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

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#235 - London in 2011, London in the 1660s - Human Voices Wake Us

An episode from 7/27/26: Tonight, we visit London at two different times in history. First, I read passages from Craig Taylor’s 2011 book Londoners: The days and nights of London now—as told by those who love it, hate it, live it, left it, and long for it. Then we go back a few centuries in Liza Picard’s Restoration London: Everyday Life in London 1660-1670, and focus especially on the lives of women, children, and the poor.I also talk about the value of accounts like these, which don’t pretend to be definitive or objective. But what else do we really hold onto, in the end, other than vivid and subjective stories told by the people we’re closest to, or gleaned from books that we love? Taylor and Picard’s books have both become those for me.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. #235 - London in 2011, London in the 1660s
  2. #234: The Intensity of Private Moments
  3. #233: Talking Baseball with Tom Hart
  4. #232: Ted Hughes in Alaska
  5. #231: The mythology of the moon
  6. #230 - The mythology of the bear, and Byron gets apocalyptic
  7. #229 : Mother Earth and myths of mining and agriculture
  8. #228 - What Ted Bundy did on July 14, 1974
  9. #227 - The Great Fire of London and the destruction of Jerusalem
  10. #226: The Vitality and terror of cities

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Discover more from Tim Miller

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