of security, a president from a nursing home and poison
And may the 1% live in the islands of freedom watching the collapse with a grin

Let’s flood this nation with money laundering,
racketeering, and a circus in the oval office
Let’s flood this nation with a plandemic, generated virus, and rigged elections
Let’s flood this nation with skepticism, where the mafia and the government work in unison
Let’s flood this nation until it looks unrecognizable but identical as a third world country
And may the 1% live in the islands of freedom watching the collapse with a grin

My books are available on Amazon.

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Government’s Best Friend

Technology is a bitch with an irrational itch
Technology is a weapon of inhumane destruction
And your eyes and ears are desensitized to the demolition
Technology is a disease without a cure
Technology is society’s whore that has no standards
And your eyes and ears are desensitized to the demolition
Technology is a cigarette that everyone
inhales
Technology is the government’s best friend
And your eyes and ears are desensitized to the demolition
Technology is a calculating thief with a political tongue
Technology is a hard on that we all play with and don’t admit
And your eyes and ears are desensitized to the demolition
Technology is a rash that can’t be removed
Technology is a vindictive slut that you are embarrassed to acknowledge you kissed
And your eyes and ears are desensitized to the demolition
Technology is a two headed monster that screams and laughs simultaneously
Technology is a tool that is used to wipe out civilization as we know it

My books are available on Amazon.

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Wildflower and a Whisper

For you, I was your wildflower and a whisper
I was drowning in your crimson flames
Letters from my jagged and jaded soul burnt
Free falling, lost your touch in the summer rain
I was sleeping in your elastic and lucid dream
a snowflake evaporating on your sleek tongue
I was just a temporary fascination and wonder
For you, I was your wildflower and a whisper
I was descending in your artificial paradise
Letters written from my heartbroken tears
Slipping, invisible to your smooth-spoken ego
I was growing dimmer in your nebulous eyes
a blanket you never wanted to feel and cradle
I was too invincible and priceless for you to hold

My books are available on Amazon.

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I was born between a California dream and a fog in the suburbs. I’m twenty percent scarecrow and the rest of me is a lion without a roar. I carry a pen and checkerboard notebook with fear parading in my alcoholic eyes. I have acquaintances that are on parole and a heart that is a victim of aggravated assault. Cassandra my dear, I’ve seen you take money from my camouflaged wallet. You plead insanity, is that what you want to call it? I juggle darkness and anxiety in my head. I fight battles I can’t see and shout at the gargoyles that laugh from the porch.

I fell in love with an embezzler who had a phrase “I don’t steal, I borrow” embroidered on her charcoal jacket. I once kissed an acrobat who tumbled away from my scars. I found myself glaring into an empty glass. I made love to a gypsy whose compassion and character couldn’t sit still. I was fond of a painter who sketched her tears on my chest. I found myself sipping on destruction. I was drawn to a lyricist who couldn’t convey her affection without a melody. I was magnetized to a whistle stopper who refused to stare into the truth. I found myself weeping in the dark gazing at the bottle.

I sat in therapy reliving my enigmatic past. He asked me in his continuous monotone voice “What do you write?” A part of me replied. “I write nonfiction because no one is listening.” He paused and provided his licensed smile.
“Can you please share your latest entry?”
“I thought I slept in a bed of catastrophe but I recognize that I’m the casualty in this foreign affair. I’m visiting a lackadaisical shrink who knows the answers to his longwinded list of satirical questions. I don’t want people to act like they care and he gets paid to show concern. I just have to move and stop sitting still.”

My books are available on Amazon.

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Coming Soon!

✨Release Date: 3/5/2024

Once Upon A Rain, She Bloomed

Between shadows and memory, one woman’s diary elucidates relationships come and gone, those who helped shape who she is from the inside out. Turning the rain into something beautiful, the opening petals of a rose now blooming.

Veteran poet Braeden Michaels crafts his seventh collection of poetry into a mold of vision. Like pages from a twisted fairy tale, he narrates using his unique poetic style and perspective, first dissecting emotion before reconstructing and reimagining each one.

Pre order: Once Upon A Rain, She Bloomed

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⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Michaels doesn’t fail to deliver in The Raven’s Poison. From start to finish I was taking around the horn on an emotional rollercoaster and was left in awe of his words. Can’t wait to get the next book!”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Braeden knows how to tap into the human emotion and the sometimes dark nature of our innate characteristics. This is a book that is sure to grab you by the throat from the very first piece until the very last. You will be gasping and grasping for more until the very end.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“I haven’t read a poetry book so full of great poetry in years. Everyone should pick this collection up.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“I highly recommend this well written book. His writing is full of great imagery and it draws you in leaving you mesmerized.”

My books are available here.

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excerpt from “Unpaved Crossroads”

I’ve seen the icicles hang in the burning silhouette
I’ve been reminded of the unspoken truth
caressing my frozen ghosts
I’ve crawled between the spider like despair and mesmerizing sunset

Let the explanations seep and bellow
Let the justifications trickle down my face
Let the interpretations subside in the dusk
Let the denial drip down my pale cheek
I plead with my contradictions

I’ve tugged on my restlessness and uneven faith
I’ve been surrounded by strangers with
mind numbing tension
I’ve sought out simplicity but eroded into complexity

Let the explanations seep and bellow
Let the justifications trickle down my face
Let the interpretations subside in the dusk
Let the denial drip down my pale cheek
I plead with my contradictions

I’ve drifted away from the sympathy and magnetized to the obscurity
I’ve stolen hidden glances in my sleep and dream of the awakening
I’ve ran from fears wrestling in the dark and disappear in the light

Let the explanations seep and bellow
Let the justifications trickle down my face
Let the interpretations subside in the dusk
Let the denial drip down my pale cheek
I plead with my contradictions

My books are available here.

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Coming Soon!

Between shadows and memory, one woman’s diary elucidates relationships come and gone, those who helped shape who she is from the inside out. Turning the rain into something beautiful, the opening petals of a rose now blooming.

Veteran poet Braeden Michaels crafts his seventh collection of poetry into a mold of vision. Like pages from a twisted fairy tale, he narrates using his unique poetic style and perspective, first dissecting emotion before reconstructing and reimagining each one.

My books are available here.

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excerpt from “The Raven’s Poison”

Even the devil himself chuckles
The moon is carved with your lies
Tangled up in your demented mind
Serenaded by demonic gargoyles
Stains of convoluted fairytales twitch
Nightmares glide through your skull
as you become the twisted spin doctor
Even the devil himself despises you
The haunted tree is covered in your sins
Using the phrase “sick and dying” to draw attention
The line for the roller coaster to hell
banishes the disturbed and psychopathic rants
Even the devil himself cringes at your name
Fearing your chameleon sadistic skin
Wallowing in your fragile bones
Be careful what you curve with your tongue

My books are available here.

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I glared into a faded photograph of our founding fathers, where dogma was priceless,the ink used to place the period behind our Declaration of Independence spoke volumes, where freedom wasn’t part of a cliche or a sales pitch, where dreams were bright as the clouds on the Fourth of July, where individuality was embraced but businesses thrived from the word capitalism, when tax was minimal, but as generations progress with a letter from the alphabet, the labels make the period disappear,traditions were once cherished, differences were honored, education was a foundation, face to face communication was imperative, and tears from the moon never fell into the cracks of the sidewalk of Washington Street

I carefully placed the collectible portrait between the pages of one fifty seven and one fifty eight of my history book, nonchalantly I sat on the curbside, glancing at the emptiness, no bumper to bumper traffic, no obscenities lashed out, civilization working behind rectangular screens, nominal movement, and goods can purchased with the click of a button, inch by inch, decade by decade, the zest is thinning, the lawmakers relish in spending income that isn’t their own, hankering over tax brackets, salivating where to raise outlandish charges, pulling a percent from this pie from the chart, manipulating statistics, storytelling and fabricating, patiently waiting to feel the tears from the moon on the sidewalk of Washington Street

As I walked down Washington Street, I recognize too many boarded up buildings, morals and ethics were pennies that jingled in in legislators pockets, make no mistake “we are shrewd burglars that don’t need to break into your house to steal from you,” no bureaucracy is willing to save a dime, “Let’s not pretend, we love to spend” is the proverb for thieves in two piece suits, I can recollect the carpenters that hammered every nail to the bankrupt superstructures being unemployed minutes after the task was complete, the cosa nostra and baby-kissers are no longing working against each other, the henchmen and handshakers are exchanging recipes for disasters over a bottle of burgundy, chuckling, smoking Churchill cigars, reciprocating filthy and racist jokes behind doors of the dungeon, but hours later standing in front of billions with both hands together pleading “togetherness, one, unity” reading it from a teleprompter, fumbling through every word, and the sound of the crack pipe falls to the floor, the camera moves in a split second to ensure the puppet is protected by the exclusive, but let me remind you the stooge who can barely walk up a flight of stairs received eighty one million votes, let the confidence ripple, and the thunder in the catastrophic sky pierces a million ears across the globe, as I walk toward “The Devil’s Backbone Tavern” I could see the lightning whisper danger, my feet froze on the sidewalk of Washington Street

I entered the tavern and could hear the introduction of the spoken word from Ramsey Parker, a local townsman, with a raspy voice, with his arms swinging, a theatrical display…”Welcome to the the insidious circus, where the clowns are incoherent, and the ramblings labeled as a speech are gnarled and tangled, weaving in and out of grains of truth, silently signing executive orders to vaporize the capital air, beware, apathy is a tattoo on our forearm, endless pages of calculating distractions, categorized and classified, blindly swindled, if you disagree, childish tantrums will be heard, lack of respect and cohesion, popularity plummets, approval ratings dismissed, impeachment being tossed around like a softball, no hardball here, afraid to rock the sinking ship with a stumbling captain who is meant to be an oar thrown in the ocean of disgust, humanity struggling to keep their heads above water, if we throw you a life jacket, we own you! Safety wasn’t a priority, designed for the survivors to be a minority” Ramsey shouted at the top of his lungs “Wake up America before it’s too late” grab your weapon, freedom, parade Washington Street, bark at the moon and pray it doesn’t cry

The sipping regulars clapped their hands, even the bottles of bourbon and scotch are pointing fingers, the mice on the thirty year old floor scrambled from the outspoken rhetoric, the shadows on the wall nod their heads, the bartender wipes down the hallucinations over and over, the optimism shrieks like a ghost, the misfits in the booth exchange civic points of view, babbling on about equal wealth distribution, working twenty five hour weeks, bellowing over exhaustion, taking orders from convicted illegal empty headed authority figures, the bystander on the left is a former navy seal listening to the nonsense, a man who carried laurels on his back, with eyes like a sniper, capturing detail like an artist, shrugging his shoulders walking away, discomfort is drank on the rocks, while truth is an invisible spot, heading for the door to leave a place of familiarity yet smelling a stench of wrecking change

My books are available here.