Tom's Crossing

Some say the universe bends toward Justice, but when it don't, stories mend the trajectory.

to matter you gotta set free someone that ain’t you.

Loyalty is but a shade off from a threat.

No one talks to the dead for free.

Some say the universe bends toward Justice, but when it don’t, stories mend the trajectory.

Kalin couldn't say what unsettled him more: the now obvious deadness of his dear friend or that even in death the dead might still know fear.

Growth comes when we make choices with results successful enuf to move us beyond repetition. But Allison knew that growth also comes from makin bad choices.

All of it: unreal. Like the mountains you discover aren't mountains but paint on plywood; like the stage floor beneath your feet you discover ain't even that, a stage, but just ground; like the open-air theater is an open-air theater because the theater was razed years ago. Because there ain't never been no theater, no stage, nor even mountains. There ain't been nothin but a wide, flat, merciless plain, what's so barren too that you begin to question even how it is you stand. On what? Sacred boards? Those are long gone. Ground? That's gone. Until it's just the sky above and sky below. Until there's no sky. Just nothin. Until you finally have to turn your disbelievin eye on yourself and meet nothin there too.

Our daddy used to tell us just usin a few words or worst of all one word don't give you no better handle on things. Like, do you really think the word apple is an apple? That one word, apple, don't come close to what the apples in the world really are. And horse? Can you imagine? I'll use every word I can think of, and if I can't think of one, then I'll make one up.

Lend a hand. Not one of us is whole.

...then journey a moment far from this blue-glazed orb, past the Moon and our war-weary Mars, beyond our protective Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, the icy bleakness of Neptune, you in your endless encapsulation of breath, movin farther and farther from all you once cherished and took for granted, until you're passin beyond even Pluto and whatever else rubble drifts there in those far orbits still honorin the grip of our sun, a distant star at best by then, that orderin presence you must now abdicate and abandon once and for all, castin yourself into the arms of what you will never come close to knowin but which will hold you nonetheless and guide you for near forever, forever beyond your grasp, all the while the home you once knew, even the memory of it, will be dismanted and scattered upon the void.

As if it ain’t already obvious

Though in the end what name isn’t a fiction? You think yours isn’t? Mine?

fairy tales was hard on feet.

maybe because we too easily lose hold of that feelin that a journey really did take place.

Sargent’s Fall of Gog and Magog

For everyone there is reserved a great journey. That include the dead? Kalin asked his friend. Especially the dead.

Lucky are them, most will say, whose futures align with the promise of their inheritances. But I’d say they’re the most cursed.

And meat is the only cost that matters to real men.

The now that passes creates time; the now that remains creates eternity.

I’ve rarely, if ever, had a sense of true arrival, let alone of bein at home.

You get what you deserve when you ride with cowards," Kalin told Old Porch.

nothin worse than a great idea gettin in the way of a better decision.

you’d have to know Church talk better to understand how sometimes just the mention of somethin, however nicely put, is a way to warn you from that path.

though why men would like to be united by their drool is an unsavory image of allegiance not worth dignifyin here.

That vest deserves its own moment, but not even a small part of that story will be told. Peace be with you, Morit.