it depends on how you look at things
whether or not you can consider yourself
one of the special ones

maybe you know something that we
as a populous are largely unaware of

it depends on what the world and
the people well above it
consider to be special

because in every story of the heroes
and the saviors and great ones
there are infinite passers-by and which one are you?

because you walk past a lot of people
in any given day on the street

and maybe they're on the way to finish
the great american short story
or lead the men into battle

there can only be so many special ones
and i don't think we know which one we are
until the moment we realize we're about to be gone.

because until then, anything could happen
and you could, in any way, change the world.

someone may consider me to be something special
but if they do, i don't know about it and i suggest to you:
tell the special ones that they are so much that

because lots of us will go away, soon,
without so much the idea that
you were there and that you loved us.

- ben chappel, simplesimon mailing
"just a word before tomorrow," 04.15.01

I never met him. I never wrote him. He never knew of me. I was just an email address on the mailing list to which he sent little anonymous packages of insight and poetry. And they just happened to impress me. I made numerous references to them in posts during college, about how I looked forward to the next time I would be surprised to find a mailing waiting in my inbox.

I thought of him again in November, went back through the mailings, reposted this piece (it had always been my favorite). And again I thought of how much I liked knowing that he was in the world...

Odd, these Internets. You can never hold a conversation, exhange a hello or even share a breath. And yet somehow you feel like you've come to glimpse a side of a person. Otherwise, you may have never known that person - or perhaps that side of that person - even existed.

And hearing of that person's passing saddens you. But you're glad to have been given that glimpse.

I'm thinking of those who actually did know and love him.

i never quite figured out the
spacing
involved
in being a poet, and i never could get the plot together, the words forever, to be a novelist, and i never quite managed the lifestyle it takes to be a rogue, a rebel, a writer. i always wanted to know what they know and see the world like that,
think in line breaks
and fragmented
bits
and pieces
of sentences
with only a couple words
here
and one or two
there but
you really just know
what i'm trying to say