This poem first appeared in The Awakenings Review, Spring 2026, Volume 13, Number 1.
There was a time, a million years ago, when I believed art held some unique truth— a breath beneath color.
I angled paintbrushes toward the sky like telescopes, searched headlines through a camera lens, stood invisible on street corners with a ghost-hungry journal.
But then winter arrived and I called off the search—abrupt. Like the last shot fired in a clean, well-lighted place.
What truths can you find in five short years of stick-figure drawings and sloppy finger paint?
After I dropped the last shovel, I briefly dug for meaning beneath desert dogma, but the ground split too wide for a mind broken but still skeptical— too stubborn for feel-good bullshit or vague deity threats.
Once, I took a poetry class with a teacher who meant well. She was kind. Talented. But when she said, To be a good writer, you sit at the computer and bleed, my eyes rolled so far back I saw the past.
Me—alone in a room of books, loving Hemingway the most.
If you’re going to modernize a stolen quote, at least credit the dead man who suffered it first.
Not that I’m above theft. For a decade, I wore a borrowed smile, stretched over my face like cheap fabric, just to dodge that empty concern, Are you okay?— a dumb question with an easy answer I learned the old-fashioned way.
Eventually, the smile became my own. And maybe there was truth to be found somewhere— but I’m not going to tell you about that.
Because even if clichés sometimes crack open the dark, you wouldn’t want to see them here.
The Awakenings Review is a literary journal published by The Awakenings Project, an organization founded to support the artistic work of people with a lived experience of mental illness. Established in 2000 with support from the University of Chicago Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, the journal publishes poetry, fiction, and art by writers and poets who have a personal relationship to mental illness, whether their own, a family member’s, or a friend’s. It is one of the few literary journals in the country exclusively committed to this community, and received Mental Health America’s 2024 Media Award.
Five of my poems appear in the Spring 2026 issue, Volume 13, Number 1. The journal is print only, but I’m sharing them here. If this kind of work matters to you, it’s worth supporting. You can find them at awakeningsproject.org
Quiet Compliance
The mask becomes your face— a shell you never meant to keep, carved to coax a voice out of the natural quiet that was always yours.
In small, obedient gestures you built your own confinement, grasping for the thing that kills, just to vanish a while longer.
There’s a kind of magic in it— to disappear in plain sight, to fold yourself beneath the weight of expectation—
while the machine cranks out billion-dollar death campaigns disguised as joy, as rebellion, as belonging.
To adapt to illness, to bury the self in the haze, all for the familiar delusion—
Look at us! Soul-split specters, clinging— pleading for the dose.
Normal is a fragile, strangest fiction.
Measuring the Distance
Each morning, a slight revision, colored by thoughts and opinions— both mine and the ones I’ve borrowed.
The mirror doesn’t argue. It only offers today’s version of me.
Somewhere, in the silver hush of reflection, a stranger lifts my hands, measures the distance— who I am, who I almost was.
Choices aren’t made—only followed. A series of events, disguised as free will— the past bends into the shape of my body, a path unfolding just as I arrive.
Perhaps I’ve always been walking backward, mistaking repetition for progress.
A shift in light. A warping of glass.
No one ever steps fully into focus.
what follows will follow
run long and sit often. what follows will follow. what stays behind was not worth holding.
the demons lose interest when there’s nothing left to feed on, when sweat carries away what words cannot.
the mind, emptied by effort, listens.
there is no trick to this. no door you forgot to open. no shortcut.
only breath, body mind, discipline.
and the sound of your feet on the path,
the slow untying of everything you thought was you.
I Loved Hemingway the Most
There was a time, a million years ago, when I believed art held some unique truth— a breath beneath color.
I angled paintbrushes toward the sky like telescopes, searched headlines through a camera lens, stood invisible on street corners with a ghost-hungry journal.
But then winter arrived and I called off the search—abrupt. Like the last shot fired in a clean, well-lighted place.
What truths can you find in five short years of stick-figure drawings and sloppy finger paint?
After I dropped the last shovel, I briefly dug for meaning beneath desert dogma, but the ground split too wide for a mind broken but still skeptical— too stubborn for feel-good bullshit or vague deity threats.
Once, I took a poetry class with a teacher who meant well. She was kind. Talented. But when she said, To be a good writer, you sit at the computer and bleed, my eyes rolled so far back I saw the past.
Me—alone in a room of books, loving Hemingway the most.
If you’re going to modernize a stolen quote, at least credit the dead man who suffered it first.
Not that I’m above theft. For a decade, I wore a borrowed smile, stretched over my face like cheap fabric, just to dodge that empty concern, Are you okay?— a dumb question with an easy answer I learned the old-fashioned way.
Eventually, the smile became my own. And maybe there was truth to be found somewhere— but I’m not going to tell you about that.
Because even if clichés sometimes crack open the dark, you wouldn’t want to see them here.
If I Let Myself Go
If I let myself go— not just falter, but fall— I lose the trail back from the sorrow of strangers, absorb the newsprint weight of grief until it settles in my marrow like winter.
The lines drawn in blood blur easily— becoming this mother, and the father across the river.
To feel what the world keeps behind glass is to glimpse something unspoken, something real.
Not evil, exactly. Maybe wrongness. A hollow in the hive-mind where reason should live— the inheritance of lazy thinking and sun-faded flags.
This old game? Yes, we’re still playing, though no one remembers to keep the score.
And I can choose to carry the cost, or set it down— to look away, like we do with so much else.
For now, I’ll stay a while—keep vigil in that hollow room built for one, but known by all, eventually.
I suppose I owe at least a breath of attention, the small price of saltwater and silence— to follow the trail, step into the slow-dark hush of grief that isn’t mine—
run long and sit often. what follows will follow. what stays behind was not worth holding.
the demons lose interest when there’s nothing left to feed on, when sweat carries away what words cannot.
the mind, emptied by effort, listens.
there is no trick to this. no door you forgot to open. no shortcut.
only breath, body mind, discipline.
and the sound of your feet on the path,
the slow untying of everything you thought was you.
I guess this should be pretty simple and self-evident, but I’ve noticed over the years that the quality of my mental health is directly tied to the intensity of my physical efforts and the consistency of my meditation. Obviously, there are other components that play a role (for me those other components are meaningful human connection, sobriety, service to others, and creativity) but when I’m at the very least logging lots of long trail runs and staying disciplined in my Vipassana practice, there isn’t much room left for anger or anxiety to hang around.
The Truth About Tigers 