ISBN: 9798273246416

Come delve into the depths of madness, melancholy, and hope, as you unfold these poems. If you have ever felt the dark side of an unregulated mind, or have ever seen the paths of destruction a malady of the brain leaves behind, I implore you to explore these pages and see if inside them, it is a mirror you find.

"Can I ever get better? Nah. Is there even a mite of hope left? Maybe next month. Has anyone ever felt what you are feeling now? I have."

What do you think they think?

    If you don't know what it is like to lose sleep, wondering what people think of you, thinking of them, then you won't get it beforehand. Please don't fret, my friend; I will help you understand the confusion of a good conversation while secluded and a host of other obscure facts you never knew you needed. You can tuck these nuggets of knowledge away just in case there is a memory you can’t erase one of these days.

    So try to read between the lines, but don’t worry; I’ll help. I've already double-spaced to save a bit of face. I even used good grammar and properly punctuated too, to stay in your good graces, but we both know I have overused the phrase “It is what it is” lately. Honestly, though, I am not pessimistic, although I am suspicious of all the statistics I am given, both proven and self-delivered. Well, at least 98.6 percent of them. But as an optimist, I’ll always leave you a chance to get it. 

    However, it does depend on how late you stay up and your opinion of my view of you as to how much you will actually comprehend what I have alluded to.



Unquiet Mind

    Are we alike in that we both have an unquiet mind? If you scold your thoughts out loud when you are alone, maybe we are. If you enjoy gazing at the stars because it lets you know beauty is simultaneously intertwined with disorder, which gives me hope, perhaps mine is too. 

    If you have figured out the hard way never to back your enemy into a corner, and being loyal sometimes means being wrong in dire situations, I know it as well. 

    Never forget that your friends talk as badly about you when you are not around as they talk about their other friends when they are gone. What makes you any different? 

    If you get the gist of what I said, I regret that you do not understand what it is like to let your mind rest and reset, and that no one understands that the past bitters your truth.

Uncommon Understanding

  I can hear the rasp in your cough and the catch in your laugh that you have been to the same dark places, but when you got back, your clothes were stolen, the lights had been cut off, and your dog had not been fed. Sometimes the dry creek beds on your face are mistaken for smile lines by acquaintances for a little while, until they find out that you are content walking in a driving rain for six miles to clear your mind. 

    No one mistakes that the kind of loyalty you have is but adversity and heartache turned inside out, the fact that your pride will not let you turn back, and that you have finally realized that you still have worth in this world.



Luke lives in eastern Kentucky, USA, with a goofy dachshund and the love of his family close by. On his family’s farm, with goats, horses, and cattle, listening to the sounds of squirrels while reading in a rocking chair with a good book, is a day well spent.

“If that last screw comes loose, we’ve got a lot bigger things to worry about.” is Luke’s first published work, with more to come in the future.