Wisdom Teeth

✽ The Gospel According to Napkin #7

A metaphysical desperado, chasing truth like smoke through rafters. (as if truth were something you could catch like a butterfly in a poem-stained net) I watch him now across decades, a holy fool wrapped in thrift store prophecy, wearing enlightenment like a secondhand hat.

O, you beautiful, pretentious idiot— with your backpack full of borrowed wisdom and your lungs full of borrowed light— did you really think Nirvana lived at the bottom of a coffee cup or in the pages of some dog-eared Salinger you carried like a passport to profundity?

I see you there, scribbling manifestos on coffee shop napkins, each word an existential hiccup, thinking you’re Kerouac reborn in Jersey because you learned to spell satori and could quote Ginsberg while stoned.

✽ Acts of the Mad Prophet, Vol. I

The mad ones found you, didn’t they? Just like you wanted, just like you prayed for, never realizing “mad” meant exactly that: not the romantic kind of crazy that gets you into poetry anthologies, but the real deal, the genuine article, the kind that leaves you wondering if your teeth are government spy devices (and yes, that really happened: Tuesday night, Summer 1998, outside the gas station on Main Street in Madison— I haven’t forgotten).

And those women—Christ, those women— who saw right through your paper-thin philosophy, your dime store mysticism, your "I’m so deep I can’t even see myself” act. I remember how you loved them with all the selfish grace of a broken teacup trying to hold the sea, thinking every girl who read Anaïs Nin was your soulmate in waiting.

✽ Stations of the Lost Cross

They knew, didn’t they? Each one a prophet warning you about the boy you were, the man you weren’t ready to be. Their laughter still rattles in my ribs like loose change in dead men’s pockets.

(Remember *****, who told you “Being deep doesn’t mean you have to drown”? You wrote three bad poems about that, then proved her right anyway.)

Look at you there in your spiritual mosh pit, thinking every neuron you burned was a sacrifice to some higher truth.

We were soldiers in a war, eventually fought with borrowed fire, every battle lost before it began— generals in an army of one, fighting for a kingdom that existed only in our heads (and maybe in that weird coffee shop where they let you pay in haikus until they realized you couldn’t count syllables).

✽ On Enlightenment

I want to reach across time, grab you by your nicotine-stained collar, shake some sense into that dharma-addled brain. I want to tell you that TV dinner philosophy and midnight parking lot epiphanies won’t add up to wisdom, no matter how many times you reorganize your vinyl collection to mirror the I Ching. But you wouldn’t listen—

✽ Dharma & Dreadlocks

Remember how we prayed in the temple of Sweet Dreams? Burning clove cigarettes like incense, chanting Ginsberg between sips of lukewarm enlightenment, every barista a bodhisattva. You wore revolution like a secondhand coat, too big in the shoulders, frayed at the edges with someone else’s glory, accessorized with buttons that read “QUESTION REALITY” (but never questioned why you thought wisdom came with a price tag and cosmic consciousness could be achieved through the right combination of black turtlenecks and bongo drums).

✽ Ordinary Revelations

Jersey parking lots became Dharma halls, every streetlight a bodhi tree, every all-night diner a station of the cross where you’d genuflect before jukeboxes, praying to Bowie for redemption.

Now, years deep in the ordinary world I look back at you—my mad prophet self— with something between love and horror, like finding an old yearbook photo where you thought sideburns and corduroy were the height of spiritual fashion.

The scars have faded from our arms, but the map remains: every wrong turn taken, every beautiful mistake, every moment we thought transcendence could be bought for the price of a hit or a handful of pills (plus tax and next-day regret).

The world has changed: the mad ones all got jobs or died, and connection comes in gigabytes, not shared cigarettes or stolen kisses.

But something in me still honors you, you beautiful, desperate fool, writing your soul across the night in ink that would never dry, convinced that every poem was a lockpick for the universe.

You were wrong about so much, but maybe you were right about this:

the sacred lives in the profane, meaning hides in empty spaces, and sometimes you have to break yourself completely before you can learn how to be whole.

Sleep well, mad prophet. Your words still echo, your fire still burns, but I’m glad I’m not you anymore— glad to know that real enlightenment tastes less like revelation and more like morning coffee, ordinary and warm and somehow, finally, enough.