I’ve traveled as far as Odysseus from Ithaca since the time I first heard tell of a gathering in the night woods. Since I sat, back to a knotty pine wall, typing my first honest words in an epoch. 

Since I gingerly set them aloft. I still write this way, back against wood, legs outstretched. Wetting the tip of my index finger and smoothing my eyebrows, feeling for grit between my incisors. One bottom tooth is sharp to the touch from the infinite times I’ve dragged it under my fingernail bed, looking for the right words. 

And the dog still lies, washed by snow on a white duvet, instead of brown and flea-bitten in the back of my truck. His eyes are milkier, his gums bloodier and his joints flex gently as he chases down flying things in his dreams.  

I only live across town from that time. I can smell the fires from Ithaca’s shore.  

But I’ve been joined and unjoined since. Declared myself whole to the wide world and been unceremoniously disassembled in an operating theatre. I’ve lifted a jug of whiskey to my lips before the house awoke and spent the day curled around my own knees. Risen before the sun to demand the pistons in my chest do something, anything, but quiver like a kicked mongrel. 

There was a time that the colours disappeared completely.  

Before, I was a baker, a traveling minstrel. I ate fried dough in a swamp in Louisiana and watched men in colourful tatters chase chickens in the freezing rain. Ate a sow’s belly from a smouldering cauldron. I watched plastic door handles snap in the snow and I left the windshield-struck body of an owl, cleaved from its wings and claws, on a promontory in the Appalachians.  

The music in my head woke me up when I was sleeping.  

I have a retirement plan now. I discuss compounding interest. My belly is barren and I’m afraid to fill it. Afraid it might not take to filling. I keep a green notebook full of little squares that are checked when I change my engine oil or send some small token to a child not bound to me by blood.  

Some mornings when I wake, there’s a tang that’s sour and old, and I shoo it out with incandescent pine and black tea and maple.  

And some mornings, the birds streak across the blue and give way to clouds, and the hoarfrost-hung air gives up no smell at all.   

And it’s easier to soothe a dull ache with skittering blue light than to pull a knife from its sheath and tease out slivers from a red-run hand.  

I first wrote to share the story of a fire with a covey of kindred spirits, and then again when I pulled things from the earth and felt they bore repeating. And I’ve been grateful this world has kept me haunted. 

It is a gift to know there are others that sit with pottery shards spilling through their fingers, listening with curiosity to the sound of clay hitting stone.  

…Please visit the Dark Mountain Project, to which most of my recent writings have been dedicated.