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—
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.
I wrote this poem a few years ago. I honestly can’t remember if it was while I was still drinking or in the foggy stretch right after I quit.
I don’t have an exciting story to tell you about high-speed police chases, or cars full of “hookers and blow,” or waking up in the hospital, or some other cinematic rock-bottom meltdown. I didn’t drink before work. I didn’t drink at work. I didn’t lose my job or my family or my driver’s license. The reality was simpler. Boring, even.
It goes something like this: For years I drank normally. With friends. At bars or parties. A couple beers at a barbecue. Then, slowly, I started drinking more. And more. Then every single night, often to the point of partial blackout. Alcohol stopped being a social thing and became the way I smothered emotions and turned down the volume on problems I didn’t want to face.
There were plenty of mornings where I’d stare at my bloodshot eyes and puffy face in the bathroom mirror at 5 a.m., getting ready for work after another random Tuesday night where I’d polished off an entire 750 ml bottle of bourbon or vodka while watching TV, and mutter out loud to myself, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” You know, the kind of things “normal” people do.
Reality was puking into a toilet at midnight because I’d overdone it again and only had a few hours before my alarm went off. Reality was planning how to work booze into every event. Reality was going to the kitchen to “grab more ice” when really I needed to do a private shot because everyone else was drinking too slowly.
And while I wasn’t a mean drunk or a violent drunk, I definitely wasn’t as present with my family as I should have been. As I am now. There’s just no way—I spent too much time thinking about drinking, doing the drinking, or recovering from the drinking. Being a drunk is basically a full-time job made of guilt and logistics.
Then one morning, after what counted as a “light” night (splitting a six-pack with a friend and chasing it with a couple vodkas on the rocks, because let’s be honest, three beers might as well be water at that point), I went to bed and told myself, You know what, I think I’m done.
I didn’t believe it. Not really. It certainly wasn’t the first time.
I’d stopped plenty of times—or paused, technically. A week here. A month there. Once I even went five months without a drink before my brain convinced me that if I could stop for almost half a year, I didn’t actually have a problem and could definitely “moderate” going forward.
You already know how that story ends.
But for whatever reason, this time—March 2, 2023—something was different. I think a big part of it was the language I used with myself. Instead of I’m taking a break or I’m not drinking right now, I started saying, I quit drinking. Or, No thanks, I don’t drink.
Saying it out loud felt terrifying at first—like the words themselves were pushing me closer to some irreversible finish line I wasn’t fully convinced I wanted to cross—but it also started rewiring something.
The funny part is I didn’t get much encouragement. Mostly because I was “good” at drinking. Or maybe just good at hiding how much I drank. I’ve seen videos of myself on nights when I know for a fact I was absolutely shitfaced but not tripping or yelling or slurring my words. A “high tolerance” isn’t always a good thing. The most common response I got when I told someone I quit was some version of, “Why?” People I cared about genuinely had no idea what was going on in my head.
But I had one friend—one of my best friends of forty years, who quit a couple years before me—who understood immediately. He didn’t preach or brag or try to turn it into a competition. He just listened. Said he was proud of me. Told me he’d be there if I ever needed to talk. And for the first time—at least when it came to drinking—I felt, as the kids say, “seen.” (Do the kids still say that?)
I’m not going to go into detail about how I quit, because that part is different for everyone. There’s no single method. For me, it was a mix of books, podcasts, trail running, meditation, support from a few key friends, reinvesting in some meaningful relationships, walking away from a few unhealthy ones, and constantly reminding myself that I get to choose my own future.
That’s not the entire story, but it’s good enough for now.
Today, the day before Thanksgiving, marks 1,000 days sober. I know that’s not monumental in the grand scheme—not even three years—but something about hitting quadruple digits feels like a milestone worth acknowledging. Maybe even worth celebrating.
And that celebration is going to be simple: a long run, a nice dinner with family, and a Thanksgiving morning without a hangover. Which is something I can be genuinely grateful for.
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 