First, the camel: yes, I’ll take the burden,
		a back made altar for the world’s commands;
		I learn the weight of duty without wonder,
		and walk into the desert doing what I’m asked.

		And then, the lion: no, I won’t be harnessed,
		I bare my teeth at every borrowed rule;
		I meet THOU SHALT, that dragon of habit,
		and tear its ancient scales to make me new.

		And after ROAR, a softer revolution:
		a child steps through, unscripted by its fears,
		its inner life the only constitution,
		a wheel that rolls from center, not from cheers.

Lately I’ve been wandering through the world of poetry.

I stumbled onto the villanelle form. Its a strange, beautiful contraption of repetition and constraint, and I’ve been treating it like a kind of meditation practice. A crossword puzzle for the soul. The challenge is finding the line that lands while still obeying the architecture.

Sometimes it feels less like writing and more like tuning an instrument.

I’m still circling the idea for this week’s essay, so today I’m sharing one of these poems with you. Think of it as a glimpse into the workshop while the larger piece is still being built.

Leave me a comment and tell me what you think. If people enjoy the occasional poem, I might share them here from time to time.

And one more recommendation while we’re here: if you haven’t checked out Augmented’s Journey, you should. It’s one of my favorite places on Substack.

Island of Peace

We reach for an island of peace, however small
While drowning in a sea of too much to know.
Where did our love go?
It’s the only question left.

Every signal arrives already seized,
A rumor wearing the clothes of truth in its glow.
I am reaching for an island of peace.

Polished voices argue what should be believed,
Each certain the others must go.
Where did our love go?

The maps are torn, the compass spins,
Every harbor lit by a counterfeit glow.
I am reaching for an island of peace.

Trust drifts past like wreckage no one can retrieve,
Old words sink where the deep currents flow.
Where did our love go?
It’s the only question left.

Still something inside refuses to be deceived,
A faint shore appearing where no charts show.
We are all reaching for an island of peace, however small.
Where did our love for each other go?
It’s the only question left.

1856 photo of the Island of Philae in Egypt (now submerged)

Somewhere between 2010 and the Great Linguistic Collapse, someone decided that truth was no longer a fixed point but a personal accessory — like a tote bag or a mood ring. Thus was born the phrase “my truth,” and ever since, I’ve been quietly (and sometimes loudly) losing my mind.

I remember the first seismic ripple… Kellyanne Conway, when she defended false statements from the White House about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd. She said they weren’t lies — they were “alternative facts.”

Then came “My truth.” It sounds noble, enlightened, even therapeutic — but every time I have ever heard it, I’ve felt like someone’s slipping a hand into my pocket and stealing language itself. Truth used to mean something shared — heavy, stable, verifiable. You could test it, measure it, agree upon it. Now it’s been sliced into bite-size emotional packets that dissolve on contact with reality.

Both phrases perform the same linguistic sleight of hand — they blur the line between perspective and reality.

“My truth” is the therapy-world version: it sentimentalizes subjectivity. “Alternative facts” is the propaganda-world version: it weaponizes subjectivity.

Both say, in essence, “reality is negotiable if it feels right to me.”

Take that therapist’s favorite riddle: “The system can’t hold two emotional truths at once.” Excuse me? Two truths? How did we end up living in a universe so fragile it must be padded in quotation marks? What they mean, of course, is “two perspectives,” “two emotional experiences.” But that’s not how they say it. They say “two truths,” as if fact itself is now an emotional state.

This kind of language — soft, evasive, narcotic — drives me nuts. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a participation trophy. It lets everyone be right, and therefore no one is accountable. You can set a house on fire and still get to say, “Well, that’s your truth.”

I get the therapeutic intent. It’s about coexistence, not contradiction. About saying: both people in a conflict have emotional realities worth acknowledging. Fine. I can live with that. But when we start calling feelings “truth,” we’re no longer communicating — we’re hallucinating in chorus.

Two truths can’t exist. There’s only one reality, shared and often disputed. Within that, there are perspectives — wildly divergent, sure, but still orbiting the same planet. Once we start pretending there’s a separate galaxy for each person’s truth, we lose the gravitational pull that keeps meaning intact.

So yes, I despise the phrase. It’s not just semantic sloppiness; it’s moral laziness disguised as empathy. It’s how people absolve themselves from the messy work of discernment — deciding what’s fair, what’s real, what actually happened.

Truth, singular, still matters. And I’ll defend that hill even if the rest of the world is busy planting flags for “their truth.”

One love.

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This one’s a Monk’s With Wifi post. No big story, no wild characters — just some thoughts about rushing, getting, and what happens when you stop. If my weekly posts are the performance, this is more like the rehearsal space: slower, less polished, a room where I just let the thoughts stretch out.

Consider it a Saturday night note for the Sunday morning …

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People ask me why my father pulled a gun. They want to know the scene, the juice, the story, the trigger. They want to understand. They want to help.

I don’t want to tell it.

Not because I’m protecting him—he doesn’t deserve that. But because repeating it feels like feeding it. Keeping it alive when I’ve spent years trying to let it die.

Still, I bring it…

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That’s not the question. Right now, I must, so I do. I must tell these stories because people (and they were sincere as children) asked for “another one please?” Its the same artist’s dilemma I’ve always had, just dressed in new clothes. No choice involved. For now, writing is a necessity. When that stops, when it becomes a choi…

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Not a poem. Not a metaphor. Not the mythic phoenix erupting into transcendence. Just the truth, naked. Because there are days when the beauty of storytelling feels like a lie. When the archetypes exhaust me. When I can’t stand to watch another symbol rise in glory while the world quietly burns in bullshit.

I …

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While trying to keep this ro…

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And then, he'd inevitably get to it. That question.

“What is your least favorite word?”

No contest.

Brown-nose.

Technically two words. Hyphenated. One compound gesture of spiritual decay.

It’s a verb, a lifestyle, a sickly superpower. A person who brown-noses will always, always outperform you in rooms filled with famous people, because celebrities—like ancient royalty and crusty old dogs—love nothing more than a face in their ass.

It’s fealty. It’s flattery. It’s, “Your highness, your bowel movements smell like potential.” It’s most entertaining in iambic pentameter; what fun it is imagining the Shakespearean verses:

“Thy snout hath taken the hue of thy lord’s rear, thy loyalty writ in fecund hues.”

“Thy beak, stained with the dung of his favour, thou art a brown-nosed servant ever buried in breeches, a taint sniffing proboscis at thy lord’s hind parts aching for a crumb of grace.”

And yet—ironically, hilariously, shamefully—my favorite word is a synonym.

Obsequiate.

It means the same damn thing. Just sexier. Obsequiate has flair. It’s a feathered snake. Its actually not a word. Obseqious however, is.

Obsequiousness can be studied, dissected, worn like a costume. But brown-nosing? That’s genetic. A spiritual spinal tap.

And yes, I’ve seen it work. I’ve watched colleagues in the music biz (and by that, I mean the industry) climb past me like rats with complimentary passes to the green room, their noses polished to a corporate shine. I’ve known what it’s like to be misunderstood because I didn’t bend the knee. When Bruce Willis took a shine to me, everyone assumed I’d been tongue-deep in star-butt. But on the contrary, I think what he liked was that I didn’t care. It must’ve been refreshing, which is an odd thing to say when one is talking about one’s pal’s ass. Not easy to say aloud either. But to read it is most amusing. Try reading it again. You’ll see.

Anyway, as always, I digress without apology. Onto other irritants! Now that’s enthusiasm.

To begin, let’s talk punctuation. Specifically, the exclamation point. The very point I came here to make.

I know, I know. “Guilty as charged!”

And doesn’t that phrase just make your whole being clench, like the thought of someone who smiled while slowly closing a coffin lid? Boom. Clenchorooney.

“Guilty as charged!” marked with exclamation, is the verbal shrug of someone who’s about to hand you a passive-aggressive pie. I say it too. We all do. Because we’re living in an age of weaponized cheer.

Let me show you something. A recent “Do you want Chipotle?”

YES!

Now that YES! was honest. That YES! had conviction. That YES! was me being hungry and open to whatever civilization had to offer in a foil-wrapped burrito.

But imagine the other version. The lie.

She loves Chipotle. Thinks it’s health food from heaven. She thinks it’s the culinary equivalent of a good TED Talk. I think it’s sodium disguised as self-care. But I want her to be happy. I want her to feel safe. So when she texts, “Chipotle?” I reply:

YES!

Meaning, “I’d rather French kiss a spiny cactus.” But I type YES! because I’m tired and love her and also because I’m a coward.

This is how we live now.

We lie with punctuation.

The exclamation point used to mean something. It was a yelp in the night. A lightning strike. A holy cow.

Now? Now it’s a hostage note dressed as a hug.

“Great work!” = I didn’t read it but feel obligated to respond.

“Sounds good!” = I am disengaging from this conversation and possibly our relationship.

“Thanks again!” = You’ve asked too much, and I resent you, but I’ve been trained not to say so outright.

The exclamation point has become the sociopath of syntax. It mimics enthusiasm. It puts on a smile like a politician at a deep-south church potluck. And in corporate culture, it’s everywhere. It’s the most oft used tool in the war chest of the spineless.

The period, at least, is honest. The ellipsis is a little haunted. But the exclamation point? Its a chipper little dagger of deceit, pretending to be your friend.

And the worst part? The repetition. Once someone sends three in a row—Thanks! Got it! Will do!—trust is obliterated. I don’t know if you’re coming to my party or planning to kill me.

Sidenote:

The semicolon; they are the tuxedo of punctuation. I am always amused when a spot for one appears because it’s the bit of ink that says, I could’ve ended it, but I’ve chosen restraint; I’ve chosen style. Yes, style—my last defense against chaos. My small, stubborn rebellion against the mundane. Two in one paragraph? Bliss!

Look, I get it. We all want to be liked. We want to seem easy-going, agreeable, professional. But every time I get a “Looking forward to it!” from someone who absolutely is not, I die a little. Somewhere deep inside, a little part of me curls into the fetal position and mutters, “Just say what you mean, Emily.”

So maybe there’s hope. Maybe we can reclaim the period. Rehabilitate the semicolon. Give the exclamation point a little rest. Let it sleep off the trauma of too many marketing emails and text threads.

Maybe, just maybe, we can return to a time when enthusiasm meant something. When it danced. When it shouted for joy like Sly and the Family Stone and not like an Insta selfie seeking external validation (to silence internal chaos.)

Thanks.

I mean… thanks.

Really.

Please leave your example of a disingenuous explanation in the comments!

How ‘bout I start:

Ha! Ha! That was funny!

Somewhere along the morning school run, right there on that stretch between the 70-split and the stone walls of a once-grand southern plantation, every stone of which was pulled from the earth by weary, grief-stricken black hands long gone, surrounding what is now the private golf course where this generation’s wealth cajoles, I caught a glimpse of something holy. Not church holy—though if Bacharach isn’t canonized in the temple of melody, then we’re all worshipping at the wrong altar—but something older and softer. Something like grace.

Like many parents, I ferry my children through their lives in increments—one driveway, one snack wrapper, one YouTube video, one delightfully incorrect observation at a time. Henry, bright-eyed and misinformed in the most beautiful ways, attempts coolness and asks if I’ve ever seen “Mike Brecker play drums?” And there we are, in traffic, watching Michael Brecker—a saxophone demigod with a drummer’s mischief—sitting behind a kit instructing some students about swing—by doing his one beloved Elvin groove. Sidenote… drummers: when sax players show you things on drums, you should pay close attention because they think of things we don’t. He is swingin’ (because he can) and my eyes are leaking and my heart is doing the tighten-up. He saved my life more than once, and this teenager beside me would not have been here to ask that question were it not so.

I want to play him Pilgrimage, or African Skies (the George and Rodney studio version) but that would be too much for this moment. For me, I mean—and it was his moment, not mine, anyway. I’ve learned that grief and gratitude can share the same breath. Being a parent... you get used to these little "you get what you need” shots. Some call it coincidence. My kid inadvertently prompts me to miss my old friend. Maybe it’s luck? When these things happen, I always think of it as proximity to the divine.

Imagining the past (as if there was one) is like steeping a teapot in a cozy. Thinking doesn’t create the richness (where do thoughts come from and where do they go?) A few minutes pass and I am shoulder-deep in Dusty Springfield and Burt Bacharach when my brain starts shot-gunning dopamine through, I don't know, my cerebral cortex? Sounds right. Anyway, as the traffic inches forward, I read about time signatures and collaborations, turn up the volume a "contair" (Smokey's favorite delineation for a “teeny-weenie bit”), as I sense heartbreak made lush with flugelhorns. I'm suddenly thirteen again, standing in Nancy Levine's shag-carpeted and broken tiled foyer dressed in mid-century pop, and everything sounds like longing and sunshine. Here I go again, remembering how I felt when music wasn’t a playlist—it was a planet. Bacharach was my first intergalactic passport.

And then—poof—he’s gone forever.

"Burt Bacharach, the master pop composer behind innumerable classics like “Walk on By,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” died at his home in Los Angeles today at the age of 94," the New York Times headline on my phone says.

We’ve all had it happen: the coincidence too clean to be anything but a message. You think of someone, they call. You dream of a someone, and upon awakening discover they passed away that night. In this case, I had just searched “Accidents Will Happen” and wound up face-down in the Bacharach ether not one hour before the world loses him.

Call it the collective unconscious. Call it quantum entanglement. Call it God, if that’s your thing. But if I try to believe that what I just experienced was determined, or even real—I get lost. I’ve the sense, that music is a wire running from your gut to something bigger. Bigger than feelings or logic. Bigger than culture. Bigger even than shared experience. Or tinier, if that’s a word. The attachment is to something like eternity or… everywhere. That feels right to me. Tat Vam Asi in Sanskrit. It means “Thou Art That.”

My apologies for taking you all the way out there. I tend to do that sometimes. The point is:

We actually are the music.

Which brings us to the tragedy. It roars underneath the following thought: we no longer share the same songs. And separation is to no one’s advantage. Slowly, the radio dial fractured into eight billion silo’d digital streams, and so ended everyone humming the same tune. The anguish hits me hard, some days more than others. I’ve learned many of us grieve this though. Those of us who remember a time when The Beatles weren't a band—they were the world. Music didn’t just soundtrack life. It was life. Music was once a gathering place, not a scavenger hunt.

Still, the mystery remains. And perhaps that mystery is why I still make music. Why I meditate. Why I search as if there is a prize. Because every now and then, a chord hits just right, a fortunate rythym is struck and the veil lifts. For a moment, something bigger, something transcendant breaks through—where me and my son Henry, my memories, my childhood living room, you and Bacharach himself; duality disappears and all of it exists in the same trembling note.

It’s not nostalgia. I think its called communion.

So yeah, some stories are worth sharing. Especially the ones where nothing explodes and no one learns a lesson—just a dad, a kid, some tree-lined roads, and a visit from the spirit of Burt Bacharach, whispering from the great hi-fi beyond. It moves me to make myself a reminder on my calendar app to make a best of playlist when I get home from dropping the kids off.

No drafts and redrafts. Like my dishes, usually unfinished. One hopes there is a beginning middle and an end but I make no guarantees.

There’s no problem to solve here, not really. Just thoughts, floating—but tethered. Ideas that require a bit of stillness, a little climb, and the quiet thrill of looking around once you reach the ridge.

If you’re not up for that today, that’s okay.
But if you are—come in.
Let’s get lost.

Welcome to Monks With Wifi. For the big kids.

Pootweet.