(after Tim Johnson accused me of never writing anything again)

Let’s get some things straight: for all the bridges I’ve burned behind me without looking back this stage, this page is not and will never be one of them.

Tim Johnson, perhaps it’s my collegiate athletic career that forces me to see everything through a tunnel-vision of competition but for the record books, this is an answer to what I considered a challenge.

When you accused me of never coming back of putting down the pen of treating my writing as some psychological stage of life

I was reminded that the only thing any of us broke down the doors of this life with was a shotgun full of noise screaming like broken dams and explosions. Poems are just our attempts to channel the freedom that God wrapped us in like a blank canvas that’s what poetry is to me freedom, and a blank canvas.

Every nightmare has taught me we can’t escape the things we’ve broken or the things broke us but whenever I open this book one page away there is always a slate that looks the way life does the moment before it begins: wet cement and a pond that has not yet rippled. Blank canvases, beginnings, and also lifeboats.

All those months, those days, those nights, when the dark was at its brightest when I could hardly wake without weeping when the tears flowed free because grief mistook my cheeks for fire escapes when my chest was falling like an anvil heavy with all the empty inside it,

Still I held a pen still I exhaled a voice one spark so small but goddammit a spark all the same!

Genesis 2:7 The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life and the man became a living being.

Where there is breath, there is sound for us to reclaim to rearrange like fresh coats of paint and, yes, sometimes we have to beat the words like blacksmiths over this worktable of a world.

They are malleable, not like my inertia so when I bend too far for my ironclad soul to manage poems wrap themselves around this frame like oil in a gear-shaft.

If nothing else the stages I have stood on the microphones I have taken the pens I have stolen are all just a part of my desperation to create something. After all, sunsets come from dynamite.

So, dearest Tim, don’t think for one second that I’ll abandon my birthright this is just one more way of breathing this is just one more way of shot-gunning down the doors this is just one more way of screaming.