Tag Archives: poetic wilderness

Get Lost ©️

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The island didn’t kill me. It revealed me. Not in a blaze of suffering or a tale of survival you’d pass down to your children like a bedtime legend, but in something far more complete. More deliberate. It pulled me out of myself slowly, like silk unwinding from a spool, until I was no longer a man surviving—just a man being. Alone. Untethered. Free. I arrived soft and civilized, wearing the costume of who I thought I was: a reasonable man with reasonable habits, a man who answered emails and smiled in elevators and knew the right things to say when someone cried. That man didn’t last a week.

What replaced him didn’t come crashing in like a wild animal. No. He strolled in. Unbothered. Quiet. A version of me I’d buried under decades of expectation, handshakes, and birthday parties I didn’t want to go to. The island called him out like an old friend. I didn’t resist. There was nothing left to resist with. The rituals of the old world fell away. My name, my job, my self-assigned importance—all of it dissolved like sugar in saltwater. And it didn’t hurt. That’s the strange thing. It felt good. Like slipping into warm water. Like finally telling the truth.

I stopped talking to be understood. I stopped watching the sky for rescue. My thoughts unspooled into rhythm—feral, bright, clear. I would walk the same stretch of sand for hours, barefoot and sunburnt, chanting nonsense to the wind, not to be heard, but to become the sound itself. I carved symbols into bark and whispered stories into the fire, stories that had never existed before but somehow belonged to me. There was no audience. No witness. But I never felt alone. The air watched. The tide remembered.

I began to wear the sky. To feel the gravity of the moon like it was inside my spine. I was not going insane. I was waking up.

I learned to laugh again—ugly, deep, soul-shaking laughter, the kind that starts in your gut and tears through your teeth like music too big for your chest. I laughed at the ocean, at the trees, at the bones I found in the sand, because I saw the joke now. I had been sleepwalking through a polite nightmare my whole life, calling it comfort. Here, stripped of every softness, I felt pleasure ripple through me just from breathing. Just from being alive without reason.

I built shrines from coral and bone and lined them with my past. A watch. A boot. A cracked mirror. I worshiped nothing, and it was divine. I slept in the rain. I sang to storms. I stopped counting days, not from madness, but because time had bent its knee to me. There was no before. No after. Just now. And now was infinite.

I was not a castaway. I was not lost. I was not waiting.

I had become the island. And it had become me.

There is a kind of joy too large for society to hold.

And I drank it.

Every single day.

The Field Between Them ©️

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Two trees grew in a field where no man prayed, Split by a stone that the thunder obeyed. One sang of heaven in bark and bloom, The other drank deeply from winter’s tomb. Both bent to wind like prophets in sleep, Their roots clasped secrets the river would keep.

O mountain mother, hush not thy voice—For wolves still yawn and the elk rejoice. The stars hang drunken on fir-lit pines. Where the dead breathe fog in the faulted lines. And under their branches, frost-wrought and bare, Lie hoofprints nailed like hymns to prayer.

One tree leaned westward, one toward the sun, Their shadows braided when day was done. No saw, no axe, no farmer’s grief, Could split the vow in bark and leaf. They grew not tall for man’s delight, But to whisper to moose in the lantern night.

Beneath them lay the bones of snow, Where blood once melted, then ceased to flow. Not war, but silence had torn the skin—Of a land where breath is held within. And the trees stood still as if they’d known That God rides bareback through pine alone.

So rage, green giants, and swing your boughs—The storm is just the world’s old vows. Though cabins rot and ranches fall, Still you stand, and still you call. And when my time comes, make me this: A voice in wind between roots and abyss.

Two trees grew in a field where I lay down, One bore a crown, the other a frown. Yet both were true, and both were wild, And both remembered me—as child.