Dan Campbell

My life stopped lending itself to poetry a few years ago. Or maybe it was the other way around, but I’ve either stopped feeling enough to write about it or I never did and manufactured my sadness in tiny factories that rose up all over my skin and had little neighborhoods form around them only to watch the industry fail and the buildings decompose and the neighborhood give way to violence and drug addicts and alleyways you don’t walk down even in the broadest light of day because some people just don’t give a fuck anymore. Yes, it must have been this way because I was absolutely sadder this past year than I ever have been before and the poetry just never came. I saw glimpses of it when I had dreams of daughters we never had crying for their mother to name them after a sad song they heard on the radio once or of times you muttered to me when I was half awake about how you saw pictures of us painted in vivid colors on a veranda in post-war Europe making love to the sound of silence after the bombs stopped.

Dan Campbell

But Honey, we dream in grayscale and the blackout curtains wouldn’t have let the light in anyway so I’m near positive that we’re going to be okay. I thought I saw poetry hiding in the corner of a small diner when a girl told me stories of building paper boats and sailing them in puddles in her backyard during monsoon season, but if it was there, it went outside for a cigarette and never came back and once I found a poem inside me the night of April’s funeral, but I’d gladly trade it in for my friend back. So, if you know who’s running heaven these days, let him know that I’m ready and willing to negotiate. And fuck, I was pretty sure there was some sort of metaphoric sentiment built into the night I had a pistol pointed at my chest, but in retrospect, I’d rather you just go find the boys with the gun because I think I’d rather them have my life than the faith in humanity I gave them.

Damn, if I could go back in time to when I wrote quiet little poems, I’d punch myself right in the fucking face because it gets worse man. It gets much, much worse and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can just start dieing, and I know. I know—blahblahblah, nobody gives a fuck about your broken heart, but you know something? Most days, I’m not even sure what I’m upset about.