Exercising our right of self determination is the cure — The realities of the impact on our health from being who we are, from being LGBTQIA+, is an important issue. On the base level of existence, there is a price to pay for simply being. The Buddha discovered early on that life is suffering, or more accurately, there is a…

Because It Does — I’ve been silent for a while, my energies focused on my graduate work. I write a lot of papers and discussion posts, so there’s not much left to write about life as a gay man in the red semi-rural world of Texas. …

Gaily playing with poetic form — I There are no strands of green at our day’s end. No more pretending our night holds blessings Beyond the ring of shadow bells. Souls tend What time will rend and all the world will sing For sacred things to seal the breach and bring The breaking end to time as the red sun Sets over…

And learning to love myself along the way — I was a senior in high school. It was a random day, a normal progression of events. Wake up, endure what passed for school, football practice, 4-H projects… That evening, as we were getting ready for supper, the news was running in the background. I had heard of this new…

It’s not as hard as you think — I have written elsewhere, either here or in memory, I do not know at the moment, that vulnerability is the human condition. All of us are one word away from a breaking, one word whose critical slant breaks the hope, the joy, the love we have for life. …

The supernatural not required — There is a common misconception that atheists are not spiritual. The experience of the numinous is a signature element of the human condition, and for myself as an atheist, it is a source of infinite wonder and joy. To be a spiritual being is to embrace those ineffable moments of…

Coffee shop talk from the front lines — It’s a morning like any other in the coffee shop. The hiss of the espresso machine, the smell of fresh-ground coffee, the murmur of conversation. It feels … different, though. I sit sampling the random conversations, looking for the pattern that lets me feel the room. …

The power of a desert world — I remember these days. I remember the unrelenting heat, the undulating waves of distortion as hot air blasted up from sand dunes and caliche flats. I remember the pervasive smell of hydrogen sulfide gas, by product of crude oil production with its ever-present whine of pump jacks’ mindless thrusts into…

A Poem of Awakening — I never felt my body electric jacked into the machinery of the night Never heard the rhythmic breath in time, felt the rhythmic pulse Never felt soul and body fused in release bound by the touch of fate Never let my lips touch his, searching seeking yearning to taste one moment Never let time…