paperback.
poems and art by mike mahoney, 2018-2020.
142pgs.

this little book of poems, All We Need Is A Great Ending, was written with burning lungs.  it's a desperate attempt to navigate. 
to survive. 
to keep the spark alive.
to find an opening up at surface. 
to breathe...
it speaks not of or about, but from the most enormous journey, the most profound & perilous adventure a man can make -- or rather is forced to take, for no one ever chooses it.

it's the long dark night of the soul.  it can take any shape or event.  look any way or be any thing to any one.  sometimes it really is just one long dark night.  other times it can last for years.  sometimes you don't even know you're in it, but somehow you also realize the stakes are beyond high: the stakes are yourself.

in the end, it's the only war there really is: the battle man makes against himself for his own soul.
 
this little book tells the narrative of my few-year swoop down into the Belly of that Cosmic Whale, my timeless time in the crypto-sludge & dark rot of the human heart, as my own downwave overlapped with the world's  -- the world-historic downwave of life being shut down, locked down & strangled with quarantine by men in high places.

*

All We Need Is A Great Ending includes poems from two other handmade books: Archetype Degenerate and The Night I Drank The Sky, plus two whole other sections of previously unpublished work, including more degenerate poems from 2019 following a horrible breakup & the death of my father, and a short suite of poems writ on return from the mid-forest cabin trip documented in The Night I Drank The Sky, bringing to a close the shape & journey of an alchemical sort of healing.