Over the years I found other ways to heed my visions without having to tell Mom about them. I learned to deal with them in my own way, to protect my family as best as I could. God, I wished I knew why I had them. I wished I knew what their purpose was, or, if it was just a curse, why I had been cursed like this.

As I got older, I started researching other people who saw visions, other mystics around the world, people like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe and Hildegard von Bingen, Saint John and Ezekiel and Jonah and Daniel, Nostradamus, Aleister Crowley, anybody I could find.

That’s part of how I got into poetry. Turned out poetry was a place where it was okay to talk about your visions. If you had visions and wrote poetry, nobody thought you were crazy or horrible—they thought you were a genius.

The first time I read William Blake, it was a revelation. I’ll never forget flipping open a big full-color copy of The Book of Urizen I got at the library, gazing upon all those illuminated wild men and women and skeletons and swirling columns of fire, holy books and angels. It was like seeing into my own mind, like somebody had taken my biggest shame and made something beautiful out of it.

I even tried to write my own poems sometimes, same as my heroes had.

Problem was, my poems sucked. I mean, they were total shit.

Every time I took the fury and terror of my visions—the burning gorgeous reality of them, the way they felt and smelled and tasted to me, the electric jolt in my bones before a big one—it all just came out flat and dull on the paper, toothless. William Blake was a prophet, you know? An honest-to-god seer, and he wrote his verses with lightning, scalded them right onto the page. Me? There wasn’t an ounce of wildness to my words. I could have made the goddamn apocalypse seem tame. But I kept at it anyway, hoping that someday I’d be able to make sense of all this and that my visions would become a blessing to me and not a curse—or a lie, like Mom always said they were.

The thing is, Mom wasn’t totally wrong about them lying. Because sometimes my visions don’t come true. It’s a real problem.

Take, for example, Murphy’s tenth birthday party. We were supposed to go down to the lake for fishing and a cookout with homemade ice cream and possibly canoeing, depending on how many kids showed up (because, you know, unlike me, Murphy had actual friends). The night before the party I had a vision. I was just lying in my bed, watching the fan whir, trying to write a poem in my head, when the ceiling vanished above me and I saw the whole thing play out like a movie.