The Tinsmith

In that bumbling quest of self-discovery that may take any of us leagues across the volatile greenery of America; hop-scotching through the cow shit and granary; lost betwixt the state lines and time zones created by some invisible council to catch the sun’s fleeting brilliance in our own dimming greatness….It is the Tinsmith, the lost father, the absentee figure of manhood that drives our testosterone bones into the husky horizon of the setting sun. We are scouring the barrows, the hobo dens. We become denizens of the night searching in the old the hidden nooks of the world, for the forgotten, the damned, the scorned visage of manhood we’ve desecrated into battered mosaic; the coping mechanism of volatile adolescence, forming our own tablets of manhood, yet forever searching for the greater truth. The bristling hoary beards of fraternity, etched down in the hereditary blood of generations, the graveling voice of masculinity that passes on the wisdom of becoming whole.

The street signs wear, the lanes swerve around the bend, the dust catches up to the eye as the sun eclipses the distant land; what we scour for in the physical world is the reconciliation of our souls. These Tinsmith woes are a lifetime of excavation. The lure of freedom, absolute decadent sultriness in the unrestrained experience; no tether to scour desire nor quell the raucous abandon; the untamed mania of burgeoning manhood bubbles the cauldron of decency into the icy waters of reality. We search and search for who it is we are to become, how it is we are to become, and the only answer lies in the chromosomes passed on without advice on how to grow into those shoes. So we take to the road fleeing our internal damnation; for the mirror plagues us with the truth of our creation, and thus forsaking, we attempt to lose ourselves wholly in an attempt to find anything in its entirety.

Can the Old Moriarty ever be found? Somewhere in the pool halls and wino bars of Denver he seethes in his own lost quest of fatherhood. How can we be fathers if we don’t know how to be sons? How can we ever be men if we can’t escape boyhood? Lost in the wino thoughts and infinity dreams that the wind screams on the road, the broken mantle of responsibility shall lie shattered for as long as we continue to flee. The abrupt about face is the brake wearing catastrophe called truth. Where we end from there is the trial by fire within us all, on the cusp of looming doom, the end of the road (so to speak), where truth can no longer be outrun nor found, where the woes of home become the fabric of existence, and miles no longer mean distance but feigned instances of introspection….it is at this pivotal moment we must all confront the ghost of our own Tinsmith. Stare into those ethereal orbs and reclaim the volatile entity of our existence, the full grandiosity roaring through our veins; and in that very moment cross the threshold of fear and uncertainty, and hang up the road-time escapism.