Category: Essays

by gRj

They say you’re dying—
but the morning doesn’t know it,
still spilling gold through your window,
still begging for your rusty guitar.

You count your breaths like old guitar strings,
yet somehow—
there’s always one left
to hum the chorus of Wild Horses,
one more to pluck the notes
that slip like loose change
through your fingers,
but never quite vanish.

And if death is a door,
it’s stuck halfway open,
and you’re neither coming nor going—
just leaning on the jamb,
tuning that old six-string
to a key only the wind understands.

Men who are done with living
don’t name the birds at their feeders.
They don’t laugh when the rain
soaks through their boots,
or grin at the nurse
who calls them honey
and means it.

You measure time in coffee stains,
in snapped strings and calloused thumbs,
in the way your voice,
roughened to gravel,
still finds the high notes—
a hand groping for the light switch
in a familiar dark.

Dedicated to George in Austin

by gRj

For the man who carried home on his back,
and hummed his way through the dark—

You were a wildfire in a body
that wouldn’t burn slow—
lungs like paper lanterns,
still glowing where the wind tore holes.

The woods knew you first:
your tent a cathedral of rain,
your bicycle a steel-winged bird
that never left the ground.

(How many winters did you pedal,
wheels spinning hymns between your ribs,
chain rusted with the weight
of all the roads you couldn’t stay on?)

Then—miracles in small type:
four walls, a key, a car
that started when you turned it.
You rolled the windows down
just to feel the world move with you,
not past.

Now the emphysema comes
like a thief you’ve learned to name.
You laugh around the oxygen hose,
pluck your guitar till your fingers stiffen,
sing till the notes fray
into something too honest
to call music.

Oh, George,
they’ll never understand
how a man who’s been untethered
so long can strum the light
clean through the cracks—
your voice a stubborn knot
holding the sky to the tree line,
holding the road to its promise:
Forward. Always forward.

by gRj

They say you didn’t love them right—
(the ones who left you
with three hungry moons
orbiting your ribs,
their tidal pulls
gnawing your name to bone.)

You fed them with your fingertips—
split your last loaf seven ways,
hid the crusts in your own palm
while they learned to chew your silence
into blame.

(No one taught you how to spin
gold from an empty fridge,
but you did.
No one praised the way your back
became their bridge—
only warned it’d break.)

Now their voices, grown and sharp,
carve verdicts in the kitchen air:
You should’ve—
Why didn’t you—
We needed—

(They don’t remember
how the rent clung to your throat like a noose,
how the bus fare in your pocket
was always theirs to lose,
how their fathers’ taillights
were the only gifts they sent.)

Mother of the unappeased,
your hands still mend their wounds—
though they hand you the knife
and call it love.
Your crime?
The sky you gave them
had no father-shaped clouds,
and they’ve spent their lives
howling at the sun
for casting shadows.

dedicated to P in Austin

by gRj

She loved in dollar signs,
each act of kindness
a receipt waiting to be signed.

Look, her hands would say,
as they pressed bills into palms—
See how the light catches
the halo of my giving.

A year of her love
was a year of ledgers:
flowers tallied against apologies,
dinners weighed by their cost,
never by the silence
that followed the first bite.

(Even the poor knew her name—
how she’d linger after handing them a twenty,
waiting for the God bless you
like a comma in her script.)

Oh, R*
your heart is vast as a department store,
bright and full of price tags.
You donate to feel the echo
of your own echo—
Saint R*, so generous, so kind—
while the rest of us starve
for something you can’t buy:
a love that doesn’t
keep change.

-Catharsis

gRj

I still believe—
not in the lies they wore like perfume,
but in the way my hands,
though scarred,
still cup hope like a match
in a windstorm.

Yes, I love too loud.
Yes, I trust the map
before I check for cliffs.
But this is not weakness—
it is the stubborn art
of planting gardens
in a world that prays for rain.

Let them call me reckless.
Let them say I burn too bright
for my own good.
I have known the heat of a thousand false suns
and still, my skin remembers
how to glow.

One day, a woman will stay
as true as her first laugh.
One day, the love I give
will not be a question
but an echo returned
in the same language.

Until then, I practice
the sacred act of falling
and rising—
not as a fool,
but as a tide
that knows its own worth
even when the moon lies.

gRj

At first, I am stone—
all edges and warnings,
a cliff face carved with no and not yet.
But you? You arrive like weather:
soft hands, softer laughter,
a promise of sun after drought.

(And I forget.
I always forget.)

The days stack like kindling.
Your voice becomes the flint.
I burn so slow I don’t notice
the fire until my skin
smells like sacrifice.

Here is where you change:
The jokes grow teeth.
The silences thicken.
Your love, once a lantern,
now a flickering conditional.

I stay too long—
not because I’m weak,
but because I keep digging
for the woman I met
in the ashes of the one you became.

The leaving is never clean.
It is a bone reset without anesthetic,
a name scraped from my ribs.
But I do it.
Again and again,
I do it.

And if my heart is a map
of all the exits I ignored,
at least I finally learn
to walk through them.