November always takes me back. Tomorrow is the second, and this was the birthday of a writer friend, a lover of mine from years ago. Someone that filled me with so much passion, the flame burned out far too quickly as hot flames such as ours do. Never truly actualized.

Somehow, he took a special piece of my heart, and held it; I’m frequently reminded of him, on this, the day before the annual of his birth.

There were many cold and cruel things he said to me, in the brief period of months that I knew him.

Sometimes the bitter things are often the most valuable. We learn from the things that cut us so much this way, in the heart, pieces falling to the ground.

He would listen to my writing, my rambling. And he would say things like, “I would lock you up and condemn you to write out all your feelings, write them down and feel them brutally and soulfully”….

He was always a rather sadistic muse to me. Extolling his bitter loss of muse, and reading me long ballads, sonnets, and other passages of sordid love story, or magick, or intimacy viewed through his spectacle version of life.

I am much older now, and I recognize the intent of his words more so than I did at the time. Life has made me wiser, but not any less of a dreamer, a poet, an inspirational writer of life and love.

A lover, after all is perpetually a lover. With fierce passions, that inflame and burn those around them. I’d like to believe I’m wiser, but generally I just feel older.

Love still finds me in forbidden, and untenable places, and still shatters my heart often, leaving me with poetic inspiration. The lack there of being little more than artistic suicide.

It’s a nice day to remember you, wherever you are, whatever adventures you have found, my once and temporary muse of writing, life and love. It is my memory that you drank too much, you smoked too much, that you mused too much, and found pleasure in the discomfort of others. You did gift me with life lessons, that were invaluable, and I reflect upon them from time to time. I wish that you are still walking amongst the pulsing rhythms of this world, finding joy where it will you to, and harmony of your own discordant beat.