Introduction 

Palms of psalms from one who's seen little.

Seconds of experience turned into a book.

I could fill libraries with the days I’ve slept through

And I make monuments to the life I have lived.

Beautiful monuments, that serve as a living, breathing record

Of my weight on this world.

These psalms are one word in a sentence on a page.

The stones we throw ripple farther than we think possible.

From each breath, we can exhale a million unique outcomes into the world. 

The young mind thinks about all, 

And makes a choice the body disagrees with. 

The lines I write come from a gray existence. 

A life free of great pain and great pleasure.

Let me run.

Let me hunt.

Let me cry.

I cannot bare standing around in this hollow house,

Hiding away from all it means to be alive. 

So explore my words.

Examine a sliver of my thoughts and judge for yourself;

What kind of life have I lived?

Polarizing 

Our flaws define us, yet we swear them away. 

The regrets that keep me up are as much a part of me as my successes, yet I lie awake. 

Perhaps we are more similar to trees, developing branches from missing limbs that have been cut, and contorting around others to stretch up to the light.

We have scars on our bases from where two lovers carved their names, 

From where a birdhouse built with my parents was nailed, 

Or from where I took some bark off with a bike accident.

These scars never do fade, nor do they heal, but they do shrink.

They become a smaller and smaller part of us, but only if we grow much taller than them.

Let’s move forward 

To yell at a fire burning your house down that it will mean nothing to you.

To tell a paper cut that its wound on your finger will not last.

To scream at a wasp that its sting will last only a second.

With all of the philosophy that I know, which is little compared to others.

For all of the logic I can pour into my circumstance.

Using every C.S. Lewis stanza I have memorized.

None of it will remove the pain I feel.

Words can not dampen sleepless nights, nor can they heal wounds.

Even still, I continue to let them aid me, for they have taught me how to better feel pain.

Ancient quotes from long dead men will not pull me out of a white capped river, 

But they may teach me better how to swim.

Suffering is unavoidable, and suffering I have suffered.

But our hands should not grasp at the possibility of avoiding suffering, 

And instead should seek a way to find help in it, 

so that in both times of pain and in times of lesasure,

We are happy.

A mannequin 

What have I gotten for my contortion into our world?

Have the trees not bore fruit from my extortion and my toil. 

My resolve to grow silently 

Has become, quite violently,

A loneliness felt only by those who are trapped entirely within their own minds 

I am not disillusioned at the prospect of living a human life, 

I simply wish I was able to experience one.

Stage right 

My friends and I all dream big.

We’re planning something, we want to change something.

We all want to go far and fly high,

high enough to see the hatred of humans by humans at our feet.

High enough to drag our fingers through desserts to fill wells with rivers.

Buy enough to brag that we linger above hurt while our cells shiver.

Gardening 

I hate to plant and I hate more

To reap the seeds I sow.

I hate that choice slams doors.

Just lay me down in reeds 

And float water lilies down past me.

Let me sit on the bank so as to not get swept by the rapids.

Feel the oxidized zinc, smell the metal, and flip it

To leave things out of your hands and tossed into the palms of the 

Uncaring, careless, and carefree.

Then go and worry less.

Take it from the one whose palms are uncertain and scarred, 

Who has been torn limb from limb from indecision from cowardness.

What you need, is to be unthinking, to be a water lily, 

And to float gracefully down whichever stream the current faces.

True story!

I can’t force my eyes open as the ice beneath me 

Attempts to slip me off my feet 

and away from the places I need to be in an ambulance.

There’s a whirring, whirring sound.

I turn my key and open my trunk and ski

Up my driveway with a brush to get my car unstuck from snow.

I pull out of my driveway and am already late 

So should I just expect my fate? Of course not.

I have my obligations.

I agreed to this.

I see my family in the backseat.

On the road I see an old birthday party of mine.

If everyone else can get to work safely, so can I.

What makes my car so special that it’s incapable of going down the road

Which is still being blanketed?

Whirring, whirring.

How insane. 

To risk life and limb in a blizzard for a paycheck that wouldn’t cover one one thousandth of the bill that would come if I merged onto the interstate incorrectly right now.

My mother is in the passenger seat, then my brother, then no one.

The snowfall is a 60 mile per hour blindfold wrapped around my old Infiniti.

I don’t see anything. 

Not the other cars.

Not the black ice. 

Not the rest of my life, as my car spins off of the freeway and rolls three times into a deep median.

I am back in my seat and I see one of my first days of school.

The tires spin in the air and their whirring sound drives me mad, but not for long.

I see my job and my paycheck, and I listen as the tires stop spinning.

I close my eyes.

And I work tomorrow 

Broken glass stars under my socks pierce my feet as I stumble into bed.

There’s concrete filling my heart and my liver as I lay 

Under the weight of my pain and bruises, 

Knowing not what I have learned tonight.

It’s too cold in my room and too hot under my sheets

And my life is pretty good but also just alright, 

I wish there was more to do.

I wish for more than mediocrity and averageness.

Maybe that is selfish, but I wish it so that I can be selfish and be out of my normal feelings.

I remember to rest on my stomach so that if my discontent and cruelty 

Come out in the middle of the night 

I won't drown on dry land.

My routine was shattered again tonight by my selfishness.

A good time or a bad one?

Who’s to say?

I can barely ponder this as even though the mysterious of life are still outside my window 

and across the lawn, 

and I’m stuck here thinking about how yellow my teeth with get 

if I skip brushing them tonight.

There is no sleep tonight, none that matters. 

Interlude 1

I really am scared of the hourglass.

It’s sand hits my roof and errods its paint like a river eroding sand that will fill an hourglass.

The wind wisps it all away as my roof thinks about how its hair is thinning.

It no longer has a reason to think of good metaphors.

In my free time, I wonder why we are cruel.

What must compel it?

I see under my bed the jaws of a beast well known.

We all may attempt to cover it, lock it away, or otherwise hide it in a closet,

But in the heart of every hunan, 

There is something monstrous.

From a pincushion 

I have received a daily poking and a daily proding 

Every day from all things around me.

The air is sharp inside my scarred lungs 

And the sun is sandpaper on my scared skin.

Inside of me, my organs are upside down.

They are flipped and turned and my heart has walked out through my mouth.

I have been stitched up horribly.

And I am afraid to wake up and be stung by my bed sheets.

I can be anywhere I please so long as my eyes are shut

I don’t want to stop writing.

I don’t think I can.

To stop writing is to stop breathing,

The same as stopping thought

Or stopping heartbeat.

My hands will keep moving, and my mind will follow.

To stop work would cause me physical strain,

And to continue it hurts my back.

I am driven by a compulsion to work, to improve.

It is very true that there has never lived someone who has lived perfectly.

But in pursuing perfection, we may all improve.

Perfection is nothing to me however.

Me whose grave I’ve dug myself and whose grave is very comfortable.

I won’t retire from this work yet, but I fear I will not be awake much longer.

Self-portrait 

My book is one of a dread which stains black its pages and makes one wish they could cease reading.

My spine is frail and strung together with vertebrae of Papier-mâché and aspic.

My bones are shattered by water damage,

And my pages could be torn out by the breeze.

I dread being picked off the shelf and I dread being read and wrote about.

Maybe that is why I am frail, and maybe it is why I am hard to read.

Has the faded ink throughout my being come about as a deterrent 

to those who attempt to see the full story within me?

Or have I simply been neglected?

As I lay on my cover, I wonder if a hedgehog hates itself for growing quills.

Interlude 2 

An early bird gets the worm, and a night owl gets the rabbit.

If I don’t sleep, I get to write poetry. 

Keep taking more than you give.

Keep spending my gas money its fine,

I won’t be needing it anyway,

And you always find the right day

To stay 

next to me when it’s easy.

With love, Tiktaalik

There is an emotion that separates itself from all others.

More powerful than any one feeling, it has the ability to change landscapes.

It is responsible for the nature of humans and animals residing in different worlds,

And it lives within all.

Determination.

Without it, all other emotions affect only oneself.

Determination is a fire wielded by those who have the drive to temper their will into a blade.

We know no limit to it, although it can be fickle to obtain.

Even though my pages are fading and there are moths circling me,

I continue on.

I don’t know why, but who really does?

I am a fish developing lungs to leave the pond it’s trapped in.

I flail around and drown and attempt to move my stumpy limbs and it is torture.

But I keep trying.

Because in my fish mind I know that the land is close, 

And the more I thrash, the more capable I am of breathing.

If I left now

I would walk out onto the street and down a barren highway.

My sorrow would be immeasurable, but short lived, 

And I would witness the beautiful grass and terrible trees of the next town over.

I would see nothing, feel nothing, and know no pain.

Maybe I end up standing in a field, 

Or a pit of brimstone,

Or I remain as I am now, floating in a void of Eigengrau.

And you.

You reading this.

You would feel that weight.

You would think of me sometimes and if you are close to me you would think of me often.

But even though I would shake myself of routine,

And be free of these grinding gears,

I would be missed.

I would be unable to bring more joy into this world, and my cat would question where I was.

She would lay on my neatly made bed and think of me.

And I would wish that on no one.

I have too much determination.

I hope to wander forward at a chance of ending up in a field of flowers.

And I will wait for you.

I will stop every couple of days and help you up.

I will walk around every field, 

Down every street, 

And over the ocean.

I will help you all.

With the psalms I write I will reach you.

And with my palms I will save you.