A beer walks into a bar… Beer styles are human inventions—categories, labels, our best attempts to pin behavior onto a liquid that never sits still long enough to stay pinned. Yet we’ve always borrowed the…
Posts Published by R. Carl Lesher
Gen X | Writer | Northeast Ohio Native | Freethinker | Humanist | Atheist
Continue? |
Single-Player Only
I wrestle daily with loneliness, meaning, and the realization that existence often feels like a single-player game. Let’s explore trauma, numbness, and the quiet question that appears when the world stops making promises. Ready player 1?
Settlement |
As Required by Statute
In a near-future United States, the wealth disparity has peaked. The super-rich now face an annual lottery that redistributes their hoards to society. This brief excerpt from the forthcoming novella Settlement offers a haunting perspective from one chosen man as he steps onto the gold circle, exploring morality, power, and the human cost of systemic balance.
Electric Paperc/ts |
AI & Writing Anxiety in Rhyme
I don’t think AI is killing writing, but I do think it’s wounding our pride. The reaction fascinates me: equal parts awe, insecurity, and prophecy. This poem lives in that tension — between tool and identity, speed and meaning.
How AI Killed the Em Dash |
On authenticity, automation, and a suspiciously confident pause
An inconspicuous typographical mark of hesitation became a cultural tell. Machines learned our rhythms and readers learned to be suspicious. The result isn’t the death of good writing but a migration away from polish and toward the uneven signals of humanity we instinctively trust.
Where Is I? |
A Return of the First Person
Some memories feel third person, like the memories of childhood trauma. Like the body was there but the narrator stepped out of the room. This poem moves through the strange, disjointed grammar of survival, where identity thins, fragments, and slowly rebuilds back into a voice strong enough to stand inside its own sentence.
A Polar Sphere of Influence |
A Snowball's Chance
There’s a poem waiting in the hush of winter air. Snowflakes commiserate, small hands shape them into frozen orbs, forts rise, and tiny acts of rebellion arc through cold skies. Mischievous and soft as snowfall—this is a lyrical song of winter, of snowballs, of laughter pressed into crystalline, fleeting mischief.
There Was Cake |
A Stranger's Birthday
A photograph insists I was there, but memory has other ideas. A boy at a birthday table, candles, sisters close by. The room is familiar and strange, light stuck in its own insistence. Time slips, identity wavers, and the past just won’t let go.
The Violence of Ornamental Physics |
A Frozen Accomplice
An object formed by cold and gravity hangs in quiet clarity, unaware of the role it will soon play. When human heat and human conflict spill outside, something ornamental becomes something irreversible, and the only true witness is the one thing that cannot last long enough to be questioned.
Corporate America Supports Its LGBTQ+ Employees |
Just Don't Let Anyone Else Know.
I worked for a company that proudly employed LGBTQ+ people while quietly forbidding any public support of them. As the social media manager, I was told to delete a Pride post because it might “upset the board.” This is what corporate neutrality looks like from the inside.