A Rock at the Point

In front of me laid the Pacific Ocean. 

To the left of me, a dark, deep cove, 
and to my right, a sunny, sandy beach. 

And here I stood on a rock at the point.

Below, the waves swelled and roared and lifted large rocks under the water
with shear strength and power.
And then dropped them as it retreated back into the sea. 

Each stone cracked and shook as they tumbled back onto each other. 
And the sounds they made... 
It was as if the earth was crumbling below me. 

I could feel the vibrations underneath me,
as they crashed down on one another. 
And I thought: What if this point I stood on,
this rock I currently stand on,
what if it crumbled below me
into the waves,
became part of the rising and falling stones
under that dark, deep water, 
became one with that vast sea.

No longer standing above it. 
But joining the unknown. 
Falling into the ever moving void.

Lost or found,
by that never ending 

I Couldn't Sleep Last Night

We're all seeking

for something meaningful,

but it's all fleeting

and sometimes forgettable.

Nothing lasts,

and we're filled with just

moments in the past

In time and space.
Where is our real place

in this meaningless world?

So I just try
and enjoy each minute,
cause we're all gunna die,
no matter how you spin it.

Let's make the most
of this time on earth.
Collect as many memories
as we can from birth.

Cause 'life is short'

and we don't have time
to sit around and dwell on
what was once mine.

But in all truth,
I miss him so dearly,
and him being around
is what let me see clearly.

See past all the strife,

and continually derive happiness
in this thing we call life,
in this petty, huge mess.

I can only hope
that I can still be strong,
but without him,

it feels like it's long gone.

Like my outlook on life

is somehow different,

but I'm just really hoping
that this was all meant

To teach me something,
make me a better person,
who can still find meaning
until my unavoidable end.

The Human Way

We are what we are
a means to an end
even if some people
like to pretend

That they actually care
that others actually matter
If you're one who believes this
your hopes will shatter

Have extreme lack of care
or consideration for others
for those who do worry
will only ever suffer

Fend for yourself
and let others do what they may
as horrible as this seems
it is the human way

My Second to Last Day (written by Carl Foster additions by Katherine Nawilis)

My final weekend could not have been better. It was some sort of cosmic miracle in fact. It is a story I would like to tell.

Shortly after arriving here in June, I was contacted by a childhood friend named Katherine. We had gone to elementary school in The Colony, Texas together and we were very close. I passed her house on my morning walk to school, and it was the first I saw leaving class every day. Then in middle school her family moved away.

How insurmountable even a small distance is in childhood... it was only the next town over, but after a half dozen or so field-trip type visits to the new house we soon lost touch. We went to different schools, traveled to different places, suffered different tragedies and chased our exclusive dreams in different directions. So I thought. Anyway I had no idea how to feel when she found me online and said she was also in Wyoming, living in Cheyenne seven hours away.

I was excited, but also hesitant to reveal how far I've strayed from the young man she knew. Same thought for her: could she possibly still have the passion for X-Men comics which brought us together so long ago? She would then be very dismayed to learn I had canceled my subscription, "put away childish things" and so forth.

Our meeting kept getting pushed further and further down the calendar line, all the way to my last weekend here. It almost seemed like it wouldn't happen, but then I found myself giving directions. I shrugged off apprehensions as I described my neighborhood and I waved casually from my walkway as I saw a familiar face looking for me from the parking lot; not riding some child's bicycle, but skillfully navigating an SUV.

Immediately I was overcome with excitement and emotion. How do you tell someone what you have been up to for a period exceeding ten years? My best friends of longest standing, ten year friendships that produced brothers who are always with me in photographs and at family gatherings–she had no idea about any of them! I had no recollections of her parents, nor had she any of mine. It would take an hour to explain my summer work here at the Tetons... to explain all the other times of my life over one weekend would be a crude dismissal of entire places and peoples.

Not possible. It had to be enough that we intertwined our lives once again in this abstract way... we couldn't stay indoors comparing notes and justifying all these decisions that got us here. We spent the weekend, which she noted was my last weekend, doing things that would be new for me as well as her since she only passed through Jackson once with family. She had seen the adventures I already had on facebook, and I call it the grace of a mythological ghost to say I shouldn't re-do anything just for her sake. All new things!

Our weekend was a comedy in the Shakespearean tradition. Everything was an enjoyable disaster. During our first hike right after reintroduction, Katherine moved to take a photo at the top of the mountain and accidentally nudged her black camera bag off the cliffside. "Was there anything in that?" I asked.
"My nicer camera," she said laughing. 
We listened to it roll. She laughed again and began to ask why she would do such a thing, as we stood there tragically but comedically still listening to the distant tumbling sound of something long gone out of sight. Our first assignment would not be easy.

We had to scale down rocks and make this unexpected social trail in order to locate a small black bag before complete darkness, which was due in one hour. My dog sniffed, her dog sniffed, and two frantic people searched the side of a large mountain in a zigzag fashion. I scaled a steep bed of fallen trees and miraculously, spotted and recovered the camera bag with much joyousness and surprise from Katherine. I think by that point, she had given up hope and marked it as an impossible task since nightfall had almost completely settled in, but again, by the grace of that same mythological ghost, the impossible was somehow possible.

We then found ourselves a bit lost in the woods at night, and my flashlight was discovered to be dead, probably because I had previously been playing with it in a well-lit room. Eventually, we found our way off the mountain and back home, amused and relieved by the evening's series of unfortunate and fortunate events.

The next day we rented tubes and went floating through town. The first half was peaceful, but soon my lanky form was meeting with rocks in a way reminiscent of being assaulted with aluminum baseball bats. Both of us received an identical slash in our tubes and had to climb out in a section of river which gushed violently through a public park. I injured my toe attempting to walk through the current, and Katherine's top came off in front of many happy families as she vigorously tried to wrangle her tube and attached car keys from being carried away by the rapids. Then we had to drag our deflated tubes to my car, lugging them as if they were sad, injured donuts. All the while, like the night before, there was only laughter and we seemed oblivious to any hardship.

We rode my bicycles without incident, but then decided to roll the dice once more and take a road trip to Victor, Idaho. We are both fans of live music, and I assured her we would find something there on a Saturday night.

We arrived to find the town dark and quiet. A lonely barmaid scrubbing a table at the Knotty Pine told us there was nothing, nothing. There seemed to be some junction with the Twilight Zone near Jackson. So we played Pac-man and walked several miles in the total darkness of a small Idaho town. We investigated a strange barn which turned out to be an ice rink, the oval shaped enclosure overrun with tiny sage brushes.

Those are really the extent of our calamities: Sunday was spent perfectly in the Grand Teton Park, and I got to take her many places I had never been myself so it was providence that none of them were disappointing or dangerous. We even encountered and provided a ride to a cute hitchhiking girl, the kind you only find in the movies, with long hair blowing in the wind, a trendy backpack, and a thick foreign accent.

We spent the whole day in the park, and on the drive home we talked about the complex series of coincidences that had brought us back together again at this bizarre latitude and longitude... from riding bicycles in The Colony, Texas to strolling through Victor, Idaho after midnight on a cold August night: as adults, bedecked in jewelry and endowed with so many years of our lives already written. It seemed like a miraculous coincidence that we were still the same age. Our conversations only emphasized that some quality of mind, call it philosophy maybe, had infected us both as youngsters and caused us to act in parallel ways without knowledge of what the other was doing.

You know, in a psychology textbook I once read about identical twins who were separated at birth and then reunited after thirty odd years. The photo showed two slightly similar men, but it was the words that jarred me: they had children of the same age, very similar wives, and both had small dogs they had named "Toy." It really makes you wonder, doesn't it?

That's about how I felt talking to Katherine. She told me she is an intern with the Teton Science School in Cheyenne, and I–all of us from the Academy, to wit–have some unofficial capacity with that organization as well, remote as it is from Texas. We shared so many qualities evident in our stories–ways we lived, places we traveled, people we knew and ways we felt... was our bond so strong in elementary school that it could have been the initial, womb-like core from which these events in our lives are so symmetrically cast in opposite directions? I just don't know, but we seem to be rushing headlong along some great arc too far to see.

She is gone again, but I am assured after this weekend that we will meet again, even if we do not speak in the meantime.

It was the perfect summation of a long and strange journey, a short moment which informed large parts of my past and certainly my future too. I hope everyone here can experience something that causes such a jolt inside the brain. It will help me reflect on all the friends I have made here, how they are gone or "not really gone" if you choose to argue the optimistic side... here's to hoping there is some place buried in our future where we can share the psychedelic joy of this kind that is only such because it is known so few times in one's life.

I Will Miss Those Lips

Those quiet kisses
snuck in at night
as the sun slowly rises
to provide a dim light.

We look at each other
between each kiss
the treasured eye contact
that I will forever miss.

Staring at your lips
and that damn chin
that I can't keep my hands off
it was worth the sin.

The undeniable lust
'It's such a far drive'
to your house and to your room
where we both thrive.

Those pushes and pulls
directing me which way
following your lead
I wish I could stay.

And after it all
we end up in an embrace
Everything's so personal
I am in love with this place.

If I had it my way
this would never end
with you as my lover
and also my friend.

But things run their course
so it's best that we stopped
before our romance
could be intentionally dropped.

Forever in those moments
shared secretly between you and me
a deep unspoken connection
that only we could see.

Experiences never forgotten
no memory left behind
on those future lonely nights
they'll live on in my mind.

Quarterlife

No god
to guide my way.
No hero
to save the day.

Just me,
in my entirety,
to figure out what
and where
I want to be.

The Vagrant Goes Home

She took a train to St. Louis.
Slept on friends' floors for six nights
and in a library cradle for a day.

Then hopped a plane to Tennessee,
to sleep on a couch in a loft apartment
named Sterchi.

Then drove to North Carolina,
to sleep on a bed in a cheap motel.
Tomorrow,
she takes a plane back to her hometown,
to end her vagrant days for good.

Over the last year and a half, she has been jumping from one home to another.
From Austin to Dallas
to Tulsa to Plano to Denton
to touring the Western U.S..

Jumping from one place to another
and never staying more than a couple months
in any one location.
Although her physical place of existence was never stable,
her mind was set.

This was her life,
to be by her mother's side,
forever and always.

Her mom once pleaded to her,
on a plane ride to Tulsa,
"I'm so sorry you had to put your life on hold for me. Please,
I don't want to be a burden to you."
She simply responded, "Mom, do not worry,
This is my life."

This was her initial reaction.
She didn't even realize what her response fully meant,
but it was probably
the most sincere and genuine thing
that she had ever said.

She could only hope that her mom understood her sincerity,
and the amount of love
and truth
and care
that was delivered with that statement;
The underlying notion that
she was here for her mom,
always and forever.

No matter where her life took her physically,
she would always be
here for her mom.
Even when her mom was not physically by her side,
she still held her close.

But now her physical self will soon be stable,
but she's starting to lose footing emotionally.
She'll be living physically at home,
but without her mother,
it is not fully home;
not in her mind at least.

So now,
the physical vagrant goes home,
but her mind is about to travel.