I wrote an unsolved mystery song about abuse titled Inkwell for my new album All Who Wander, which is available for preorder on Amazon and the iTunes store. Before we go any further into these Inkwell lyrics, I want to give a few more national hotline numbers:

• Child abuse: (800) 422-4453
• Domestic violence: 800-799-7223 (SAFE)
• Suicide prevention: 800-273-8255 

When I started writing this album, I had no idea how much more abuse I’d have to process through before I completed it and the only way to articulate all the pain was to write the song Inkwell, a song about an unsolved mystery. My good friend, Rev. Kyle Welch, works out at a church in Hollywood that takes care of actors and agents and the homeless. He wrote an amazing novel called In Memorium, In Transit that, like all first novels, needs a ton of work, but he has the bones of something quite beautiful and moving. At least for me. Maybe he wrote the novel just for me — that happens sometimes.

But it features an unsolved mystery and a character wrestling with whether or not the solution to this mystery can give him any answer to the grief in his heart. I borrowed a couple of scenes for this song — particularly the scene of the crime and the roundabout meetup — as a headnod to his beautiful novel (I really want it to come out in the world).

But in Inkwell, this song about abuse, those scenes really helped me process a ton of pain.

I found out in the last four years that I have around a half dozen people in my extended family that suffered systemic sexual abuse as children. A few of them testified at a couple of trials for their perpetrators in that time. Then add in the physical abuse and a few marriages ended in that time. Then add in two former mentors that went to prison for victimizing children and two friends that went to prison for the same. One of them was a milder, singular case with an older victim and he has now finished his prison sentence. Since I didn’t know the victim, I tried to stay in contact with this person on that side of the issue, debrief with him, help him find counseling and support and repentance and penance and a job and to build a business and now to go to law school. He has changed immensely in ten years — a rare case in our system, a ray of hope in the darkness.

But with much trauma for so many, both inside and outside of the #MeToo movement, I had no way to process it all.

In the same time, the cluster suicides went on in my hometown, a few unsolved disappearances happened loosely connected to my family, and several child runaways whose lives I feared for because of other colleagues of mine who run safe houses that help rescue children out of sex trafficking — the list went on and I needed a way to process. So I wrote Inkwell to try and process all of the different angles from which this issue came at me. Inkwell is the free download reward if you preorder on Amazon and the iTunes store:

her house was underground
in a town that ends in “A”
her daddy was a preacher
but the preachin’ wouldn’t pay

when her brother tried to drown
cause he didn’t wanna grey
I tried for days to reach her
but she took a week to say

I used a house I remember from childhood, something like a hobbit house, for the main character of the narrator. The narrator’s Tobias from the When Timbers Start and Carry Canons by Our Side, stories from The Vale. It ties in again to the theme of suicide from Lexi’s song, but this time from a sister witnessing her brother struggling with the idea of getting old. This is more of a personal one: it’s one of the reasons I almost took my own life in high school:

meet me in the roundabout
in the town square
I can’t bear to stay silent
need to talk to a listener

kiss me on the head and mouth
fingers in hair
run away with my defiance
take a walk with me whisperer

You cannot believe the number of friends I know whose only solace in the midst of trauma and grief was to cling to another high schooler. I mean your friends will help at that age — any friends help at any age — but that’s an insufficient part of getting help with that kind of trauma, especially for romantic types who, as the enneagram institute would say, lack

“wholesome self-discipline [in] many forms, from sleeping regular hours to working regularly to exercising regularly, and has a cumulative, strengthening effect. Since it comes from yourself, a healthy self-discipline is not contrary to your freedom or individuality. On the other hand, sensuality, excessive sexual experiences, alcohol, drugs, sleep, or fantasizing have a debilitating effect on you, as you already know. Therefore, practice healthy self-discipline and stay with it.”

Sexual encounters with peers often even compound the problem at that age:

when I refused

she went underground
in a self-destructive way
screwed addicts, pimps, and creatures
and the reapers of the fray

when her mother roused the town
cause her daughter made her grey
I tried for days to reach her
filled her voicemail with dismay

“Girl meet me in the roundabout
in the town square
I’m aware you need guidance
and I’m shocked you’re so insular.”

Dismissed me, she, my dread and mouth
lingers in air
for weeks shared her silence
(this this child of a minister)

Sometimes people don’t respond to you reaching out. They lock up. They ignore you. They stonewall. Especially victims and perpetrators. I can’t tell you the number of times this happened with other people and they tend to mistake your kindness for blindness, as Tolkien would say (email me for the full quote). They don’t yet see that wisdom is the recovery of innocence on the far end of experience:

found her body underground
in a shallow ashen grave
killed by the unnamed creatures
who had raped her like a slave

with the other they had drowned
how their bodies were arrayed
I can’t forget their features
no sense in either sleeper

in grief I am a seeker

There’s an implied “they” in the “found,” found by both Tobias and the detective Ebur from the Vale story Wilderness, which now exists on kindle and as an audiobook.

And here’s the unsolved mystery: what if we never know? What if we never help? What if we’re just helpless in the teeth of the void and nothing we do makes it better?

What if we’re too late? And what if we feel like the whole thing is our fault? And what if it feels like the whole world is made to hurt us?

How’d the fire get in this freezer?

This is simultaneously a statement of ontology — why is there something and not nothing, there ought to be nothing-as-such in existence and yet, here we are — and a statement of trigger warnings as I mentioned in Lexi’s song:

You see, I considered putting a “trigger warning” on this post. But as Neil Gaiman says, life and art do not come with trigger warnings:

Neil’s right: I received no immediate warning of the fate of my loved ones. And I received no warning of the pains that accompanied my birth. In fact, if anything, art — like life — is the exact opposite of a trigger warning: art is not first and foremost self-consuming, sarcastic, and jaded. Great works of art, and great lives, force us to face the real, the true, the authentic so that it earnestly changes us.

I hope this song, in part, helps us decided to make and live and shine in the teeth of the dark abyss:

I left the scene to pray.
I leave crime scenes to pray.
I grieved, chimed, screamed, and prayed:

Meet me in the roundabout
in the town square
I can’t bear to stay silent
need to talk to a listener.

anoint me on the head and mouth
show me You care
did You take on our violence?
See the chalklines, oh Whisperer?

Tell me now of Your renown.
See how I’m scared?

Is our planet a black island
Or the inkwell of a scrivener?

Is our planet a black island
Or the inkwell of a scrivener?

The question summarizes the heart of the grief: is our planet a black island or the inkwell of a scrivener? Because those are the options for suffering. Those are the options.

But it’s also the precise plotline of the Vale story 00:08:23, featured in Of Gods and Globes: what happens if the sun disappears from the sky and leaves us as a black island out in space?

I used this song about abuse to process through the trauma these last few years. Again, if you need help right now:

• Child abuse: (800) 422-4453
• Domestic violence: 800-799-7223 (SAFE)
• Suicide prevention: 800-273-8255 

Otherwise, preorder on Amazon and the iTunes store to download Inkwell immediately. You can sample Lexi’s Song and Cherokee here: