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A Thousand Addiction Sleeps

Ghosts of memory haunt your muscles.
Validation addictions rest in the cells.

Forgotten traumas slumber rancid in your stomach.
Neglected blood cells conceal dormant poison.

You host multitides of sleeping monsters.

What will you do before they wake?


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Picture Petal

She’s always in the garden
Beneath the dirt breathing her magic
Pressing mystery shoots into the sunlight
Opening pink picture petals.

I tilled the modest plot to start fresh
Yet it remains her domain
It is her beautiful earth
Her seeds and surprises bring it alive in May.

We plant and weed and tend
She feeds
We work
Yet the reward is not our doing.

This garden is God speaking in her voice
It is reborn for good and beauty.

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Playing With Poetry

It’s a mystery to me why I stopped writing poetry in my twenties.

I’m sure drinking had something to do with it. But that’s not enough. It was part of a process that had been working in me for years. An intentional repression of my empathetic self.

Poetry worked against that process. I learned that to excel in the art I needed to be open to emotions, mine and others’. I had been walking away from that deep well of emotion for years and wasn’t prepared to change my course.

In my last semesters before leaving college, I took more poetry workshops than were allowed. I worked the system to spend more time on the one thing that brought me value in the university.

In doing so, I started writing about a secret in confusing ways. I had bottled it up and needed to share, but it wasn’t all mine, so my poems became increasingly opaque.

I don’t yet have the courage to write about it.

I played with words today, like I did when I was young. I still feel the block. I still feel that secret holding me back.

These feelings emerge as I remember that April is National Poetry Month. This used to be a big deal in my world.

I wasn’t looking for a new challenge, but I believe one has found me. I’m going to publish poetry every day for the next month. It’ll be bad, like the wordplay below. I’ll write until I can’t contain that ancient secret any longer. I’ll write until I produce that poem I promised Mary when we were dating. I’ll find the words I need on these magnetic tiles until I can form my own.

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How Much Freedom?

I have found that every time I create more freedom for my sons, they take it further than I expected. They push me out of my comfort zone and challenge my assumptions, inspiring a desire to take that freedom away.

I try very hard to see that as my fear and not project it onto my children. I look for ways to empower them within their new found freedom. A tracker is not a neutral thing, it is a message to your child.

No judgment and no advice, just a call to consider what messages we want to communicate with our children.

Situational awareness and some self defense training make an individual much less likely to become a victim. A tracking device may offer a false sense of security that leads the child unprepared into unwelcome danger.

I always return to a couple ideas. One, there is no “safe,” there are only degrees of risk we are willing to accept. Two, what parenting strategies will most benefit my children as they become adults.

I feel that the danger they put themselves in will teach them more than an excessively safe childhood will. With practice, they will come to master their own boundaries and have no fear when it comes to pursuing their dreams. This is what I hope they gain from a free range childhood.

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A Connective Weekend

A single parent can’t build a lasting relationship without the consent of his or her children.

Patience and trust are all I can bring to the process. If my young sons don’t want a certain person in their lives, I don’t have the will to force it.

We’ve gone through a variety of missteps in the last two years. Sometimes it feels that more has gone wrong than right. It’s through this series of storms that I can now recognize how bright the prospects are with a new lover.

We all camped together this weekend, me and the boys and my partner and her daughter.

It was seemless. The kids made friends at the playground and carried on for hours. When we denied a request to turn our respective family tents into “adult” and “kid” tents, they not-so-clandestinely fell asleep together in a hammock.

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The next night we all piled into one tent and closed the evening with a goof game of Cards Against Humanity: Family Edition. We’re all clowns and, even though we were exhausted, we played past midnight.

The morning brought rain that exposed a compromised roof and soaked a good amount of our gear. Undaunted, my partner and I closed up camp while the kids slept in and entertained one another. The challenge of adversity with new people was the perfect ending to an otherwise effortless weekend. I’ve found a partner who wants to work, play, laugh, and enjoy all the moments together. Our children have found kinship in each other and tentative bonds with the new adult in their lives.

It has been a perfect few weeks cultivating a romance that not only works for our children, but gives them room to thrive. We’ve each worked hard on ourselves to get to a place where this is possible. I don’t know what mystery is behind the comfort that our children are experiencing, but I am eternally grateful for it.