Looking ahead to the February release of Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, I will be posting poems from it with accompanying videos.

You can preorder the book here and see all videos and reviews of here.

Today’s poem is the first in the book, and one of the hardest to write (and perhaps the hardest to read), Dylan Klebold’s Crush. I was only out of high school for two years when the Columbine High School shooting took place, and it took almost twenty years, and becoming a father, for me to write anything about it.

In many of the accounts of Dylan Klebold’s final year before the shooting, his attachment to one or more girls in his class comes up again and again, and the poem imagines one of those crushes, now in middle age, still with no idea what she meant to a boy who became a murderer.

In part, the poem imagines a situation most of us can see ourselves in (having a crush from a distance) ending up being forgotten, and in its place is a horror and a tragedy few of us can imagine being a part of.

Please leave a comment, if you have any thoughts.

Dylan Klebold’s Crush

Discover more from Tim Miller

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

Leave a Reply

#233: Talking Baseball with Tom Hart - Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 7/6/26: For the past year or so, I’ve been putting out another podcast with the artist and educator Tom Hart over at his Substack, Men, an Explanation. You can find all the episodes we’ve done at Apple or Spotify where we talk about all kinds of things, but mostly creativity and how to be decent in the weird world of 2026. Today, I wanted to share one of those episodes with you, where Tom and I talk about baseball.It begins with Tom dealing with a bout of insomnia by listening to a podcast of fake AM baseball broadcasts, Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio; it ends up with the two of us talking about what baseball has meant to us and its connections to creativity and even religion, mysticism, and history.I end the episode by reading from Mac Davis’s Baseball’s Unforgettables, a book published in 1966 that first belonged to my dad and much later became hugely important in my childhood. I also mention the HBO documentary When it Was a Game, which everybody should check out. If anyone is wondering how I ended up obsessed with history, religion, and meaning, Davis's book and the documentary are good places to start. Both showed me, at a young age, how history so easily becomes folklore and myth and how, in the best ways, individual and shared memory can become layered in the best kind of sentimentality. Thanks to Tom for letting me repost the entire episode here. I hope listeners to Human Voices Wake Us will go check out the other episodes Tom and I have done.The best way to support the podcast is by leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, sharing it with others, or sending me a note on what you think. You can also order any of my books: Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. I also have a YouTube channel where I share poems and excerpts from these books, mostly as YouTube shorts.Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.
  1. #233: Talking Baseball with Tom Hart
  2. #232: Ted Hughes in Alaska
  3. #231: The mythology of the moon
  4. #230 - The mythology of the bear, and Byron gets apocalyptic
  5. #229 : Mother Earth and myths of mining and agriculture
  6. #228 - What Ted Bundy did on July 14, 1974
  7. #227 - The Great Fire of London and the destruction of Jerusalem
  8. #226: The Vitality and terror of cities
  9. #225 - The invention of the wheel, and the power of storytelling
  10. #224: Let's talk about William Blake

Discover more from Tim Miller

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Discover more from Tim Miller

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading