Ingredients:
1. Courage
2. Dishonest Lovers
3. Dead Friends
4. Years of Recreational Self-Destruction
5. Surrendered Ego

Directions:

To begin is to fail.
If you are trying to be intentional with this recipe,
you will certainly spoil the flavor of its culmination.
You mustn’t try, you just have to keep participating.
Make choices, have some courage,
but to get anywhere with this you’re going to have to mess it up.

Love comes swiftly, or what you think is love, unripened,
yet so enticing you pick it from the branch before its ready.
Quick to taste it, to make it yours,
And when you give it your breath, it spoils in your hands,
wilts behind your turned back,
rots out of sight of your bowing head.
Pairings will never be perfect,
which is why all of them are critical elements to this recipe.

Hearts grow wide as they deepen.
Those who sing a similar song come and go,
or come and stay to share the weight of life’s approach.
Fun is had, be generous with its amounts.
Dreams are birthed from tender lips, mix them in quickly,
discard lesser ones if you have a change of taste.
A place is created, inhabited in the stories unfolding,
where fellowship and inspiration are cultivated in a trustworthy company.
Death appears like yeast rising too quickly in the oven,
like the white froth boiling over the pot on the stove,
with the burner set too high.
Death’s flavor is bitter and unforgettable
You will never be the same.

Your appetites will change, diseases and demons will want to feed,
the reach for true nourishment shadowed by the luster of hollow magic.
An emptiness that aches to be filled in,
that makes you believe you can add enough ingredients to satiate the hunger,
You’ll be stirring this for a long time
but it’s consistency will never hold.

If you fail hard enough and long enough at this you might get it right.
You might end up with humility that connects you with every other living thing,
void of any identity that separates you from coexistence.
Perhaps a little more careful with what you crave,
aged to taste.