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Love is a wavy lullaby sung through broken stained glass; 
Love is the sum of all our tries, the futures of hopes bypassed; 
Love is what catches up to us when the moment went too fast; 
Love is a sunrise dewdrop on a lonely blade of grass...

The anaphora of this stanza (from one of the author’s surrealist, transcendental love poems) emphasizes what remains in the wake of life’s brutal inevitability of loss; it reflects the indestructible force—of love—that redeems after life plays spin the bottle and administers its kiss of death on everyone and everything. Love is, love is, love is, love is, and never is not…

Enthralled by the glimmer that breathes under fresh ashes of burnt conversation; uncontainably anxious to hang my sighs on the lines of your imagination…

Another line from the author’s poetry capturing the essence shibori-dyeing this collection of short stories: It may be invisible but there is an exuberant cord of life and love on which meaning and beauty hang, like bikinis and swimtrunks rinsed of seasalt when the sun goes down… the sun, a Nilla wafer dunked in the milky horizon line.

With figurative, tactile prose, toy train town, allegorical ruminations, Dadaesque, satirical spelunks into the human psyche, and twisted fairy tale plunges into chiaroscuro edges where obsession shadows longing, the author is on intimate terms with the struggle to decode joy, to craft an ideal of beauty, from the inexorability of impermanence.

...Leif was growing weary of the endless sprint and only snatches of comfort. He was sick of having to work so hard to constantly find joy like matchsticks. Sure, there’d be rushes and blazes of light…and then the stick would burn down and the smile was over. Why couldn’t that fire catch on anything? Why was it destined to always burn out in its predictable crawl down the stalk ‘til fingers clutching to the moment are nearly singed with desire to hold on to the high just a little bit longer? Why couldn’t *happy* be more like the sun and just fireball with permanent might? Why did the train of good feelings always have a stop over and wind up with a shitty seat to complete the ride? – next stop, loneliness.  

Why was “why” such an exasperating word?

It’s not that Leif even wanted answers. He just didn’t want the constant questions, whose answers begot more quandaries, quagmires and quickly dissipating comforts of resolution. Why couldn’t his mind hush to mirror-like stillness, so it could reflect the perfect vastness of a divinely appointed sky? Why couldn’t he regard the pursuit of asking why, not as futility but as a divining rod destined to point to the presence of silent elemental knowingness, deep under the human crust of consciousness. And why couldn’t he plug his current of wondering into this telluric socket, trusting, like a sage sunflower, it would conduct its quest back to the unequivocal light of the sun, where life is given without question? He was starting to grow weary of the perpetual “why”-shaped branch of his witch hazel psyche, always prancing forward at something tellingly beneath the seeable, but never knowing exactly what.

Today Leif wanted exhilaration of feeling alive, of striking water, or alchemical ore, or that mystical umbilicus mundi, so he could control capricious energies of life around him and subvert their transience once and for all. He was sick of joys being little untrained puppies that would only scatter and bark anarchically when you commanded them to “stay!” So, with his backpack around two shoulders, Sorel Caribou boots, and an inscrutable gleam in the orb of his right eye, he trudged through the shag coconut carpeting of his snowed-in toy town on December 24th. He was determined to leave glass-half-emptiness behind in favor of something that would let his heart overflow in the frothing springs of vitality. He was ready for something extreme. He was courting something off the beaten, ground-down path. His desire lines felt more like rug stains, his desire tree bore hollow fruit in the flaying cold of this hark-hear-the-bells night, tolling desolation in the void of a ramshackle, Yule-bereft bell tower.

Leif knew where there was a bridge nearby. The highest one in the outlying vicinity. He didn’t mind walking miles to get to it. It took the seemingly endless march of a lifetime to get to what he was planning but some hours in the Jackfrostbitten evening were a little price to pay for the release he was ready for. He never had the courage ‘til now...