Aidan Miller

Aidan Miller is a 20-year-old student from Denver, Colorado in America. He has precisely one phobia, and it haunts him incessantly (it's an irrational fear of bananas. He would like to take this moment to remind the audience that a phobia is by definition 'irrational', he can't explain it either). In spite of that, he works tremendously hard to become a writer and is planning to pursue graduate school after attaining a Bachelor's in both History and English. Living in Japan has been a wild ride for him, and he's unsure if he'll survive the next 7 months he's going to be staying here. But he is cautiously optimistic his experiences here have given him one or two stories or poems worth sharing, which you can find below.

NOTE: Yes, the background image is Troy Bolton singing 'Take a Chance on Me' from High School Musical 2. Symbolic for, hopefully, your willingness to take a chance on me.

A Pencil

Use me?

I mean, why not? Look at my supple pink eraser,

That perfectly sharpened point that practically asks for it?

Am I yellow? Am I orange? Am I mechanical?

I’m whatever you want me to be

Use me!

I mean that’s literally what I’m here for

To help you move along, to help you learn, to help you with whatever you need

My graphite tip breaks and breaks and breaks over and over and over just for you

Just for you I shatter, I shrink, I break

Eventually you’ll discard me, so save us both the trouble and don’t think about it. Just

Use me.

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This piece is incredibly fun for me. The sass, the humor in it, hides a damaged soul, and I find that incredibly symbolic of accurate coping mechanisms. While much poetry, several of my own pieces included, try to provoke the audience into sympathy via melodramatic and over-the-top lamentations and suffering I find pieces like this one to be more effective. And honestly, I am happy I was able to write a piece that maintains such powerful messages without sacrificing my humorous voice.

Nulla sits alone under the arching entrance to a gothic cathedral, headphones pressing down her otherwise dandelion-esk plumes of black hair. Half-shut eyes watch the green bouncy ball collide with the opposing wall before coming back to her, and she catches the toy with one hand before sending back on its sisyphean journey. While one might assume the headphones allowed her music choice to remain known only to her, the blaring sound (which cannot be good for her long-term hearing) is slightly audible – though muffled – to the outside world: We Will Rock You by Queen has just started playing. She adjusts her routine, now throwing the ball against the floor first so that it bounces off two surfaces before slapping back into her hands and matching the rhythm of this new song.

After a minute of this new bouncing pattern, Nulla grows comfortable enough to look away from the ball and watch the world outside the archway. New snow decorates a town so small it may as well be called ‘the cathedral and its two neighbors’. Nulla stares longingly at the satellite dish attached to the Thompson’s house, though her eyes eventually drift over to the shack. Although it is technically owned by her family, nobody has been to the shack in years, and Nulla’s recently began wondering if it would be worth it to break the very strict ‘no-shack-visiting’ rule her Gruncle forced her to abide by. After all, perhaps she could invite Mitchel Thompson to go with her, and make the trade of satiating his thirst for adventure with an hour of watching their TV (a technology her family has vehemently disapproved of). Getting lost in thought, while not inherently a habit that harmed Nulla, quite tangibly harmed her this time as the green ball returned much faster than it should’ve and slammed into her cheek.

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This piece was entertaining to write, as it helped me explore characterization. How would one characterize a character when given the explicit instruction that NOTHING can happen? Well, I chose to characterize Nulla by having nothing of consequence happening. The character is just as bored as me with their situation, pleading for anything to happen to them, but alas, they have to make do with being subjected to naught but a short story by me. I wonder how existential she would grow if she knew that?

Flip a Coin

Call it.

Heads & Tails

A passive assault of the eyes An aggressive indifference to my body

softly soothing the ears their hands around my neck

transporting me far away from this place trapping me in this place
It’s the concept of It’s the concept of

Yang & Yin

A snake is biting its own tail. My sensei is proud.
How brave that snake must be, How much I have grown in his craft,
eating itself, and watching me do the same. and how much I have helped him too
As connected as As connected as

Day & Night

One drop slowly, slowly, slowly falls. Tears are falling, falling, falling down.
Why? To mock my progress? Why? Bittersweet victory?

To emphasize my lethargy? Tangible loss? Hysterical amusement?

This land and I, we’re incompatible, like They seem incompatible, like

Fire & Water

Sticky, soaked, stuck Blind, billowing, babbling

to my skin. to each other

It burns, it chafes, We splash, we laugh,

but then, there we were, and there we were

Death & Life

I love you. We love each other.

I miss you. We miss each other.

But how weak those words are, And we’re there for each other,

when you are a world apart. even when we are worlds apart.

I wish to get through this, I got your letter, and sent you my own.

to see you again We want to see if it’ll make it.

So I'll flip that coin. And call it, So lets flip that coin. And call it,

Heads Or Tails

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The formatting of this piece was a nightmare. If it doesn't look right on your screens, my apologies! But I find it one of my favorites. Joel introduced me to this style of poetry, which seemed to innately call for playing with its structure. While I'm known to dabble with spacing from time to time, this allowed me to really explore the whole page. And in doing so, I created a dichotomy of my experiences in Japan. Some of them were a little abstract of course, but I find it quite a nostalgic trip to revist.