Me at 22 - A Poetic Reflection of My Time in Kirksville

An Intersection Never Reached

            Streets like Washington and Jefferson and other great leaders

                        set the roadmap across this college-town Kirksville

A student living on borrowed time with a borrowed money for a

predicted future and features that can lead to great new leaders

            The irony of repeatedly picturing myself standing literally at the corner of

                        Normal and High Streets

            The smell of last night’s spilled beer isn’t something I’m crying over like milk

because I know that tonight I will get the opportunity to spill again

Escaping into the Pages

I love when a book forces me to look up from a page to assess my own world.  That moment where I am so engrossed in someone else’s world that I lose myself for a bit.  That moment in Richard Wright’s Native Son where a decapitation is seemingly the only possible solution, where I feel Bigger’s struggle so much that if I was to stop reading I would kill off

An Afternoon in Westport

At the corner of Pennsylvania and Westport Road sits Kelly’s Westport Inn, residing in the oldest building in Kansas City, MO.  What was once The Albert Boone Store back in the 1800s now houses one of the more recognizable watering holes in town.  Cattycorner to Kelly’s sits Beer Kitchen, a recently opened taproom of specialty beers.  The contrast between the two could not be sharper.  But it is perfect for this setting:  Old meeting new, relics meeting up-and-comers. 

And the meeting isn’t limited to the buildings and businesses.  In just a short amount of time quite of few people come to recognize others in the area, bumping

The Failure of My Father

My father, for many years, considered himself a failure.  He had a Masters Degree in a field in which he had never become a professional.  He was entirely overqualified for a fairly menial job for the county government. 

He is a loving father who has overlooked that his curiosity has become the foundation for my own education.  His failure professionally never crossed the mind of his two boys and daughter who, growing up, saw him as a wealth of knowledge from which experience was constantly opportunity. 

That possibility would find itself in the most innocuous locations.  I remember