Touchdown?
By Andrew Krosch
What follows is an expression of who I’ve become, a juncture, a crossroads of all that has made me who and what I am today at this moment in time, at Halloween morning of 2025. Having ridden a manic high for days, propelled forward into an uncertain future, compelled inexorably to speak out, burst into some sort of song as if what I have to say, all I have to say carries the weight of the world and the force to propel said world into the future, for better or worse. Whether my mania today is the gift from God I believe it to be, for some greater purpose I’ve yet to understand, or a combination of worldly factors that shaped my past, present and future. Things like an upcoming parole review board meeting I am wholly unprepared for, with a feeling like having my feet superglued to the railroad tracks as the Burlington Northern Express out of Boise is bearing down on me. I’ve got my arms raised waiving them around, so I look like the mad man I probably am, signaling a passing spaceship. “Go around. Go around. No parking here!” Forces beyond any understanding. A father’s fears of failure, an inability to do anything to help his children as they struggle, stumble, fall, and hopefully get up again, and trooper on through the travails of life, that he, the once protector failed to protect for so long. They there, in need, he here in, what? What it means when a father leaves his children behind, telling himself they’re better off without him, all his shortcomings, failures, straight up betrayals.
A father who loses themselves in the world, at a great distance, observes observed, if never served. Lost under the events, the weight, yet trying to observe It all, somehow honor it. Record it. Wish it all away? The pain, the misery, all the children forgotten. The feel that it’s all forgotten. The prayers that it isn’t. not yet. The wish to wear the world’s suffering. As if the past was no predictor of future events. Or full of sound and fury and significant of nothing? Carrying pages forward. Does the message matter? Do the means? One voice calling out in the wilderness.
Right What You Know
By Andrew Krosch
Everybody has that one person they’d do anything for. It is an inexact science. What we know. What we can do. We want the best for them. We do this from a distance. We do what we can. Support. Encourage. Nudge in what we hope is the right direction. But how do you compete with the world? Everything moves too fast. We react to their reaction. We formulate what we hope is helpful. On the fly, in the middle of a quick clipped phone conversation, metered in time and monitored in content. We know them well. Or we believe we do. What they need from us. What we want for them. Know we’ll always fall short. Fail to deliver. We try. We listen. We try. We listen. We try again. We want to get it right. Want to right what we know.
When You Run Out of Things to Say
By Andre Krosch
Time swallows everything. Everything worth caring about anyhow. You don’t need another trip to the segregation until to remind you of that. I don’t. or shouldn’t. the seg unit in this joint is the same as any other – of the original building – before the Administrative Control Unit was added in the 00’s. The control bubble in the center, the wings to either side are thirteen cells long. Two tiers high. In seg the thirteen cell long ‘run’ is broken in half with a solid steel and safety glass door. The cells in seg are the same as any other, except they’re a couple feet longer and the cast concrete shelves and locker by the door have been removed. For security reasons of course. (See National Geographic channel’s show “Hard Time” the Oak Park Heights episode.) the bed frame is a concrete slab stretched across the back of the cell, it and the built-in desk/sink combo form an L. The added length of the cell means that while you can still sit at the head of the bed and write at the desk, you have to stretch to lean across the gap. I was a hair over six feet once upon a time, even then it was a reach for me. You lean across the gap, or you do what I do. Fold the mattress back from the foot of the bed, sit on the floor and write on the concrete slab of the bed. It provides a certain symmetry, makes it more comfortable than you might think. Where I’ve spent some of my best times. A few years back, writing a girl. Not just any girl. You know the one. The one. Head over heels. True love. Truer because you know it can never really happen. Intense. The only relationship I’d ever had with a woman while sober. Lovestruck. Or at least as lovestruck as you can be with a woman across the world. This was in the days of the pandemic and George Floyd, here in Minnesota. (They housed that cop here at OPH in the A.C.U. for a while.)
We, me and her, my girl on the other side of the world talked about it all. Love, madness, running away from it all. All the what-ifs and if-only, endless countless possibilities. A world, a universe, created and transversed by machine gun rounds of email. Too good to last, we knew it. in a fantasy world the possibilities should be endless. They’re not. One day you run out of things to say. Words that made your heart so light your chest felt hollow, so heavy you knew your soul would not survive. Words that were the wings of gods, they carried everything that mattered, then at some point they were just words.
The words you say once you run out of things to say.
Breathe
By Andrew Krosch
The hive is cold.
I never sleep.
The walls are tall and solid,
a thousand times stronger
than concrete or steel.
Absent any color,
blank and perfectly smooth.
Insurmountable.
The only light inside the hive is gray,
the color of cold ashes.
The air tastes black.
Staying alive has become an act of will.
Sometimes I forget to breathe.
There is a cathedral in the venter of the hive.
Stone arches, a golden dome, minarets.
It is the most beautiful,
the most horrible thing
I have ever seen.
I saw the sun once.
When I was a small child,
a dream took me there.
In my dream I saw a window
to the outside world.
Beyond the walls of the hive.
A world of bright protein colors.
A warm plastic land.
Red flowers, green grass.
Dwellings, short and squat.
Trees tall and happy.
Lakes, cool and calm.
Market stalls, open wall and clean.
Bluesky, bright yellow sun.
A world beyond endless shades of gray.
It is all I see when I close my eyes – try to dream.
I cannot sleep.
Will not dream.
I try not to think.
Try not to dream.
To dream again. (To leave the hive.)
To think again. (To leave the garden.)
There lies the root of all evil.
That,
that
has always been
our original sin.
For in that moment,
free to think, free to dream
(free to precipitate the fall)
we became death,
destroyer of worlds.
I try not to think.
Try not to dream.
I try not to breathe.
History, Time, and Space
By Andrew Krosch
without history
new time drifting in space
abandoning all modern concepts
all claims on time and space
eliminate all presumptions about history all assumptions about time
all suppositions about space
conceptions of time and space
completely overthrown
without or within time, cause and effect relations
impossible to specify
temporal priority established
the probability of truth reduced to zero
the significance of the present moment
effervescent, transient and temporary
for this moment of permanent consequence
with the unbearable lightness of being
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