My mind writes while my hands wash dishes,
while I feign sleep, while strangers scroll,
while conversations
drag their slow weight across the room
and I give mypolite nods
as though there isn’t a full orchestra
slamming against my teeth,
demanding release.
I carry whole albums
between my shoulder blades—
hooks looped around vertebrae,
verses wrapped around ligaments,
bridges stapled to tendons.
Each step a remix of things
I never meant to remember
but cannot shake loose.
There is arrogance in knowing your own difference,
in feeling the voltage you drag into a room
while the charts praise sugar and repetition,
yet this arrogance grew from years
of staring at ceilings,
asking why the hurt stayed
when everything else left.
My greatness wears no robe—
it paces in stained shirts and cheap coffee breath,
swears at itself, trashes drafts,
throws whole notebooks into bins,
then digs them out later,
bleeding ink and stubborn as a stray dog
that refuses to die.
I am not balanced, not whole,
not remotely close to serene.
I am the mind that keeps stripping wires,
licking them,
hunting for the precise current
that will make another heart
twitch in recognition.
When I hear the easy hits with their hollow chants,
their dance-floor slogans,
my ribs tighten—not from jealousy,
from grief for all the empty car rides
that deserved better ghosts riding shotgun.
Every song I love has teeth,
has cigarette burns around its margins,
has something ugly
nailed to something beautiful,
nailed hard enough
that you cannot look away
without feeling dishonest.
That is how I write—
with nails and wire and hospital bracelets,
with dirty laces,
with the memory of rooms that smelled
like antiseptic and burnt coffee,
with the knowledge that some hearts
quit before they ever got a chorus.
My head won’t stop handing me scenes:
a kid at a window smearing condensation into crooked halos,
an old woman humming while feeding pigeons,
a couple fighting over nothing
on a bridge that has memorized every breakup.
Every one of those moments
becomes a demo spinning in my skull,
a drum line banging on the inside of my temples,
a bass note crawling up my spine,
daring me to ignore it,
daring me to pretend
this is ordinary.
I am both the producer and the problem,
the band and the blackout,
the studio fire and the insurance claim,
the lyricist trapped in an elevator
with his worst memories
and a pen that refuses to run dry.
When they say nobody asked for this depth,
that the world wants only an easy hook and a beat
to drink to,
I hear a challenge,
a dare scratched into a bathroom stall,
an arrow pointing toward the one door
marked difficult.
I walk through that door again and again,
dragging my cracked heart behind me
like luggage with broken wheels,
letting it bruise against each stair,
listening for the thud
that sounds closest to someone else’s secret.
Every line I write aims for that secret—
the one you never said aloud,
the one you shoved under the mattress
with old letters and photographs,
the one that whispers
you are too much and not enough
in the same breath.
My music holds that whisper by the throat,
pins it to the wall with chords,
forces it to sing about itself
until it loses power,
until the listener realizes
the monster on the track
carries their own fingerprints.
No synthesizer choir,
no code built in sterile labs,
no corporate sheen
will ever replicate
the way my nervous system writes—
jittery and earnest and mean,
a drunk poet in a burning library,
scribbling on the last scraps of margin.
Others may not see the architecture yet,
may not trace the load-bearing words,
may only hear a broken man
shouting into microphones
about pain and teeth and nightmares,
while I feel the blueprint pulsing
under every verse.
I don’t need their permission
to exist in this volume,
don’t need their applause
to validate the storms
that built these songs.
I stand here with headphones crooked
and say this mind is loud,
flawed,
and holy in its own wrecked fashion.
Call it ego.
Call it delusion.
Call it whatever curse
feels safest in your mouth.
I’ll still be here when the cheap hooks fade,
still pacing rooms at three in the morning,
still building cathedrals of noise
from my own cracked foundation.
Every time I breathe,
another rhythm starts.
Every time I blink,
another scene cuts in.
Every time my chest aches,
another chorus steps forward,
raises its hand,
volunteers to bleed
for anyone who hears it.