June 17, 2025 (Crom Abu)
By Adam W. Fitzgerald (Smith)
a new (Irish) poem
For Bobby Kelleher
— –
when the Catholic church exploded in our Irish blood
I was in the pews with you
looking to go outside too
there was a brightness encroaching
but we knew it wasn’t god
the grasshoppers outside sang of Neptune
Venus smiled upon us as she wept
maybe beauty is sadness, my brother
& gnosis is in the unknown
crossing the abyss from a kiss, burning the ships because we couldn’t break our chains
splintered by our lovers lips, wielding the wounds of our women
young boys broken by a world
heralding purity through an insanity lurid
making men out of broken alabaster
plastering us put back together with the porcelain
of the feminine making us sing again
golden ringing in our ears
holding hands with our BFF queerz
willing to die just to feel the high
so we could fly up like Icarus in the sky
just to touch an angel & give the maker the finger
falling through fire is what made me a ginger
we’ll be the water rising from the wood of the swamp
we buried a priest but we’ll hold your hands
as you fall asleep we were chased from the Emerald Isle like all displaced indigenous
psalms for our sorrows of eternal heartbreak
lullabies for the laments of our lost mothers
still keening for Oisín lost in Tír na nÓg
we are his sons spat out on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean
our grandsires sought Éieraan but barely survived Bavaria
centuries of hysteria crystalized in our eyes & veins
never passing blame just fighting off Catholic crusaders shame
— –
(written in Valerie Hsiung’s Naropa University / Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics / Summer Writing Workshop 6/26/25)
“Whenever any kind of deep loss occurs in your life — such as loss of possessions, your home, a close relationship; or loss of your reputation, job, or physical abilities — something inside you dies. You feel diminished in your sense of who you are. There may also be a certain disorientation. “Without this…who am I?” When a form that you had unconsciously identified with as part of yourself leaves you or dissolves, that can be extremely painful. It leaves a hole, so to speak, in the fabric of your existence. When this happens, don’t deny or ignore the pain or the sadness that you feel. Accept that it is there. Beware of your mind’s tendency to construct a story around that loss in which you are assigned the role of victim. Fear, anger, resentment, or self-pity are the emotions that go with that role. Then become aware of what lies behind those emotions as well as behind the mind-made story: that hole, that empty space. Can you face and accept that strange sense of emptiness? If you do, you may find that it is no longer a fearful place. You may be surprised to find peace emanating from it. Whenever death occurs, whenever a life form dissolves, God, the formless and unmanifested, shines through the opening left by the dissolving form. That is why the most sacred thing in life is death. That is why the peace of God can come to you through the contemplation and acceptance of death.”
— Eckhart Tolle (Stillness Speaks)
allianceofhope.org/eckhart-tolle-on-peace-after-a-loss/
My mom used to say to me:
“You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”
Before she passed away she looked at me one day & said sincerely, “you’re a good person, I don’t know why bad things happen to you, but you’re a kind man & I’m proud of you.”
But I’m paraphrasing. & that kills me. I’d give anything to have a recording of that conversation. I’d give anything to have had her write us all letters. So I could relentlessly reread & experience her cutting wit & loving humor. Again & again, I’ve read anything I can find that she wrote. She was an incredible writer like her father Jim, & musician like her mother Pat, but as far as I can find, she didn’t do either often enough. She could draw, paint, edit, cook, swim, dog whisper, play guitar, plus she was a tennis champion, but I think her real strength was words — she could cut you the fuck in two with a breath let alone a sentence. But she didn’t write much, except for on Facebook, which has been an incredible archive & source of comfort in the wake of her loss. Sadly I learned recently that after 3 years of being inactive, Facebook pages are deleted, wiped; digital storage or some other technocrat scam / bourgeois bullshit. Maybe my father still has my mother’s laptop with her login so he could sign in every few years… maybe we should take the time to go through her years of posting to screenshot, to archive, to remember. After all, if I have children, this will be all I have left of her. Home videos, photos, my audio recordings.
In 2023 my family did not have the capacity for me, drowning in grief & denial, but often I wonder if they ever did. Midwest working class middle child syndrome shit perhaps. Despite working endless hours his entire lifetime, my dad still coached my little league when he could. My mom was antisocial, agoraphobic, hated small talk. My dad, like me & my grandmother, his mother in law Pat; social butterflies. My father & I go camping & hiking in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula & Isle Royale; my mom & I read books aloud, which I also did often with her mother. I’m endlessly grateful for those moments. My grandfather & father worked tirelessly to support their children & wives, who in turn worked their asses off to keep balance. The only Smith I ever knew was my father, & now that he & my sisters are all that’s left, it makes sense I changed my mother’s maiden name from my middle to last name. The lauded only boy turned black sheep. “I’ve always been a werewolf among mere men / I’ve always been an outcast so send me back again / to the Pale Moonlight.”
In 2023, as my mom faded fast from ALS, no one had capacity for my divorce. The second of my three sisters married, & my mom wasn’t able to be there in ATL — crushing to everyone — & I wasn’t sat at the family table either — I was sat with strangers, friends of my sister T, who intensely hates me — strangers who, unbeknownst to me at the time, my ex wife had been talking shit about me & our marriage to all night, calling me the cheater. Guess I did emotionally.
My family loves each other, conditionally. My grandmother Pat & father Wes love unconditionally, everyone else I’m not so sure. No one could understand, with both grandparents gone & matriarch fading fast to disease, how to deal with it all, let alone a marriage & divorce of the two problematic middle children who never got along in the midst of all the real life tragedy & lifelong trauma. 2023 reshaped my life. What did it matter that my wife had been cheating on me for years, abusing me mentally, physically, emotionally, destroying my confidence for over a decade, making me believe I was a loser. It mattered to me, but people fend for themselves, & at their lowest, you learn who people are, if not why. I’d say my family tried to comfort each other as best as we could, but we all know that’s not even remotely true — we tried to comfort my mom the best we could & in the end that’s all that matters, especially to them. I can’t disagree.
“Stop acting like your shit is more important than everyone else’s.” My dad told me in the garage between my sister belittling me & me finalizing my divorce, my mom dying a few rooms over.
“But I never said that, you did.” I replied.
My dad & I would cry together to every version “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” & “Naked As We Came” by Iron & Wine, who my mother loved. So many of my parents’ “Chris & Wes Classic Love Songs” will forever put the image of them together in all their denim & moccasins on my dad’s motorcycle in the late 1970s — “Miracles” — “Sister Golden Hair” — “Can’t Get It Outta My Head” — “Something” — any James Taylor or Paul Simon. My mother loved 2000s light pop — Snow Patrol, Keane, David Gray, the Garden State & Wicker Park soundtracks. My family has taste, if occasionally lacking empathy or awareness. Songs & smells take me back, to growing up in Michigan, rare family trips to Florida, New York, Chicago, Port Huron, NoMI, or the Great Lakes.
WES & CHRIS “TRUE LOVE” playlist by Wes Smith: http://bit.ly/45Nq7my
Even with the obviousness of my elder sisters intentionally cutting me and my aunt K out of the family, my father will defend “his little girls” even if they were on death row (but hopefully he’d do the same for me). While my mother was passing I remember helping my sister T with some household chores, & she told me that I was “weaponizing my incompetence” — while she occupied the largest most central room in our childhood family home to conduct her daily corporate sellout lawyer Zoom meetings, where I would listen to her berate & belittle coworkers the same as she did to me my entire life. Once on New Year’s Day, T shared on social media that her only New Year’s Resolution “was to be more of a cunt to everyone she meets everyday.”
So of course I ended up with a wife similar to my mean older sisters & manic depressive mother, but later where I realized it was all off was, like my older sisters, my ex wife J is more of a Keeping Up with the Kardashians type than how she claimed to be a Jane Austen type like my mom. Alas. We are all misled, misinformed, manipulated; but how do we recover? Do we learn from our mistakes & adjust? Even when I was lying to my boss to work from home & avoid going into the office because J had taken bloody chunks out of my face & neck in one of her drunken rages, clearly I didn’t learn quick enough; not until a more evolved & healed woman I’m now lucky enough to be with told me I’m worth a damn.
It’s this type of matriarchal violence & abuse from women that has shaped my entire life. Because my grandmother was an angel, & her & my mom were my heroes, I wanted to believe all women had that capacity for kindness. But that’s not true. Like men, women have capacity for physical & psychological torture. We all have capacity for kindness, but most choose violence, silence, creature comforts, the rat race, even knowing it’s killing our planet & robbing Earth & humanity of a future. Potentially within the next decade, scientists & experts say between the worsening climate, pollution & socio political situations, & now the potential start of World War 3 due to the U.S. supporting the apartheid state of Israel & attacking Iran. More journalists have been killed in Gaza than all other recent wars & conflicts combined — & the Left Bank has the highest amount of child amputees in the world, all directly related to the global North’s desired conquest of the Middle East, their oil, & their people. Drone warfare bombing hospitals. Yet I’m the radical.
At some point right before my mom died, shit was so bad between my sister T & I that I was forced to move out of my childhood home in Lapeer, which I had moved into permanently during the divorce & to take care of my mom with my family. So I rented a flat in Detroit with my friend Connor — which apparently led to some sort of “intervention” style chat my sisters dropped on my father, pressuring him to “cut me off” in every way possible, even though I had just walked away from my kushy corporate job & returned to substitute teaching for no money specifically so I could be in my hometown to take care of my mother as she passed. But, I’m the problem child. I give up. I don’t want to spend time with people who have my blood but don’t offer respect to others, not even their own blood, not even my angelic sweet partner C. Their loss. No one owes anyone anything beyond decency, we owe ourselves boundaries. As Farik Matuk recently said in a recent lecture during Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program: “When people want to fight or argue with me, I have no interest in communication like that.” (I’m paraphrasing again) “I don’t want to stoop to that level.” We can’t blame our circumstances, our families, our socioeconomic status, our birthplace, our parents, etc. for our lives. Being an adult is taking responsibility for your life, decisions, actions, & where it’s all led you.
I’m no saint, I’ve made my mistakes, & we’re all lucky to be on the other side of 2023, death, disease, divorce & the dissolution of our family. I do not seek paths of resistance or least resistance, only honesty, education, healing, logic & love. But my divorce matters to me. My marriage mattered to me. I gave it everything I had & like a Little Shop of Horrors monster it almost consumed me. June 17th matters to me, because my mom told me that my wedding in Detroit on 6/17/17 was one of the happiest days of her life. Can’t exactly say the same, but there was happiness in my marriage, more so before we ever wed, ebbs & flows among the peaks & valleys through over 11 years of my relationship with J. Our honeymoon in Ireland in the summer of 2017 was maybe the happiest a person can be, while existing in the beginnings of worldwide ecological collapse & endless war, still financially unstable, still unpublished, always fighting miasmic depression unfurling, eeking, creeping, clawing the heart from the mind.
I have immense gratitude for my upbringing, which I recognized even as a youth was rare, idyllic, and likely very limited. My dark adulthood does not remove my gratitude for my good fortune to have 4 brilliant role models in my parents and mothers’ parents. Despite all I’ve been through & all the world continues to go through, I still work to teach students to hope, to dream. On my 34th birthday last October 26th, I put out an album of 15 instrumental songs, & although they’re some of the only pieces of music I’ve put out without vocals & lyrics (besides a tribute to Twin Peaks & David Lynch released in 2022) the track list itself tells a story, with each song reflecting different emotions & circumstances I went through while recording the album (titled “Larx”) from Jan. 2023 until Oct. 2024.
“Larx” by Quells (tracklist)
- 1. Silver Linings
- 2. Orange Peels
- 3. Sass
- 4. Drifting Away
- 5. Green Lightning
- 6. Past Life Memories
- 7. Island Blue
- 8. International Flight
- 9. Lost in Thought
- 10. Don’t Be Sad
- 11. Ride the Waves
- 12. Last Dance
- 13. Nice Knowing You
- 14. Express Gratitude
- 15. Never Give Up
Pre 2020 seems like another world now, but my entire life it’s been tragedies one after another, 9/11, Middle East wars (exploitation for oil, land & to fuel the opiate crisis), my family & many other Americans losing their life savings in the 2008 financial collapse, Snowden, Assange, WikiLeaks, Epstein, Maxwell, MOSSAD, Trump, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, child slave labour in the Congo, COVID, the worldwide pandemic, George Floyd, Trump again, ICE raids, Musk, Palantir, PayPal mafia, Peter Thiel, & now WWIII starting in Iran because of the US blatantly supporting Israel’s ethnocentric Zionist genocidal land grab. All this sprinkled with personal tragedy throughout. We are watching babies ripped from their mothers arms as they are separated into concentration camps, both in the US & in Gaza, while we witness drone warfare reshape our planet into something hellish & unrecognizable, babies left to starve in incubators, hospitals burned containing corpses with IVs still in them. Children, mothers, fathers, families, murdered, starved, reduced to bloody pulp, all in our daily newsfeed timelines, every damn day.
Derrynane Beach & Castlecove in the Ring of Kerry, Ireland following 6/17/17 was the first book end of my marriage’s ephemeral happiness, to be later matched & closed in 2019 on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, when after making love J cried, because, she said, she knew she’d never be that happy ever again — or that we’d never be that happy again. I’m not sure who decided, but I guess she did. A few years later our couple’s counselor contacted me on the side through email & told me she was worried for my safety. To run, basically. I gave my twenties to this woman, my heart, my soul, my everything. She took my youth, my music, my cats, my life savings, my home, my dignity, my confidence & the worst is that she took time away that I should’ve been spending with my grandmother & mother, two women who I also no longer have, but I want to believe loved me unconditionally. My ex wife J loved conditionally — “champagne tastes & beer money” my mom always said & that drove J crazy. Once after returning home from living in Edinburgh, Scotland, right before the pandemic, J had a meltdown over X, Y, or Z (probably my lack of financial & commercial success, as was the usual) & while we were driving through Metro Detroit, she hit me in the face with a CD jewel case while screaming at me — while I was the one driving. I knew if she had hit me less than an inch over, I probably would’ve lost my right eye. & she was sober for that one. I locked myself in rooms, bathrooms, hid car keys, & I wish I would’ve talked to my mom about it more, but I never wanted to turn my family against my then wife, all whom I loved. 2 couples’ counselors later, I was told I was gaslighting myself.
Alcoholism — Abuse — ALS
Death — Disease — Divorce
Drama — Trauma — Nightmares
Fuck all that. Everyone deserves better. Life is incalculably short, it’s absurd. Yet we deny ourselves what we really want in life & force ourselves into daily capitalist slave labor for the fascist status quo. One of the last living Japanese Samurai monks, Dai Kato, said recently in another lecture at Naropa University’s 2025 Summer Writing Program: “Capitalism has colonized the whole world, even Japan — I’m now too Japanese for Japan, so I left.” We are advanced animals deluding ourselves with language, philosophy, maths, science, AI, genocide, modern slavery disguised as kleptocracy. The masses are oppressed, but we always have been. Will it ever change? I only grew up in Michigan because my mother’s ancestors were forced to flee Ireland to survive the British engineered potato “famine” & my father probably should’ve grown up on a reservation but instead he escaped a commune & a childhood he barely talks about. His own children must seem so spoiled to him, but he did it, a big softie always listening to women even if they are belittling him. We can’t replace the patriarchy with a matriarchy, balance is nature.
Maybe my ex wife J & I didn’t have balance. Maybe the tap water of Lapeer is almost as poisoned as nearby Flint’s — because now my dad has cancer, & it seems like more people in Lapeer have diseases than any other small town I’ve heard of. Maybe we’re all just dying all the time, always, & my only misconception was that we’d live longer as time went on, as my grandfather Jim passed in his 80s and my grandmother Pat in her 90s — but my mom never saw 70, grandkids, or outside North America.
My younger sister B is a brilliant queer artist (she made the “Larx” artwork as well as the “Ice Temple” streaming art), trapped in the malaise of small town shutterings, stuck as we all often feel. But she could move anywhere, do anything, if she just heard it more often, got to talk about herself & her art & her curiosities & hopes & dreams & wants more often. Even if she criticized or judged us (which she did often) our mom would usually listen to us. Now that she’s gone, my sisters won’t listen to my father, let alone me. Only 1 of the 3 has even given the time of day to my new partner, even though we’ve been together over 2 years. Us 4 siblings can’t even be in the same place at the same time to celebrate our father’s 70th birthday. Or should I say, I’m not allowed to go home, I wasn’t invited to the party.
Today would’ve been my 8 year wedding anniversary. In 2 years it’ll be 2027, what would’ve been our 10 year; 15 together. The following year would’ve been my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary — 5/6/78. My grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary was a wonderful party, a fully swinging family affair. At 14, I remember looking around & being amazed at everything (& everyone) Jim & Pat Fitzgerald had built, with their love. That was my goal with my ex wife, to make it to that, to achieve that together, like I was so sure my parents had done & were going to celebrate together, a unified loving family.
Now they’re all gone except for my dad, & I’m not sure he’ll see May 6th, 2028 — ojala. My grandparents & parents have been my greatest heroes & inspirations in my life, giving me the gifts of education, inquisitiveness, the written word. My whole life I’d always planned on raising children with their help. Where do you find yourself when your heroes are gone? This isn’t exactly a midlife crisis, I’m 34, but this is my reality. By now I thought I’d have kids, a home, maybe a career, my parents the doting, loving grandparents I’d always envisioned them to be. But, no. No grandparents, no mother, no family, no wife, no cats, no home, no money, no career, no future to speak of. I’ve got 2 new cats, 1 new incredible woman who saves my life daily, 1 sister who speaks to me & 1 father who I cherish & pray for everyday, & I’m not religious.
What do you do when your heroes are going, going, gone… become the hero? What a joke. I’ll never stop being kind, because my mother’s bright blue eyes looked into my dark brown eyes & told me she’s proud of me for being a good man. I was taught to treat others as I wish to be treated, that the golden rule in life is to treat others with kindness & respect, as if they were your own mother. I can’t do it all the time, & I don’t think she ever thought of herself as a “smiling down from heaven” type of deceased, but until my dying breath I will bear witness & testimony to the legacy of the Smiths & the Fitzgeralds, for I am their progeny, & I’ve felt since youth I have some twisted destiny to put words on paper to help people. I’ll bleed through ink to stain history with my time if it will help others. I will continue to cry for my mother, my 3 cats I tell myself are better off with my ex wife, the years I spent being abused & giving up on myself because I was told I was a loser day in & day out, but I’m working to let go, to move on. I forgive but won’t forget. We must forgive ourselves, our tormentors, face our fears, laugh in the face of death, let go. We can’t take anything with us, so do & say what you want while you can. I’m determined to live my life to the fullest, to do better, to be better, & to leave a legacy that would make my family proud, even if deceased or estranged.
Because I can still feel my mom, her love, holding her hand while reading to her, like she used to do for me, hugging her on her hospital bed — & I can still hear her saying:
“You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”
—
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge — unless it is knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
— Walter Benjamin
“Thesis 8: A Real State of Emergency”
(written upon returning to Denver from Boulder on 6/17/25 after one of the longest days of the Naropa University 2025 Summer Writing Program )
