Show me your original face before you were born.

                     			—Zen Koan

I walked in

because I thought I could leave

myself behind.

The trees didn’t care.

The leaves kept falling—

with or without me.

I stood by the water

and saw a face.

Not mine.

Just shape and light—

no owner.

We want to believe

in something that stays.

But even stillness

moves

if you sit long enough.

Belief, doubt—

they’re just names.

What’s real doesn’t speak.

It doesn’t need to.

I turned back

and left nothing behind.

Nothing was ever mine

to begin with.

Peaks Island, Maine

In a shed
behind a boat

a giraffe hugs

a mannequin

in lingerie.

She’s taped up

like hope

with no follow-through.

Left breast: duct tape.

Right breast: same.

They appear

to be having

a moment.

One arm raised,

one finger pointing—

at what?

Nobody knows.

Maybe God.

Maybe the fuse box.

You cannot

roller skate

in a buffalo herd.

But you can

make eye contact

with a fiberglass giraffe

and feel

understood.

Do giraffes

recognize mirth?

If so,

they hide their tell.

Too much thinking

chokes the magic.

Too much seriousness

snaps the string.

Let it be—

and the surreal settles

like a memory

of an almost familiar song.

Just look.

Don’t ask.

Sit still.

Don’t name it.

Don’t fix it.

Just—

watch.

People want meaning.

They want cause

and effect,

a punchline

with timing.

But not everything

needs to resolve.

A mannequin.

A giraffe.

Some duct tape.

And the question:

Do giraffes recognize mirth?

Or are they simply better

at not needing to?

Sense arrives late

and ruins the view.

You cannot

roller skate

in a buffalo herd.

But here,

you can listen

to plastic silence,

witness

unorthodox congeniality,

and know,

without knowing,

that stillness lives

in the unsolved.

Porter Lake, Maine

The bed sagged like a cracked raft,

smelling of rust, salt, and lost time.

The other side was hollowed out,

a dent where someone used to dream.

The air bent yellow at the edges.

A radio somewhere cracked and whined —

low country and western misery,

a voice leaking out about someone who never came home.

The floor leaned west, 
always west,

because that's where things go 
when they’re too tired to fight.

The clock on the wall had stopped 
sometime last night,

but no one noticed, 
not even the dark.

The sea dragged the dead nets, 
and the chain inside the walls, 
hummed low 
against the bones of the room.

It ran through my empty wallet,

through my cracked teeth,

through the long thin cigarettes 
burning themselves out.

It rattled whenever I breathed too hard.

The motel bible sat open on the nightstand,

a page torn loose,

a note scrawled in blue ink:

"don’t wait for me."

I tasted rust,

saw the green of rotting rope,

felt the floorboards creak 
with a tired red sadness.

White gulls circled low,
no purpose left;
their shadows vanish
into the sea’s forgetting.

I thought about standing up,
walking toward the window,
singing along 
with the sad broken radio.

I didn’t move. 
The tide had already 
taken everything.

Ocean Cay, Atlantic Ocean

Clouds move

like thoughts—

shapeless, then clear,

then gone.

The wood beneath me

leans and softens.

A crab—small, rust-red—

clicks past

without meaning.

They say

the notion of emptiness

was understood here once.

No sermon.

No symbol.

Just the tide

covering what it could.

Not loss.

Not absence.

But space

for the self

to rise—

shadow and light

together.

The sea

keeps no stories.

It lifts,

it leaves.
I sit,

and let it.

Peaks Island, Maine

She came through the lobby

in heels that sounded like secrets,

dragging a suitcase
that probably held regrets

neatly folded

next to a book of spells.

The clerk said she had

that look—
like she’d once been painted

on the side of a bomber plane,

or whispered about

in backseats and divorce papers.

They gave her Room 237,

because of course they did.

Where else would a woman like that stay

but down the hallway

that never quite ends?

She ordered champagne at midnight,

left no tip,

and signed the bill

“Love, Karma.”

Some say she rewrote dreams.

Others, that she stole them.

Mostly, she just waited—

watching time melt down the window

like candle wax.

Men dropped around her
like poker chips at a rigged table,
grinning through the gamble,
and left with their names

misspelled in the mirror.

When the flowers stopped

and the world got bored

of her perfume and promise,

she slipped into the velvet-lined box

beneath the lobby gift shop,

a mannequin saint

with sale tags on her sins

and a crucifix worn

like costume jewelry.

Now tourists lean in,

take photos,

whisper,

"Wasn’t she someone?"

And somewhere—

behind the front desk,

or in the static of the lobby jazz—

the universe clears its throat,

adjusts its tie,

and laughs,

quietly,

into its infinite hand.

Scarborough, Maine

Seven of Cups

They were Georgia boots,

Comfort Core.

No comfort left in that label now.

The soles gone to hell,

inlay peeled like burnt skin

on a summer drunk.

He used to wear 'em

to the docks—

not for the job

but to look like he had one.

Said the boots gave him posture

even when he had no spine.

The bench was his confessional.

"Seven cups," he muttered once,

“they all looked good

in the morning fog."

Money.

A woman who called him “baby.”

A trailer with a flag and a fridge

full of cheap beer.

A crappy transistor radio

always tuned to the same static.

He liked the noise more than silence—

said silence reminded him

of his old man’s fists

and the day he slammed the door

and never came back.

She came like the others—

eyes like storm warnings,

barefoot in winter,

mouth full of someone else’s songs.

He loved her the way

you love a fire:

too close,

too long,

burned down to bone.

Every choice
a ghost

that kissed his cheek

and walked off with his wallet.

He died right there,

on the bench that knew his weight,

where the pigeons ignored him

and the cops didn’t bother.


Boots side by side,

one insole flopped out

like a tired tongue.

A half-smoked cigarette still warm

in the groove of the slats.

No note. No name.

Just a man who picked

the wrong cup

too many times.

Portland, Maine

The wolf should've snapped her neck.
The deer should've bolted.
hat's the law, right?
Kill or run.
How it's supposed to be.
How it always was.

But here they are -
him in a secondhand suit
smelling like old rain and bad decisions,
her draped in a dress made of soft mistakes.

He's thinking,
another kill won't fix the hunger.
She's thinking,
another escape won't fix the fear.

And outside the glass,
the world hums along,
hungry for blood,
hungry for failure,
hungry for the beautiful ruin of it all.

They lean into each other
like broken doors swinging on the last hinge,
not lovers,
not saviors,
just two things too tired to keep lying.

The world wants them to hate,
to run,
to tear each other apart.

What they do instead -
this slow, brutal, stupid tenderness -
is the worst kind of rebellion.

The glass between them and the street
is spidered with cracks -
each one a little white lie the world told,
each one a rule they broke.

He's melting at the edges now,
becoming a man, becoming a memory,
becoming something the wolf was never meant to be.

She shimmers,
not prey anymore,
not even real maybe,
just some miracle walking
through the wreckage.

Sirens smear across the sky,
time drips down the walls,
and still they sit -
choosing each other in a world that stopped believing.

This is what survival looks like sometimes:
not teeth,
not speed,
but a hand on a shoulder,
a weight leaned into,
a promise made with nothing but breath.

and they sit shoulder to shoulder,
defying the ugly machines that built them,
trading the last thing that matters:
the stupid, beautiful, suicidal act
of choosing tenderness
when nothing else makes sense.

Lenox, Massachusetts

I pass him every morning
on my way to the bus—
the skeleton with wings,
painted crooked on the bodega wall.
At first, he made me uneasy.
Too bold, too broken,
arms raised like he knew something
I didn’t want to hear.

The words above his head—
I’M NO LONGER BROKEN—
felt like a dare.
Who says that out loud?

But weeks turned into months,
and somehow
I started looking for him.
On gray days
his grin felt like defiance.
On warm mornings
the light hit just right,
like he was lit from the inside.

People tagged around him,
but no one painted over.
Not once.

I don’t believe in miracles,
but I believe in
what you get used to,
what grows on you,
what begins to speak
without ever moving its lips.

These days,
I nod to him—
a small, silent thing.
Not because I understand,
but because I think
he sees me, too.

New York City