An Exclusive Glimpse Inside The Never Was | 7.11.25

A Poem About Montana, About Guilt | The Matchbook

this, and MANY others, are part of The Never Was, coming in September!

It’s been a long while since I’ve had a book launch itself out into the world. A long time and the world has changed so much since the last—in some ways for the better, in most ways, significantly worse.

Truth is, I didn’t know if I’d do another book after Illumination, what will be 5 years ago, I didn’t know if anyone would want one, didn’t know if people still wanted or needed the weird poetry that falls out of my brain. Still I kept writing, still I kept pouring it out, and I noticed a trend emerge in all the new words that were coming:

They all felt different, they all felt more, they all felt like they were so much more personal, so much more pointed, so much more about what it is to be stuck inside this mind of mine.

The Never Was is that, all of that more, all of that less that being locked in an autistic mind can sometimes be. It’s raw, it’s open, it’s a peek into the strangeness that can be when you’ve spent a long time feeling unfinished in a dozen dozen ways, when you write things because you must and some of those scraps stay scraps.

Sometimes, the scraps are more beautiful because they are unfinished. Sometimes, we are too.

Today I wanted, as a gift to all of you, give you a sneak peek at one single poem that will be in the book. A glimpse inside at a raw poem that speaks to just how honest I allowed myself to be in the writing of these poems, in the choosing them for the book. I’m able to share this to all of you, with no paywall, thanks to the generosity of our paid subscriber community. They are helping slowly, slowly, push this place to sustainability, a task that’s been a lot harder than I ever saw coming, and I appreciate it more than you all can possibly know. If you want to help, just click the button below, and upgrade yours to join us.

This poem is about Montana, yes, but it’s also about my own guilt I sometimes feel living here. See, I wasn’t born here, I didn’t live here until I was 4 or 5, and though I still know I am a Montanan, in my soul, I don’t really feel like one.

The guilt comes when I look around at the landscape I am so familiar with, and am not swept away with the awe and wonder and appreciation that I probably should be swept away with. I feel guilt when I feel complaint rise in me for the length of the winters, the depth of discomfort that comes when you live in a place that is frozen solid from October 1st until the middle or end of May, a place that has seen snowfall on the 4th of July. I feel guilt when I feel the same irritability with the sweltering season that we call summer, those 3 months where all things burn and the scent of dying grass and brittle pine needles swirl with dust and make your eyes red.

I see others around me truly living a full life in this bizarre and wide-open state. I see others skiing on snow in the winter and water in the summer, I see them buying boats and snowmobiles and 4wheelers and horses and I just don’t understand why I don’t feel the same. I don’t want to spend $200 a day to ski, I don’t want to buy a boat and a $70,000 truck to tow it to the lake, I don’t want Ski-doos and side-by-sides and I don’t feel the pull like they do.

It is undeniably beautiful here, but it’s not me, and that’s not something I get to speak of often. I am made for the sea, born on it and I know there is so much salt water in these veins. I am made to surf, I am made to swim, I am made to watch the light shift over the surface of stormy waters. I don’t have this, and that is ok, we cannot always have what we want, but I would be lying if I didn’t speak of the ache.

This poem is my attempt to do so. This poem is my attempt to reconcile what I feel is a heavier truth that lurks behind that smaller one. It is one thing to not truly appreciate the place you find yourself living, it’s another thing entirely to not have it truly feel like home.

We’re all in search of home, in the end, and while I know now more than ever that my true home travels with me, it has hair that grows more silver by the day and though she be but little, is so fierce, still, it’s hard to not feel like yourself in the landscape you spend your hours and weeks and months and years in.

I wrote this to show that these internets can make it seem like everyone else, everywhere else, is living a better, happier, more robustly joyful life, but this isn’t always true, this isn’t always the full picture. I wrote this to show you that sometimes, we’re sad, sometimes, we’re not feeling quite so at home in the place we that we have named it so. Sometimes we feel like fish out of water, sometimes we feel like we’re lost and looking.

That’s what this whole book is, to me, a reminder that we’re all unfinished, we’re all so close, always so close, but still filled with a million little bits of beauty that never was able to feel itself complete. This whole book is a meditation, more to myself than anyone else, that we’ll never be complete, that it’s not the point of our time here, and how staggeringly lovely that is.

We, WE, are The Never Was. We always have been.

I love you all, and if you like hearing me read the poem, you’re in luck, it’s right there below.

Be good.

*Also, I really, really want this new book to do well. It’d be a dream if enough of us pre-ordered it that on that first week, somehow, some MAGIC how, it became another best-seller. I don’t know if we can do it, I’m ALL ears if any of you have ideas on how to make it happen, but I just so want it to do well. If you haven’t yet, click the book below and it’ll whisk you to a place where you can pre-order. If you DO have ideas, comment below. I’ll listen.