A bored boy disappears into the racks of a Main Street institution, where jungle cats, the Wild West, and a chance encounter with a local legend turn an ordinary shopping trip into something worth remembering.
Category Archives: Poetry
Friday Night Atari
A Friday night in Syracuse, 1983. Pitfall gives way to Robot Tank, and a ten-year-old boy discovers a new dimension just before his own world is about to change.
The Ghosts of Skaneateles
A few notes from an old AM radio send me backward through three generations and seventy years of family history on the shores of Skaneateles Lake. From a frightened boy on a dock in 1976, to my parents in 1968, to a grandfather I never met in 1956, the ghosts of the lake were there all along.
Starboy
A forbidden basement room. A glowing stereo. An older sister with something to share. One side of 2112 later, music would never sound the same.
The Den
Hidden behind a forgotten hallway lies a perfectly preserved den where the television still glows, the radio still crackles, and the forgotten interstitials of Saturday morning patiently wait to be discovered once again. The Den is an exploration of memory not as an archive, but as a living place where the overlooked moments of childhood quietly shaped who we became.
The Altar of Syrinx
Neil Peart’s passing felt like the closing chapter of a lifelong soundtrack. Against all odds, one unforgettable evening proved that some spirits never leave the stage. A reflection on music, memory, and briefly becoming seventeen again.
The Cr’apple
Some lurked in closets. Others scratched at bedroom windows during summer storms, fed by half-heard conversations and imaginations running far ahead of reason. The Cr’apple is the story of one such creature, and the quiet revelation decades later that transformed a family tree into a family legend.
Ghost Runner on Third
There were never quite enough kids to fill every position, so imagination did the rest. Ghost Runner on Third is a tribute to sandlot baseball, unwritten childhood rules, and the quiet code of honor forged on long summer afternoons behind a weathered barn, where friendship always mattered more than keeping score.
The Density of Destiny
The Density of Destiny explores the strange intersection of astrophysics and consciousness, where gravity becomes memory, time bends beneath experience, and a lifetime gathers the weight of meaning. A meditation on aging, mortality, and our place in the cosmos.
Grand Central Station
For decades it was just a phrase.
Then one day, standing in Grand Central Terminal, the connection finally clicked. A meditation on memory, distance, and the lessons that sometimes take a lifetime to arrive.
Mannino Acid 