GarGoyle-Design

We were resigned to watching the planet from a distance. Two hundred years ago the planet had been our home, not our original home, Earth, but the only home most of us had ever known. War had driven us away, out among the other planets and asteroids of the Kuninos system. A war like none we had ever experienced. A war of machines against man.

She was crying, it was raining, and he hadn't changed those tires like he'd planned. That's all he could think about when he saw the news. It swirled in his head and drowned out everything else including movement. He watched the reporter interviewing witnesses to the wreck, listened to the description of the car, watched the body being loaded into the ambulance, and knew that it was his wife.

At just shy of 40 years old my father died quietly in his sleep. I was 10, but still too young to understand death. For weeks I kept asking when daddy was coming home. My mother couldn't do anything but cry in response. Today, as an adult, I still couldn't understand death. It was vulgar and random and seemed to impose itself at all the wrong times. I hated it, and yet I sat here waiting eagerly for it to visit once again and take then man I had grown to love as a father.

Did you ever have that girl in school (or boy) that you wanted to be more than friends with. Maybe you were already friends, maybe you were just acquaintances. Then one day with a knot in your stomach you finally decide to take the plunge and put it all out there "I want to be more than friends", maybe they reciprocate and maybe they don't (more often they don't).

Should I compare your beauty to a rose
Or your eyes to pale pools of bluest water
Or shall I say that your beauty is like a moon rise
On some distant planet only imagined as I sleep

You are the moon in that dream
Your beams shining down illuminating my darkness
You hover bold and bright but ever unattainable
And yet night after night I reach out

To moon beams in darkness, intangible...

He left her there, in the parking lot, in the rain, crying. He walked away just at the moment that reality set in for her. It was the moment that she realized he wasn't the man she wanted him to be and never could be. That moment tore its way deeper into his heart every minute of the short drive home. It burrowed its way into one of those deep recesses from which it will never again vacate. It would stay, just like so many other regrets, and then each time he saw a sad face or a crying woman he would be presented with these memories.

I am the king of conversations that go nowhere, the duke of partial sentences, the earl of mis-remembrance, and the count of interruption. The most recent go nowhere conversation was this one:

"I remember how I used to take pride in having the house clean and having your shirts all nice and ironed for you. I wonder what happened with that."

What excess I have I give gladly
This overflow, this abundance
I freely trade for a tiny respite
From the mundane day and sleepless night

My cup of ruin overflows
But I will happily share
If but a happiness is returned
And a joy measured out to me

I will eagerly exchange these
Plentiful sacks of sorrow
For a pittance of sunshine
Or a meager pint of passion

With fervor I will deliver
These crates of torment
In fair and welcome substitute
For the slightest hint of love

"See what you've done. See what you cause when you say stuff!" was the angry challenge I received as I walked out the door and noticed our neighbor walking back toward her home. I had been about to ask "would you like a frosty beverage?" Instead I'm greeted with what equated to "YOU MORON! DON'T SPEAK!" So I slunk back into the house, the offer of a frosty beverage withdrawn.

The Equation That Explains Everything

Well this is it! My first ever book cover. It's a small publication but momentous in the fact that Andy chose me to be the one to put a face on 20 years of his life's work. Wow, what a great compliment, that he could trust me to do something so important. I'm excited about the cover and the work.