What is language and why doe it rain on some and burn through others? What is it that we say when we speak? Simple questions given a thousand times to different answers. Memory has got to be the most sophisticated and overrated tool of the always backtracking mind. It’s enough to be here and alive; it is so much more to feel wind and hear elk fording a high creek at dusk, making sounds like an old man choking beyond a closed door. Mallards dropping into the water like dead satellites or lies. Deer moving like vapors, their black hooves clicking on the roadbed, matching note for note the drops of rain which fall upon your cheeks. And one horse, full of breathing fire, stirring his 20 peers into action. They become storm. Hearts are exposed. Soil is torn from the earth. Things arouse. A dance commences and is witnessed.


My arms tenuous coils that serve to rein the twin serpents of my hands. People ask for for terrible amounts of everything that there might then be enough to choose [from]. Choice paramount to freedom; to breathing.


Along the spine of the Tetons I ride, thinking none of these thoughts. Rain mixes with snow mixes with wind. It’s a good time to scream — may your hate be sucked into no one’s next life. A king sun sets behind the pawn of clouds. May marches. I live quietly.

When you’re waiting for someone to show up, walk into the trees — they’re a ready source of towering, potent company. Right? Right.

Jackson, Wyoming.

Bawdy neons strike at your most  immediate sense: sight. Here we are. Absolute. Full of the daily terrors that keep us from remaining stationary too long. With flags dead at the tops of their poles, I troll the town in search of. Every color combines to dye the sky; night descends completely, a trick we are loathe to clap for since beginningless time . All is swallowed slick and marvelous by God, his open chest heaving out nothing but inky, flotsam blacks. Light chances to reflect off all glass windows — those invented funhouse mirrors of this adult life. The brightness mails out hollow, elliptical notes of the empty. I stand gawking at everything but myself, holy compliance for ignorance a requisite for sight. Sun, rockets, and saints rain invisible down the throats of my eyes. My god! I can see glory! Sunday evening and, minus my dancing iris’s, this place appears a stale tomb. I’ve only these gaseous signs for company, aging pillars of the west that they are. There is nothing but waiting catastrophe this high in the Rockies. In the meantime, I’ll take this burning refuge as ridiculous hope.

A blank page, among other things, poses the question of what do you have to say? Well, what do you have to say? What laudable piece of magic do you have to give your audience? May they, and it, be worthwhile. There are too many claimed creators and not enough creation. Too many watchers, paralyzed with perceived normalcy, weighted with the inability to fucking hear. But that’s neither here nor there. What? I run round the altar of the gods seeking shelter, supplication, sympathy. They give me the tools that I was born to possess: thought, diligent action, a smile, arms that can carry the heaviest of loads.


A storm spends the day creeping across this valley. Mountains come and go like wit in a conversation. Lines of electricity, balanced on wooden poles that jut into the sky, run themselves into the dreams of your future. I walk into the evening. Snow dusts a world of sage, asphalt, and language. Clouds move off the hills with a wink — smoke sucked out of room from beneath a door. The air is dark and wet, feeling in your lungs like a thousand mornings of bitter coffee that do nothing to brighten the stain of gray out the window.  I rejoice because blessing is knowing that this is the 5^th day of May and soon enough we will see the sun. It will make us forget hot teas and blasted hours spent thinking cold thought(s). We cannot lose.


There are stars out my window so bright and precious that they rival the days best conversations, melting the weakest that they main drain like rainwater to the seas. The moon is glimpsed these last three nights not when you lay your head down to sleep, but when you lift it in that precious midnight that has no beginning, no end. Sometimes it is yellow and framed by clouds the color of dirty English teeth. Often though, it is without texture or reference, a single lit voice of reason for infinite personal possession of those with something to say.

Wyoming – and you’d be forgiven for thinking that mountains, mountains should be the subject of all things photographed – has placed me squarely between its uplifted, crunching jaws. Survival means strength, jumping from between the crashing machinery not at the last moment, but when I tire of growing ever more capable of: survival, love, patience, bearing witness. Sentience. Seeing. Hearing the air speak in sentences that instruct me to look.


Water drips from eaves — snow having been it’s previous, and oft maligned, evolution. Spring has not quite yet come to 6200ft, and all of us curious lovers of seasons await this one both for its allowed remembrances of the past and its uncanny ability to create anew. Flurries flair from a sky that is sun bright if ill-defined. Radios cackle distant – those simple waves sent from the pale blue hearts of abstract, but climbable peaks? A truck that looks the way it smells – old – carries me down roads that have been swept eternally clear by invisible scourings of wind from Idaho and Montana; mistress breezes that turn the corners of my perfect lips up into something of snared smile.


For the time being, this place is a wondrous, distilled home. Perspective both winnows and explodes. This language wanders marvelous, with strides that cross state lines. Brushing my teeth means watching the golden valley below shade black with the shadows of passing clouds. Walking means robins courting like two clapped hands. Ravens spiral out of the shapeless sun. Moose drain creeks. Birds of prey swarm like thoughts of god. The sky is a rolling thunder of all things gray, white, and blue. I’m a boy with the imagination blender set to puree. Give me it all! [Please].