For You.
For Me.
A NOTE: When I started writing this, I didn’t know what it was. A poem in form only, a letter written in parts, an offering that I’ve now been working on for years.
A thing.
But when I think of it now, and the process of it all, I realize that it was basically just the undoing of . . . me—a twenty-something clinging tight to the nugget of thin air I referred to as my dream. And as the meltdown happened, I realized that many of the people around me were melting as well. My friends who stayed up all night with me in Brooklyn—painting, and playing music, writing, practicing and pushing—were growing tired and annoyed, frustrated with the uncertainty. People in my family, the “responsibles,” whom I argued and disagreed with, never knew that I could see that the remnants of this same kind of meltdown that may have happened to them forty years prior were still there, hiding beneath their tongues.
And for some reason, around this time I also met quite a few teenagers who carried with them an unfortunate practicality. It was as if their imaginations had been seat belted, kept safe from accidents. Sure, they still had adolescent gusto, but only in speech. When asked about their dreams and passions, though, many could only answer halfway. They could admit that the dreams were real and that there were things they wanted to do, say, see, and make, but they couldn’t get past how foolish it is to be foolish.
And I couldn’t blame them. Any of them. I had tried to do something different, and it was killing me. And my friends. And my family. But the dream was still there, still painfully undeniable.
So, I started writing this. A letter to myself to keep from quitting. It was written while I was afraid. Unsure. Doubtful. And at first, I wasn’t sure what it was. A poem in form only, a letter written in parts, an offering, that I’ve now been working on for years.
For me, a mighty, mighty thing.
“Though we do not wholly believe it yet,
the interior life is a real life,
and the intangible dreams of people
have a tangible effect on the world.”
—James Baldwin
ONE
Dear
Dreamer,
THIS LETTER IS BEING WRITTEN
from a place of raw honesty and love
but not at all
a place of expertise
on how to make
your dreams come true.
I don’t know NOTHING ABOUT THAT.
I HAVEN’T GONE
THROUGH IT ALL
and come out on the other side
pinned with a
blue ribbon,
draped in
a victor’s sash
or dollar bills
or even unshakable happiness.
IN FACT,
I have yet to see
my own dream
made tangible.
THIS LETTER
IS BEING WRITTEN
FROM THE INSIDE.
From the front line
and the fault line.
From the uncertain thick of it all.
From a man with a
straight-line mouth
and an ego
with a slow leak.
From a man doing it
the only way
he knows how,
splitting his cries
and his smiles
right down the middle,
swallowing his moonshine mistakes
while in the sunlight his sweat
irrigates his life and that life he-
like you-
HAS BEEN TILLING, HOPING THERE’S A HARVEST COMING.
AT SIXTEEN I thought
I would’ve made it by now.
At eighteen I said twenty-five
is when I’d make my first million.
At twenty-five I moved back in
with my mother,
bill collectors
breathing on me like
Brooklyn summer.
And now at
ALMOST TWENTY-EIGHT
I’m just
ALMOST TWENTY-EIGHT.
SO I GOT
NO
ANSWERS.
THE TRUTH IS
our dreams could be
as far away as forever
or as close as lunchtime.
Tomorrow you could
wake up and read
this letter on a billboard.
Or you could wake up
and have forgotten
who wrote it.
IT ALL JUST
DEPENDS.
Some say on skill.
Some say on will.
Some say on luck.
Some say on buck.
Some say on race.
Some say on face.
Some say on Sunday
God got a mighty,
mighty plan.
Nobody really knows
what it depends on,
but everybody knows
IT DEPENDS.
SO I WENT OUT
and bought all the books
on all the ways to make
dreams come true,
laying out the how-to,
somehow spinning life
into a fantastic formula
for dummies and
dream chasers,
written by experts and
dream catchers
who swear that I
can one plus one
and right foot
left foot
my way into fulfillment,
never taking into
consideration
all this mess I got
strapped to my
back and my head
and my legs and
MY HEART.
And them books
didn’t bandage my
fattened flat feet,
swollen from
this journey.
The pages
didn’t spend
nor could they
be eaten to ease
the hunger.
Though I could
curl up with one,
I couldn’t curl up
on one
and get a
decent rest
or a respite from
the hunt.
USELESS.
I thought about
burning them.
At least
I could use the
firelight for this
LONG AND OFTEN DARK ROAD.
ONE THING
I AM NOW CERTAIN OF
is that this
road less traveled has
in fact
been traveled by more suckers
than you think.
All of us out here,
slumped over wearing
weird fake
broken smiles,
trying to avoid the truth:
THAT WE ALL GOT ROAD RAGE.
WE ARE a bunch of
exhausted stragglers,
exalted strugglers,
disciples of the dreamers who
came before us.
Students of a
different bible,
reading the book
of the City of Angels
and the Big Apple,
an orange house in
old New Orleans,
a cheap barren flat
above a bistro
in Paris.
We are led by the Moses in our minds
to the Promised Land
in our hearts
we know is real.
AT SIXTEEN
I thought
I would’ve made it
by now.
NOW
I’m making up
wha
t making it
means
AS I GO.
But this letter
is not about making it,
because I don’t know nothing about that.
I don’t know nothing about that
at all.
TWO
WHAT I DO KNOW
is how it feels.
How it feels
when that spirit thing
won’t stop
raking the metal mug
across your rib cage,
clanging
like a machine gun
fired at a church bell,
vibrating everything
irreverent inside.
Sounds like a prison
revolt
that only you
can hear
and feel.
And nasty things
are being said
about the prison guard-
that scared
controlling
oppressive part
of you
AND EVERYONE ELSE.
If you are
anything like me,
you hope
it never stops.
You hope the
bubbling never
dies down
and the yearning to
break out and
break through
never simmers.
YOU HOPE
the voice that
delivers the
loudest whispers
of what you envision never silences.
That it never cowers behind fear
and expectations that other people
strap to your life
like a backpack full of bricks
(or books written by
experts).
Because if it did-
if it disappeared,
if the voices vanished
and you were no longer
overtaken by the
taunts of your own
potential,
no longer blinded
by a perfect vision
of your purpose,
no longer engorged
with passion-
what would happen?
WELL,
I GUESS
NOTHING.
And to me,
there is
NOTHING SCARIER
than
NOTHING.
Even when nothing seems
to be going right
or Nothing seems to be
going right.
I’d rather be bothered
by the loud knocking
on the door inside.
Even though I answered
years ago,
the knocking continues.
I’d rather my appetite
be whet by a teaspoon
of almost-there
every now and then.
I’d rather suffer from
internal eczema,
constantly irritated
by the itch of possibility.
There have been
many anxious nights
where darkness
has slept around me,
my friends
cocooned in a
coziness I have
yet to meet.
My eyes
swollen with exhaustion,
my body sputtering
on its way down,
but my dream
won’t stop crying,
screaming
like a colicky
infant.
Sometimes I think
it needs to be changed.
USUALLY
IT JUST NEEDS TO BE FED.
So I feed it everything
I have.
And
it feeds me everything
I have.
Though the struggle
is always made to
sound admirable
and poetic,
the thumping uncertainty
is still there.
SURE,
I know my dream
is as real
as my hands
but I grip tight
a short leash
with insecurity
tied to the end
wagging along
beside me.
If you’re like me,
you’ve struggled trying
to stomp out
the flame of doubt
and fear,
the warmth and comfort
always enticing
and familiar
though venomous
and life extinguishing.
I KNOW PEOPLE WHO
have burned.
A burn so violent
it can’t be categorized
by any numbered degree.
I know people who
have burned
from foot
to torso
emotionally.
Legs of passion
turned to soot.
Yet no matter how
hard I’ve tried
to escape it,
to kill the
deceptive heat
dancing like a
devil’s tongue,
to douse it with all
the will and faith
I can muster,
I know
a tiny ember
always glows
beneath the brush.
It whispers to me
only when I step to
the edge of excellence.
My toes clawing
the cliff,
my mind already airborne.
It whispers to me
that I don’t have wings
that I don’t have a shot
that I don’t have a clue
but to me,
I don’t have a choice,
so I jump
anyway.
Dreamer,
if you are like me,
YOU
JUMP
ANYWAY.
THREE
THIS LETTER ISN’T
for any specific
kind of dream.
It isn’t intended
for a certain genre,
medium,
trade, or
denomination.
It is only intended
FOR THE COURAGEOUS.
Maybe you are a dancer
moving to the sound of your own future;
or a musician
banging strumming bowing plucking
blowing into,
creating soundtracks
for dream trains chugging along
through thick night;
or a painter
spilling and splattering confessions
across the face of stretched canvas;
or an actor
praying at the altar
of your alter ego;
or a photographer,
finger on the button
like a quick-draw cowboy,
shooting
not to kill anyone
but to preserve forever;
or maybe even
a writer
for some strange reason,
writing expert books,
pages of good intention
and rah-rah and fantasy
and sometimes truth,
or maybe even letters to people
you don’t know but
do know you love.
Or maybe you aren’t
an artist at all.
DREAMS AREN’T
RESERVED FOR
THE CREATIVES.
Maybe you’re an athlete,
a gladiator hoping for
a shot at the lion.
Maybe you’re eighteen
and plan to make your first million
by twenty-five
(it’s not impossible).
Or maybe you’re eighteen
and plan to make it to
twenty-one
(it’s not impossible, nor is
twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four).
At twenty-five I moved back in with my mother
and found out
she loved to teach
little kids,
and bake,
and help the needy-
her passion made plain,
her dream made real
after forty years
of forty hours a week
behind a desk.
You might be fifty
and think it’s too late.
JUMP ANYWAY.
Dreams don’t have timelines,
deadlines,
and aren’t always in
straight lines.
JUMP ANYWAY.
OR MAYBE
your dream is to have a family,
to wear corny T-shirts
and hold up signs
and be the cameraman
at the little one’s
games.
To kiss your child
on head and heart,
selflessly fertilizing
his or her passion.
Stay awake with them
when the dream
is crying
like a colicky infant;
help them feed it
and before sleep
do your best to
smother