"Origin Story" by Dillon Collins and Chris Selby
The day he lost everything for the third time,
Chris sat on the floor of his kitchen and wrote.
He wrote.
And wrote.
And wrote.
Letters, stories, songs, and even gospels
He wrote it all down.
He couldn't help himself,
The ability to write was all he had left,
And his left brain was all he used to think.
At the young age of 16 Dillon discovered that he was actually a very lonely man. Old enough to be allowed to date by even his parents standards, but still too young to comprehend the maturity required to make it happen.
As Chris struggled and fought to find the words
That would make the world seem smaller,
His demons lined up single-file,
And he stared them all down,
Imprisoning them in verse,
By the makers of music and metaphor,
He fiddled with fate and won.
This time around, he discovered
The pen is mightier than the bottle.
At the age of 18 Dillon decided to write it all down. Even If maybe no one could ever understand and even if no one would hear it was therapeutic just to write it. So he wrote. And wrote, and wrote, and wrote, until all of the skeletons in his closet and all of the monsters under his bed, became trapped in his notebook pages.
Meanwhile, while rounding the corner of his second decade,
Chris was still writing,
Until his head ached,
Until his fingers cramped,
Until the ink smudged onto his wrist in shades of black and blue
That matched the bruises left in his chest cavity.
He wrote his first real poem,
Titled: "To My Ex, This is Just to Say, I Think You're an (expletive deleted) (expletive deleted.)"
At the age of 20,
Dillon realized that notebooks are combustible. and as all of the monsters and skeletons did their demon dances around bonfires in the dark the heat from the flames lit the pages because the notebooks could no longer contain the fire. So left with the choice of performing or imploding He began to speak.
Meanwhile, Chris imploded.
Until one day, a man named Buddy appeared and started breathing fire
And this dead man's chest reached its capacity.
One by one,
Champion or victim,
Embarassing or tragic,
Chris rolled his secret identities up with his sleeves and put them in bottles,
And cast them across an ocean the distance
Of a microphone to some coffeeshop tables.
When the unthinkable happened,
They listened.
It was then that Chris realized
We are not alone.
You, dear friends, are not alone.
And speak he did!
And all of this speaking led to trains of thought,
And those trains have left the station,
And they are never looking back.
Because each little village or town or city that they pass through seems
Just...
A little...
Brighter.
A little cleaner.
A little easier to bear
Without imploding.
(both deep breath)
So now, here we are. In front of you beautiful people.
Pressing our noses up against the fishbowl,
Hoping that, by the time we stop talking,
We will have brought just a little ease to your world-weary minds.
Please know, dear friends, that we are here to share life with you.
In all its joy and pain,
In all its Sun and rain,
Trash Salad.
Whiskey Wail.
SLAM.
