I came out here to apologize. You know, I find myself at the midpoint of my life in a dark wood. And now I'm here, in the forest of my mind, and every tree is shame. Every living thing is a reprimand. And I realize I must speak freely now before I lose you.

In a room years ago I hid, waiting for some adult weather to pass. And I looked at a jug on a shelf. And the jug had written on it these words.

"Gather ye rosebuds while you may, for quickly time is flying."

I think there was an image of death, embodied, grinning, pointing at time. To the left of death was a little old lady standing by a cottage perched on a cliff. I think she was breathing deeply, gazing at the grey slab of lazily painted sea. To badly remember me, she was enraptured, decoding, inviting myself into the scene.

And out to sea there were little human specks. And it was apparent that these little marks were me. Many terrible times over, me, countless, indistinct, beyond the woman's grasp. A full sky of hopeless, cut-out boys, dreaming of teams. Bad, haggard, jumped-up, flat-assembly dream braggarts. Hundreds and thousands of little lads, mad, pretending to fight. I think the image was suggesting that she fell asleep one afternoon. And on waking, she searched for us. For me. And called for me, for us, screaming, "Boys, men, lads, fellas, you there, anyone?" Yelling at the suddenly futile idea of a small male human. Pathetic. A wrecking ball in waiting. Gone off somewhere with his comedy packet of nuts and pecker. Playing no doubt violent games in his supposedly prone to kindness mind. And to her horror, the child, or me, or you, were hundreds of feet out to sea, stranded on a shingle bank, barely recognizable as human, and all the better for it.

Sorry, old lady, for being so far out to sea that you couldn't tell whether we were people in your care or dancing specks across your iris. I'm here on behalf of all of us to thank you. Then here I am, a befuddled generation or two later, to say, "Sorry, Gran. Shit and fucking begging your forgiveness, Nan. I was already cruel before you grew me." She knew what I was feeling. So you know what she was thinking? "Forgive us our thoughts, as we neglect to consider the thoughts of others." That's what she was thinking. This is why I never sleep, was what she was thinking. This is why there is no such thing as death, was what she was thinking, because it is the thing. It is us.

"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may", for the sorry lost menfolk are grovelling, muttering about the damage they've done, and will ramp and keep on doing. And while we're on the subject of lost men here, is my dad, drunk, leaning on the doorframe of the tiny cottage on the cliff's edge in the last year of his life, saying, listen to this, Mum, this is the best, this is as good as it gets, Mum, listen to this, this is Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, and Aníkúlápó means he who carries death in his pouch. And that was my dead dad, defeated. Calling forth the soon-dead me with his passions, his borrowings, and his own dad not long gone, with less good taste and greater debt. He who wishes his name meant, "I'm out of here, 'cause I dread being judged, or I'm hiding in here playing at being a child, reading my future on a junk-shop jug." "You can't reach me", he smiles, this character playing dad, where I'm going. Beyond the driveway, into the road, into the fields, beyond the woods, right out of this small world which is named. I'm running away from the hard work of staying. Sorry I flinched, doubled back and attacked when you kindly told me I was become him.

That I was become death.

I just came out here to apologize for the fact that really, despite being a decent man, or a committed colleague, or a generous lover, or a good mate, the entire architecture of my personhood is shittiness. It's feeling guilty I wasn't better, kinder, cleverer, more patient, better I didn't do something more than develop my great unquenchable laziness and desire to mock, ridicule, envy others of my clan. And I want to say thank you, thank you, for the strength you found to bring us up and along and out of our animal wastetude. You had a superpower, and it was forgiveness. And with it, you gave us life.

I turned that over in my mind for years. Raising children, earning and losing money, loving women, hurting friends, squeezing sensitive bits of life and finding them senseless, empty, disloyal, gone. Was that ever so dull? Being an aggressor, being a selfish, self-absorbed bastard. Sisterhood. Now that's a thing to envy. Was I ever taught about exploitation, violence, the cost of mine and others' lifestyles, the true meaning of everything I buy and imbibe and watch sail by? And I see clearly two paths, one of which is sorry for all of this, and one of which is a tabletop of neatly wrapped stones. And on each stone is a false apology, and we can throw them at people like us and not risk any broken glass. None of this is my fault. I was never taught it, you see, and nor did I learn how to ask. You could drive yourself mad, going micro, staying local, saying sorry for every falling thing, letting the dark back in. None of this has anything to do with me. It's culture's deep. It's Dad's fault. Back and back and back.

The only heroic man is the dead man. It's okay, fuck it. Why not? Fuck it, let's hear from him. No one wants to hear from him, but let's hear from him. Gasping back from the drug-like grunting. If it's an apology you're after, I'll apologize for the way the water ran clean and quick over the slate and into the cavity under the back porch and rotted the bedroom floor. And I'm sorry I didn't more sensibly invest the birthday checks. That's the story I can land on, grand stand on and stamp my brand on. Sorry I cheated in the geography test and looked the teacher in the eye and swore that I hadn't. Sorry I used plastic, diesel, nuclear energy, gasoline, saturated fats, fucking glitter, and flew across this planet crisscross, did not give a fucking toss. Sorry I was an unkind boy. Sorry I borrowed. Sorry I pretended to be sorry. So often, I actually forgot the non-performative and sincere act of apologizing behind years of faux sorry showiness. Sorry I joined in with the lads. The proto-gentlemen, the proto-abusers pretending it is someone else's problem. Placebo-performers, proto-depressives in loveless marriages, button-pressers, runners, messers, hiders. All of these versions of ourselves muttering apologies as we sidle up to the cliff edge of endless impossible growth like luckless fucking lemmings. Sorry about the shabby state of these prayers, about the fingernails dropped beneath the pews of St. John the Baptist. Sorry about the two-facedness of my so-called liberalism and the cruelness of my jokes. Sorry about my lack of open-mindedness. Sorry I was negligent and failed to discover what my body could do. I was as jealous as the wintering side of the earth is watching spring trot away at the pace of a romance. I'm so scared and sorry that I am grounded, trapped, that I am punched. Drink dependent, weak, sink clutching, rib cartilage, wonk lean cantilevered with unreliable hinges and joints creaking, rumbling, crumpling windily towards the toilet. And it would be funny If we're not so terribly sad, and my kids weren't gathered behind the two-way mirror forever shaking their heads, forever shaking their fists, forever shaking in their tight white war skins.

Look, I just stopped here lost in the corrupt and squalid main point of my life. At a loss for what to do. An absolute farce. And I know that every utterance is drenched in blood, that language itself is abuse, is control, is exploitation to enrich us. And I am sorry for the nine-year-old boy in me who saw these pages come and I took the easy way out. Went to kick a bolt around, headphones on to drown the shouting out. And it was medieval me, way back, buying a pardon. Fast forward to my yearning for upgrades, fake grass for my garden, fake grass for my afternoon lie ins. For the buy-in naivety. For denial. For the sham cerebral fake father of the shamefaced late stage godless shopping times. Forgive me for I have read too much philosophy but only two parenting manuals and I do not know my own temper. Cannot see any idea of myself in the terrified scroller of headlines reflected endlessly in the glass, shown ugly back to myself as a troller of gossip, word-holder of meaningless pity tricks and click bits and occasionally fit chicks and tit-pics, for this is what abhors me, Heavenly Father. My guilt. In my 21st century hiding, bathed in the blue screen blinding light of your frightful nothingness.

Absolve me, entertain me, wake me up, just distract me for two seconds while I pretend I don't know what's happening just over and the person lying beside me and the children calling for my advice and kindness while I gaze back, blindly glazed over, wondering idly about the so-called world order just over the so-called border or the so-called sea or a few years back into the so-called history of so-called people like me.

I'm sorry I'm only getting somewhere now. Out here alone, putting these things on the wind to become dust, to become hymns, to become the feeling you've forgotten something, or deja vu, or the slow burn ecstasy of missing you over the years and wishing we'd talk more. Well, I see that thought and raise you four more. I did learn. Slowly. Like something growing. Two, these apologies are half journeys. The whole distance is unpassable. I cannot travel. Three, in the gesture dictionary of all that we haven't yet done, the word I most regret not learning is your body. I'm sorry for that lack of ambition. Four is process. From before we were born to the airborne or compost we go to, these lives of mine have only been minuscule and I learned to know exactly nothing, perfect nothing, of what the future will bring.

So listen, my friend, I'm not sorry that I was a body at all times failing, but I wish I'd been less deluded about the strangeness and shortness of such a thing. Sometimes I could just start itching at the scab on my scalp and my head. Do you remember? Don't itch, don't pick, don't pester your sister, don't call your brother a dick, don't run, don't stumble, don't fear the changes of puberty, illness, death, don't laugh at shapes stranger than yours, don't yawn, don't give in to the roaring boredom of the body denying it is only vulnerable flesh in a storm. Don't bury the true heartfelt meaning of shame in the outreach intention of sorry. Sorry flesh, sorry follicles. And I just wish I praised things more, being more respectful and worshipful of surfaces and textures and systems beyond my reach. And I keep on picking and picking and unpeeling and revealing and undressing myself, unzipping my sinful skin, unlearning myself from the things I've been living in, saying sorry to my liver. To my kidneys, to my brain and eyes for the damage I've done, for the time I took for granted, for the benefits of good food, clean water, wind, rain. And suddenly, as in the running dream, when you run and run and run and run and run and run and run and run and run and run and run and start to feel the distinct possibility in the foot-forward's ground faith on earth, a body thrown downwards by pressure but not necessarily stuck there, not really defined by that relationship, half hearing, almost feeling in sleep the possibility of upwardness. Upwardness starting to sing now I am so very sorry I was so damn unambitious and never tried to feel the dream of lifting and have faith that the next step in the ever overrun which does not touch down but rises up hears on the wind that there is no divide between sleep and awake there is just sing and wind and this is the step upon air I will take now a winged thing to lift myself up and onwards run oh wow little human thought undone. You are one step closer to the sun.

Look, the earth is stitched together by rivers. And I see that now. Silver veins. I'm just sorry I didn't walk more. I swallowed poisons. Things I can hardly imagine, let alone describe. Sorry I couldn't tell a hazel from a willow or a falcon from a buzzard. Or a weevil from a longhorn. I'm sorry I took and took and took and took and took and enriched myself without pause and left deep scars on the skin of the earth and on the replenishing flesh of those I helped create. I'm so sorry I took such a small God-based idea and dumped it. Unexamined. My wandering was so limited and free from wonderment. I gorged and littered, half-loved and discarded. I'm sorry for forgetting how small I was in relation to an inlet, to a cove, to a nautical mile, to the ripe, gloaming turning of an evening as the sun smiles over the lip of a day. I'm sorry I was trapped in hours when there is no such thing. I yearn to backwards flood my impatient self with a wordless sense of smallness and timelessness. Next to me, out here, calm in the light, is the apology I cradled closest. The species-deep sorry that I didn't dedicate myself all of this unreal time, to you. You who grew beside me. From here, all I am is the urge to tend for you. As rainfall tends to leaves, from up here, which is underneath the root system, countless you and countless me, as all there is trees drinking all there is water. And so, in the folded plant heart of my sorry, is a thank you.

I just came out here to say, "Every day is a last day". As every day will always be. And it is more than enough.