All The World's A Stage

my mother calls me at odd hours to remind me she still can’t sleep. i’m her first born son so she knows i’m always awake. i never knew what to make of it until i watched the youngest of my four brothers sleep through an unshakable storm. This is how hope is born.

My life has always been an open book, & i know not everyone likes to read - my mother taught me never to think twice about cowards who could never find it in themselves to ask the right questions - & i saw the way she built the future from the ashes of her past - the same way the Greeks built the world as we know it by burning the ships & the oars at the shores of a new chapter - they knew the only way home was forward - & it took far too long for me to understand the depths of my own oceans were as much a gift as they were a curse - i see the world as it is, & imagine what it could be. As a poet, i hear a friend say that he loves his chosen one, but i watch his eyes go wide & his voice go quiet when i say “tell me three stories about her that you’re not in.” & i realize i’ve been alive long enough to know what most men love is a mirror. & so i’m no longer afraid of my own depths- i’ve seen enough outliers exhaust their lungs trying to stay afloat in ankle deep water long enough to know that poetry - like a man - does not have to be good to fulfill its purpose. & the only purpose of anything is hope - not in what is - but what could be.

Robert Frost once wrote “a poem begins with a lump in the throat,” & i’ve swallowed enough words to know that if Dickinson had known we’d title her poems after she specifically didn’t, she would have sent strongly worded emails. If Hemingway knew we would disregard his own admission that there was no symbolism in the old man & the sea, he would have tweeted endlessly. If Shakespeare ever thought we’d doubt he wrote all he did, he would have blogged all of his drafts for the world to see. If Fitzgerald ever could have, he would have instagrammed a thousand photos of Zelda, each with a caption as fascinatingly juvenile & romantic as when he wrote ‘i love her & that is the beginning & the end of everything,’ only for Salinger to out do him by saying ‘she wasn't doing a thing that i could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.’ & these are the thoughts that remind me, these great minds & poets & writers of history would love to be as much a part of our world, as we do of theirs.

Eliot wrote of the Spring - of Lilacs & desire, & how April was the cruelest month. But he never had to endure Texas in July. & if i can survive this year’s brutal summer, i can survive anything.

They say that our bodies are 70% water & there is calcium in our bones derived from collapsing stars & how i love that we created imagery & language to help each other cope with the intrinsic terror of being alive. & at the Big Bang, or when God gave Adam a piece of His soul, the universe exploded with stories to tell - & i love how every human being that has ever been born has dipped their toes into that well. My mother is the strongest woman i’ve ever known but survival has taken up her whole life. & it’s been in quiet moments she’s shared if she could have been anything, she would have chosen to write - & tears have swelled in my eyes, because over the years, i have performed in front of thousands & i know now every second of stage fright was mine - but the boldness & courage - that’s been the power of my mother’s maiden name - from the depths of a collapsing star to the tides of the ocean, to this very moment - Vonnegut was wrong. Everything is beautiful - but all of it hurts. & what a wonderful, inexplicable terror to be alive at the edge of a universe that seems so hellbent on the meaning of insignificant stories from hearts that beat with the rhythm of the tides while singing love songs to the memory of long dead stars. How could anything born of this universe not be romantic?