The Loudmouth Mooch

  What is this feeling? Blindsided like a surprise storm on a muggy night In the summery swampland of my hometown. The murky waters of my grief rising,  In the corners of my souther heart. I remember a time when love bloomed  Like camellias in the spring of my youth. Only for the petals to be blown away By the turbulent winds of a hurricane. Hoping maybe that the seeds of my joy can take root, And thrive in a new and foreign place.

  I just need to write something. Ideas bubbling under the surface, Ready to have their souls bared on a blank page. If only my mind was ready to release them from their captivity. I just need to write something. Today I shared a poem I was able to get out, Praises from their readers shocked me  like a surprise firework in the night sky. Those technicolor sparks brimming with  a shred of hope and a bounty of expectation. I just need to write something. My creativity is a cancer and I its unwitting victim. When finally I'm aware, its murderous clutches have already found me. My heart pounds in fear, my sanity on the haggard fringes. I just need to write something. Questions swarm around me, watching their prey as they prepare to take me away from this place of terror. Will I ever fly away from this turbulent storm? I just need to write something. I crave peace, I crave escape, My soul ragged from its marathon of possibility. Maybe the time has come, maybe I can finally be ...

  I’m ready for my story to begin. Ever since I was a kid, I always felt like I was born for something greater. Sure, I sound like every melodramatic human out there, but cliché or not, I think that’s how we all felt inside. We all thought the world was exciting and brand new, and maybe that’s because everything is exciting and brand new. Our birth was a match that lit a candle, and we hoped could burn all the air that we could to embolden that tiny flicker of fire into a second sun, radiant and timeless. We felt what I am feeling now as I type this. A feeling not unlike a current of electricity, powering every skin cell in my body to lift the very hair on my body. This stream of energy has fueled every aspect of me in the past, but somehow, that current has gotten blocked for some time. Although maybe it was never actually blocked in the first place now that I think of it.   Sometimes, it feels like life does its best to leave us stuck at a crossroads, wondering where to go a...

Dreams can be friendly, but they can also be pretty fucking mean. I often have those nightmares of situations that have happened, but they always tend to be a thousand times worse. One moment I’m gleefully slicing through zombies with double-wielding axes like I’m a character in one of the many video games I play, then suddenly I turn around and my family is behind me, thinking maybe they’re my adventuring party and they’re here to help. One moment, a zombie is about to swing at me with its rotten, claw-like fingernails and then my dad jumps in the way to beat it down. Then, he turns around and magically the cemetery battlefield we were in turns into my childhood living room.   What was once a happy moment of my superhero, the one I trust with all my being, has rapidly turned into him screaming at me and I’m doing everything in my power to hold back tears and my own anger, surging through me like an electrical current trying to find it’s open circuit. The circuit is found, and that...

A House of Windows --> Today, I finally came to the acceptance that I’m back in my pattern of hiding from the world. The more and more I do this, the more and more I realize that I’m like a cat or maybe even a turtle. I have to hide to escape from a world that for some reason, I feel like I can’t handle right now. These wounds to my body, my heart, I have to lick them clean. It’s like everything just piles up, and just getting out of bed in the morning is a feat. Let alone, getting out of bed to make coffee. Or responding to a text message. Or trying to focus on reading a book. For some reason, I can’t do any of these things lately and I’m just not sure why. I have so many things that I want to do in the world. People I want to meet. Places I want to see. Nobel Peace Prizes to win. But then, the shackle that binds me to a room made of only windows reminds me that something is holding me back. Every now and then, I’m able to shatter that glass and walk through...

There's no guidebook to having a disability.  I guess you could say that about having any minority-determining or stress-inducing factor you deal with. But for now, I have the urge to reflect on what it means to create your very own guidebook for your life. After years of going to school while working part-time jobs, then moving to the workforce when I graduated from LSU, and then the constant go-go-go lifestyle that America is so known for, my body just shut down thanks to my disability. For seven months of being on short-term disability, I sat in my house and wondered if I'd ever recover from this bad spell of fatigue and soreness. Those seven months were some of the more trying moments in my life. Between determining if I could work again, if I wasn't letting down the organization I was working for, feeling like a huge burden to the loved ones around me, wondering if I could take an impromptu nine hour trip to Tampa in the middle of the night while on STD (spoiler...