I Am a Little Bit Gibran, a Little Bit Grizzard, and I May Have Bitten a Man in Daytona Once

I wake up some mornings ready to praise the silence. I open the window, sip coffee like I’m speaking with heaven, and whisper something soft to the trees.

“The soul is a quiet river,” I say aloud, and then I trip over my own shoe and scream something that makes the neighbor’s cat flee the yard.

I contain peace. I also contain the kind of fury you only feel when a drive-thru forgets your hashbrowns twice in one week.

There is a poet in me who weeps at the rise of a hip, who believes the body is a psalm, who once stared at a woman’s bare shoulder long enough to ruin five years of theological certainty.

And there is a redneck philosopher in me who once broke up with someone because she bought unsalted butter and said,

“You can always add your own.”

You cannot, in fact, always add your own. Some things must be born right.

I have, in the same hour, written a poem that could end a war and thrown a remote so hard it embedded itself in drywall.

There are days I walk like Hemingway's men, tight-lipped, tired of my own company, thinking more than I say and drinking more than I admit. I have stood in a field and watched the wind move through dry grass and felt it say more than any sermon.

I know silence. I know what it does to a man. I know how love leaves, how war doesn’t, and how you can miss someone who’s standing right in front of you.

But then I remember the woman in the bar who said my laugh reminded her of rain on tin. And I turned soft again.

Dangerous men still want to be kissed.

I once tried to live simply. I bought a plant. It died. I bought another plant. It caught fire. I now live among succulents and regrets.

Somewhere in me, Hiaasen’s madness blooms. I believe all birds are secretly judging us. I once dated a woman who rescued raccoons and gave them ironic names like “Doug.” Doug bit me. I forgave him. I never forgave her for stealing my debit card and using it to buy emotional crystals and beef jerky.

I pray with the same mouth I use to tell jokes that get me kicked out of weddings. I have been banned from one museum and three family reunions. I once tried to make peace with a snake. It went poorly.

There is a Rilke in me. He wakes in the stillness just before longing takes form, in the silence between one heartbeat and the next. He teaches that to touch another is to be momentarily forgiven for the ache of being separate. That the light across a woman’s skin is not a promise, but a question. And that love, when it is true, does not fill us. It deepens our aloneness into something bearable.

And still…I am the man who yells at traffic and forgets his own zip code when filling out paperwork.

I love in verses and argue in volume. I philosophize while holding a gas station corn dog. I cry over music and laugh at funerals. I once wrote a love letter on the back of a grocery receipt and accidentally handed it to a cashier named Frank.

He never called.

So no, I won’t pick a lane.

I’ll keep swerving. I’ll sing praise to every crooked thing. I’ll write odes on napkins and death threats in iambic pentameter. I’ll be equal parts wisdom and wreckage.

Because some days, you are the Prophet. Some days, you are the Possum. Some days, you are nursing a bourbon in a quiet room with too many memories. And some days, you are the reason someone writes poetry that hurts to read.

And if you’re lucky, you’ll write your own gospel in barbecue sauce and borrowed time, live long enough to regret nothing but the quiet, and die laughing, halfway through a story no one else could finish.