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Some men come home from war. Some carry it home in the chest — sealed in a jar with the lid rusted shut. Beneath the Blackened Earth is a gothic poetry collection built in the architecture of Edgar Allan Poe — but the darkness in these pages was not borrowed from a library. It was earned. Written by an Army combat medic turned psychiatric nurse of more than twenty-five years, these poems move through battlefield and ward, through moral injury and the long witness of the dying, carrying Poe's cadence and a soldier's unflinching eye. This is not costume gothic. There is real blood beneath this earth. Across five movements the collection descends — from the war within the flesh to the quiet that waits beneath all of it — and asks the question every survivor knows by heart: what do we bury, and what refuses to stay buried? Read it once for the dark. Read it again for the truth underneath.

Some inheritances don't come in wills. They come in weather — the storms a family makes and hands down without ever naming them. Things We Didn't Name is a memoir in verse: twenty-four poems and eight songs tracing a single lesson as it travels through three generations. A mother who left in a Des Moines winter. A father who was honorable and gone. A grandfather at the end of a bar in a harbor town. And a boy who learned to call distance safety because no one had given him a better word for it. This is not a book of blame. It refuses to make villains of the wounded. It does not mistake survival for victory, or understanding for pardon. It simply names what went unnamed — and asks whether a thing, once named, can finally be set down before it's handed to the next pair of hands. For anyone who has loved someone difficult. For anyone who became difficult. For anyone still deciding what to pass on.

Every shift changes someone. Whispers Behind Torn Masks honors the emotional labor carried by nurses across every specialty. Through original poetry and expressive artwork, the collection explores compassion fatigue, triumph, grief, humor, burnout, resilience, and the extraordinary humanity found beneath every pair of scrubs. These are the stories charted nowhere but remembered forever.

Duty often asks people to carry what cannot be spoken. This collection examines the emotional cost of policing through poetry that values humanity over headlines. Rather than politics, these poems explore sacrifice, family, service, trauma, redemption, and the quiet burden carried home after every shift.

The tones split the room before the coffee cools. Whispers Behind Scorched Shields is thirty-three poems from inside the gear — the hallway found by touch, the closed door that saved a child, the mayday that never resets, the plate under foil, and the chair in the bay nobody moves. No fearless heroes. No faceless victims. Just neighbors on the loudest days of their lives — and the families keeping a listening kind of sleep. The shield is scorched. The promise is not.

The guitar companion to Things We Didn't Name: My Giant Fades — eight songs that trace the inherited patterns of silence, distance, and unspoken grief across three generations, and the slow, earned work of finally naming what was never named. This volume provides two formats for every song. The fireside roadmaps lay out the complete lyric with chord changes overhead — everything a guitarist needs to play the song start to finish with nothing but the words and a guitar. The melody tablature puts the vocal line on the fretboard, note by note, in clean vector-drawn TAB built from the source recordings and audited chord sheets. The entire record sits in G major at 68–71 BPM — the tempo of a resting human heartbeat. Two modulations are marked: Exhaustion Song lifts from G to B-flat at the bridge and stays there, the only song on the record that leaves its home key and never returns. Jack's Barstool lifts from G to C major at the final chorus, the moment the narrator stops circling and sees clearly for the first time. Songs included: Exhaustion Song, Weather in the House, Winter Taught Me, Distance, The Giant Gets Smaller, Shift Change, Jack's Barstool, and The Naming. Brian Edward McDermott is a registered nurse with twenty-six years of psychiatric experience, a former Army Airborne combat medic, and the founder of BYION Enterprises LLC. Things We Didn't Name is his first record — eight songs written not from the stage but from the bedside, the locked ward, the kitchen table, and the long drive home. The Guitar Companion is one of two instrumental volumes accompanying the collection, alongside the Piano Companion. BYION Enterprises LLC — Brian's Yes's Instead Of No's

The piano companion to Things We Didn't Name: My Giant Fades — eight songs that trace the inherited patterns of silence, distance, and unspoken grief across three generations, and the slow, earned work of finally naming what was never named. This Melody Facsimile Edition provides treble melody lines, lyric underlay, and left-hand chord shells for all eight songs on the record, simplified from the source recordings into playable piano lead sheets. It is not a forensic note-for-note transcription. The source recordings, audited chord sheets, confirmed key lifts, lyric phrasing, and tempos govern every page. Production bends, microtiming, ornaments, and some pickup rhythms are intentionally simplified so the songs can be played as written. The entire record sits in G major at 68–71 BPM — the tempo of a resting human heartbeat. Two modulations are marked in the score: Exhaustion Song lifts from G to B-flat at the bridge and stays there, the only song on the record that leaves its home key and never returns. Jack's Barstool lifts from G to C major at the final chorus, the moment the narrator stops circling and sees clearly for the first time. Songs included: Exhaustion Song, Weather in the House, Winter Taught Me, Distance, The Giant Gets Smaller, Shift Change, Jack's Barstool, and The Naming.

Whispers Behind Fractured Minutes: The Stories Between the Call and the Handoff lives in the space between the tones dropping and the crew clearing the scene — the minutes that stretch, fracture, and refuse to add up the way the run report says they did. Through thirty-three pieces of clinical-realism verse organized across four acts — The Tones, The Run, The Handoff, and The Hours After — Brian Edward McDermott writes from inside the ambulance, the triage bay, the kitchen floor at three in the morning, and the grocery store aisle where you suddenly can't remember what you came for. The equipment is exact: the cot latch, the stretcher strap, the run sheet, the glove that will not tear off fast enough. The people are composite. The minutes are real. Every other Frontline Collection volume owns an object. The badge. The mask. The shield. The locked door. This one owns the clock. Emergency medical services runs on time it does not control. A dispatcher hands you four minutes of city and you drive eight. A room counts those same minutes with its ear against a door and gets a different number. The run report asks for both and has no column for the difference. This collection does not heroize or sentimentalize emergency medicine. It bears witness — at the level of emotional truth rather than procedural or graphic detail. It is written for the crews who worked the minute that never made the report, and for the ones who are still standing in it.

Whispers Behind Weathered Acres: The Stories Farm and Ranch Families Never Tell enters the rooms, barns, fields, and kitchens that agriculture's roadside portrait never reaches. Green fields, red barns, calves in spring grass, combines under orange sunsets — the view from inside is different. Inside are the milk checks that do not cover the feed bill. The calf that was alive at midnight and gone by morning. The family called from every direction because hay is down and rain is coming. The child learning the skid steer before learning parallel parking. The farm wife carrying a job in town so the farm can remain home. The auction that feels like a funeral. The land that holds every footprint until weather decides otherwise. Through thirty-three pieces of clinical-realism verse organized across four acts — Raised by Chores, Weather Has the Last Word, The Cost of Keeping, and What the Land Remembers — Brian Edward McDermott writes from inside the operation. The equipment is named. The animals are real. The financial pressure is exact. The people are composite, but the pressure is not. This collection does not romanticize agricultural life. It does not reduce it to scenery, nostalgia, or hardship tourism. It bears witness — to dairy farmers, crop farmers, beef producers, hog farmers, ranchers, shepherds, beekeepers, homesteaders, market gardeners, poultry keepers, orchard families, and the people raising animals nobody expected to see behind a Midwestern fence. For the families who learned that weather is not conversation — it is payroll, feed, milk, debt, birth, death, and whether the field comes in. For the children raised in rubber boots, bib overalls, chore coats, and feed-store caps. For the ones who left and the ones who came back.

Whispers Behind Holy Days: The Stories Faith Keeps Quietly lives in the space between what people believe and what they do for each other anyway. The calendar says holiday. A square with a name. A school closed. But before daylight, a woman stands at the stove with flour to her elbows, making the dish her mother made in another kitchen where the windows opened differently. Through thirty pieces of clinical-realism verse organized across four acts — What We Were Raised In, What They See, What It Costs, and What We Keep — Brian Edward McDermott writes from inside the pew, the prayer beads worn smooth by a grandmother's thumb, the airport screening line, the break room after a bad joke, the funeral kitchen buried in casseroles, and the eleven private minutes a coworker guards behind a truck seat without ever asking what's inside. This collection does not decide whether belief is true. It does not decide whether disbelief is a failure. It does not defend one faith by diminishing another, and it does not ask the reader to admire practices they don't understand or condemn people who no longer practice what they inherited. The believer and the nonbeliever receive equal dignity throughout — so does the person who doubts while continuing to show up, the person who left because the room was no longer safe, and the person who converted and still feels one step behind everybody born into the language. At the volume's center, a funeral kitchen holds a truce: the woman who believes everything happens for a reason and the woman who believes that sentence should never be said to a grieving person reach for the same dish. Their hands touch. They move the casserole together. Nobody wins. Nobody has to.

On the road east of fallen Babylon, a nameless wanderer carries hunger, guilt, and a silence he refuses to explain. When three mysterious warriors place an ancient dagger in his hand, he is told it is a key, a debt, and a mercy — and that Cathay waits beyond the ruined roads. But Cathay is no simple city of peace. Beneath its roots lies the Casket of First Sorrows, where seven crowned hungers were sealed away, and where Hope itself has been buried in the Garden of Unused Dreams. As Wren journeys east with Mara, her children, and a growing company of the wounded and unfinished, each road reveals another form of human hunger: pride, greed, grief, wrath, envy, longing, surrender, and the terrible ways survival can become ownership. Bread becomes a test. Water becomes a throne. The dead wear beloved faces. Songs tempt the living with what they never got to say. And every mercy asks whether it will remain love — or become another chain. Dark, mythic, and emotionally human, Dagger of Cathay: The Garden of Unused Dreams is an epic fantasy about debt, memory, rescue, refusal, and the dangerous labor of hope. It asks what people build when they are afraid, what they owe after ruin, and whether hope can be freed without being possessed. Book One of the Seven Roads begins a sweeping journey through a world where every road remembers, every hunger has a crown, and the hardest mercy is learning when not to claim what you love.

Some debts are counted in coin. Some are counted in the dead. Cathay has opened its gates, but mercy is no longer enough to keep the world at bay. After refusing to enter itself under the manner of Mother’s Bank, Cathay becomes the center of a reckoning older than any one house, office, or road. The Bank does not attack with armies. It does something colder: it prices proximity. Every village, road, office, and ally that has touched Cathay begins to pay for standing near its mercy. But from the west comes another accounting. A man with a true book rides from village to village asking who died, what was owed, who was there, and whether the number is right. His hearings are fair. His records are clean. His grief is real. Where Cathay offers witness, repair, and time, he offers something faster: fire. As Mother’s Bank calls centuries of obligation due and the western reckoner turns justice into a road of its own, Mara, Wren, Miri, and the people of Cathay are forced into the hardest question the Seven Roads has yet asked: what does mercy owe when being right still costs other people? Old names surface. Buried histories return. A first kitchen reveals the origin of Mother’s manner. A ledger becomes a weapon. A house built to heal must face the harm created by its own goodness. And when every old claim comes due at once, Cathay must decide whether accounting can repair the world — or whether every book, even a merciful one, eventually becomes another chain. Dark, mythic, and morally charged, Dagger of Cathay: The Great Accounting is the third book in The Seven Roads, an epic fantasy about debt, memory, inheritance, justice, mercy, and the terrible cost of setting a broken world in order. Every debt will be named. Every mercy will be weighed. And not every account can be closed.

The Culling Protocol: Book One – A Hunter’s Penance introduces a divided America rebuilt into Stewardships governed by the Continuance and its unforgiving ecological doctrine. When the Till turns green, signaling its annual population Correction, grain mechanic Marcus Venn is classified as “Sheltered”—but his wife Elara is marked for elimination, and their daughters labeled “Recoverable Dependents.” Their escape toward the Current Stewardship becomes a harrowing test of loyalty, sacrifice, and the brutal arithmetic of a nation that values resources over lives. Five years later, Silas Reed, a young candidate in the Current’s Conservation Corps, earns a coveted Writ granting him the authority to carry out the next Correction. Raised on Continuance doctrine and driven by duty, Silas steps into the role of sanctioned hunter, unaware of the human cost behind the system he serves. As Marcus refuses to accept the loss forced upon him and Silas rises within the machinery that enforces it, their paths move toward inevitable collision. A Hunter’s Penance blends dystopian worldbuilding with intimate emotional stakes, exploring a society where survival is measured, sacrifice is mandated, and humanity is the final resource at risk.

THINGS WE DIDN'T NAME, My Giant Fades: The Complete Bundle (Main Volume + Piano Companion + Guitar Companion) Some songs never got written down. This one did — three times. My Giant Fades is a farewell built to be kept: the complete poetry volume, plus two full musical companions that turn the words into something your hands can play. The Piano Companion and Guitar Companion aren't add-ons — they're the same grief, the same love, scored for whoever's left holding the instrument. Read it. Play it. Pass it down. Three books. One goodbye. Every voice it deserves.

Whispers Behind: The Frontline Collection (5-Book Box Set) Five doors. Five uniforms. Five versions of the same unspoken sentence. The Frontline Collection gathers the complete Red Zone arc of the Whispers Behind library — Locked Doors, Torn Masks, Fractured Minutes, Scorched Shields, and Tarnished Badges. These are the poems for the people who run toward what everyone else runs from: the nurses, medics, firefighters, dispatchers, and officers who clock out but never quite come home. No hero worship. No pity. Just the truth of the shift — what it takes, what it keeps, and what survives it. Written by a former Army Airborne Combat Medic and RN who worked these hallways before he wrote them. Thirty poems per volume. One rupture in each — the page where the frame breaks and the struggle turns into evolution. 150 poems. One frontline. Read them in any order. They'll find you in the right one.

The Dagger of Cathay: The Seven Roads Series (Books I–III Bundle) A blade travels farther than the hand that forged it. Begun in 1996 and thirty years in the making, The Dagger of Cathay opens the Seven Roads Series — an epic fantasy where guilt is a currency, roads remember who walks them, and one weapon binds the fates of everyone who ever held it. This bundle collects the first three books of the journey: the full opening arc of a saga built with the patience of Tolkien and the quiet, aching court-craft of The Goblin Emperor. Expect slow-burn power, earned consequences, and characters who carry their choices like scar tissue. Three books. Seven roads. One dagger that refuses to stay lost. Start walking.

101 original quacks of crooked wisdom about work, money, marriage, family, food, aging, faith, and the everyday disasters of being human—illustrated with dry, vintage-style editorial cartoons. Full retail description Ancient wisdom. Slightly bent. Confuse Us has lived long enough to know a few things. He’s also lived long enough to know he doesn’t. Inside are 101 original quacks of questionable wisdom about work, money, marriage, family, food, aging, friendship, faith, mistakes, and the many ways people make life harder than it needs to be. Each observation begins somewhere near common sense, wanders through a bad decision or two, and somehow finds its way back to something suspiciously true. Accompanied by expressive editorial-style cartoons, Confuse Us Says is equal parts humor book, gift book, accidental philosophy, and proof that wisdom often arrives just after it would have been useful. Some will make you laugh. Some will make you nod. A few may explain your relatives. Sit down. Pour a drink. Turn the page. He’s got something to say.

Ditch and Skittlz head out for rolling papers and stumble into a cannabis-culture misadventure involving Mondo’s Hydro Palace, a stressed plant, a grow expo, bad decisions, and Kief Richards—the raccoon whose criminal little hands somehow keep making everything worse and better at the same time.

Ditch inherits a huge, deteriorating house from a great-uncle he barely knew. Skittlz sees endless possibilities, Kief Richards sees unsecured property, and a simple move-in turns into missing keys, questionable plumbing, strange rooms, and the discovery of The Comidor’s mysterious journal.