The Advocate

(Credit) This is a prose poem. Please do not confuse the art with the artist by projecting the contents of the character into the creator. Begin rant/ I'm no longer on my antidepressant. I still take the Xanax though. My therapist, who I was finally starting to get comfortable with after months, has moved away for a new job. So I've stopped therapy completely. I treat my psychiatrist like a mushroom because he doesn't seem interested in me. I feel like my treatment has helped me as much by not helping me as it has by helping me. I still have intrusive thoughts about terrible things. I still exhibit hyper-vigilance. I still worry excessively about my shit and piss and bathrooms and wearing protective garments. Yet now I have stopped putting myself down for past my behavior when I was a child. I give myself space to try and openly be sad, to feel things, to not be perfect. Some days I even feel truly, unconditionally, and briefly happy. Especially with my infant. Still, I al...

Been a minute since my last post. Got caught up in the grind, as we all do from time to time. Forgot about the take back, clap back, but it's a long weekend and some things have not yet arrived, so here we find ourselves. There are times when I've got that itch, that restlessness, that skin-crawling tingle. The feeling that keeps me up at night doing chores no one has any business doing at 4 AM. The feeling that keeps me up listening to another Bon Iver album, sweating in my boxer-briefs, typing into the cyber-ether. My proverbial shout from the mountaintops to the bottom of the sea. I hope you don't mind this divergence into something a little more personal. There are times when my fingers must. When they have to. Have to type. Have to spin words like spiders must spin webs, like electronic daemons must crawl the interweb, trawling cyberspace until the end of time. Soon, I'm going to be a father. I am going to have a little girl. It could happen at any time. She...

So, my latest collection has FINALLY arrived for your reading pleasure! Available in Kindle, NOOK, Apple ibook, and other ebook formats, as well as traditional softcover from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , and Ingram. This collection has been a loooooong time in the making -- a lot of writing, editing, rewriting, reediting, scrapping, emotional upheavals, existential crises, and cash-strapped budgeting. But, after almost eight years of hard work, it's done. (Seriously, I could give GRRM a run for his money when it comes to the wait between books.) I certainly could never have done it without the support of my wife, my brother, and a lot of inspirational artists I know in real life as well as not in real life, including/especially Melanie Matranga who contributed the cartoon artwork for this collection. I also owe a big thanks to Amber, and all of the Dog Ear Publishing team who helped me turn this collection into the electronically as well as physically bound reality before y...

Status update! Sad Bastard Poetry, my latest collection has completed it's proof pass phase and is approved for printing with Dog Ear Publishing!! I anticipate having a solid release date for ya'll soon. In the meantime, here's another sample of the original artwork I had commissioned for this collection, as well as the back-cover description to give you an idea of what you're in for: "Since the very first quasi-mythological scratchings of the written word, and probably long before it, people have been sharing stories of the tragicomic concept known as Love. Those heights, and depths, were plundered no more infamously than by a writer named Billy the Bard, also known as Willy the Shake and Old Bill (unless you count that incestuous paedophile E.A. Poe). His gratuitous impact sparked the name for this collection in which you will read about the grotesque, photographic, melancholic, eviscerating, and hilarious faces of Love in all its forms, from romantic and sweet, ...