Kris’ Shadow Haven - Blog

08/06/2025

The Architect of Ashes

I did not choose the page.
It chose me—
like a wound chooses salt,
like silence chooses the throat.

There was no apprenticeship.
Only aftermath.
Only the echo of something
that once had a name
before grief turned it to static.

I learned to write
in the rubble of my own collapse,
where sentences crawled from smoke,
dragging the bones of memory behind them.
Every stanza was a surrender.
Every line,
a ledger of what pain cost me.

You see, I do not write
to be understood.
I write to survive
what understanding could not save.
To hold the tremor
without letting it unmake me.
To cup my hands
beneath another’s storm
and say:
Here. I’ve stood in this rain, too.

I was blessed
with the strange and stubborn gift
of stringing language together like thread,
braiding beauty
into the burn marks.
So now I use that gift
to speak for those still buried
beneath the weight of their silence—
to share my blessings
with those who feel
like they have no voice at all.

What you call poetry,
I call blood—
pressed through the teeth of trauma
until it resembled something beautiful.
I call it a flare
for the ones who never saw the road.
A compass scratched
onto the backs of eviction notices
and therapist intake forms.
I call it a mirror
for the girl who forgot what her face looked like
without apology smeared across it.

I have written for the addict
searching for their name
in the folds of a hospital gown.
For the broken
who mistook their worth for a warning.
For the weeping,
and the waiting,
and the ones still trying
to rise without wings.

I do not craft poems.
I exhume them.
Dig them from the silence
like fossils of who I might have been
if the world hadn’t come for me so early.
And still—
still—
I thread my voice through the needle
and stitch it all together
with trembling hands
because someone out there
is unraveling
just like I once did.
And they need a map
drawn in scars.

So I give them my fire.
My flood.
My unfinished truth.
Not to be admired—
but to be used.

Because what good is survival
if it can’t be passed on
like a lantern
to the next soul
lost in the dark?

06/28/2025

What’s coming up? Audible! Children’s books!!! Keep an eye out!!!

06/03/2025

Releasing soon. (not sure exact date) This is my first religion and recovery book! It's not for everyone but I wanted to make a difference with my writing and as an addict in recovery myself I thought this would be a great book to do!!!

06/01/2025

https://a.co/d/2OWvTrw

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

05/23/2025

It’s live!!! If you only read one book of mine, this is my best work yet!!!

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

05/23/2025

Excerpt from Crossroads of Destiny
By Kris Crawford – Available now on Amazon!

https://a.co/d/i2K981C

⸻

From Chapter 6: Teenage Wasteland (Part 1)

Navigating the maze of teenage-hood felt like embarking on a journey with no map and too many detours. The landscape of my identity shifted daily—under my feet, in my chest, in the mirror. Gender dysphoria, peer pressure, societal rules, the ever-present noise of self-doubt… they swirled together like a storm that refused to pass.

Each day brought a new test. School wasn’t just a place to learn—it was a battleground. The whispers, the looks, the names. I felt them even when no one was speaking. Especially then.

Music became my escape. I locked myself in my room with nothing but lyrics and a black Sony boombox. Bands screamed what I couldn’t say out loud. Songs about not belonging. About not breaking. About being too loud, too soft, too much.

Rebellion wasn’t just a phase. It was armor. I gravitated toward the kids who misbehaved the loudest—because they weren’t pretending to fit in. We snuck out. We pulled pranks. We tried to laugh louder than the pain. It worked. Sometimes.

Other times, I exploded. The bullying never stopped. One hallway shove, one kick of a desk, and I’d snap. The rage would pour out of me, volcanic and sharp, and I didn’t care who it burned. I wasn’t just angry. I was exhausted.

After one outburst too many, I landed in In-School Suspension. You’d think it would feel like punishment. But it was… peaceful. No one mocking me. No whispers. Just silence. And a pen.

I started scribbling. At first, it was just doodles. Then words. Then full pages of raw thoughts I didn’t know I had in me. Rage became paragraphs. Loneliness turned into poems. For the first time, I had something no one could take—my voice on paper.

I wasn’t fixed. I wasn’t healed. But I had a way through.

And that mattered.

⸻

Crossroads of Destiny is now available on Amazon.
If you’ve ever wrestled with identity, grief, or what it means to survive—this book was written for you.
Raw. Fictionalized. Unfiltered. Real.

Read it now → https://a.co/d/i2K981C
Let’s keep telling the stories that need to be heard.

05/23/2025

“Somewhere in the silence,
I forgot what it felt like
to be full volume.”

That’s the last line of one of the most personal poems I’ve ever written.

My upcoming book, Outcast’s Odyssey, is more than a poetry collection—it’s a raw map of becoming. A journey through silence, survival, identity, and voice. It’s for anyone who’s ever felt like they had to shapeshift just to be accepted. For those of us who got good at disappearing—but are ready to come back.

Here’s a poem from the book that I hope reaches the parts of you still learning how to speak up:

⸻

What I Buried to Belong
(from Outcast’s Odyssey)

I laughed at things
that didn’t feel funny
just to stay in the room.

Changed the way I spoke.
Softened sharp thoughts.
Used smaller words
than the ones that burned on my tongue.

I learned which parts of me
to mute.
Which truths to trim
so I wouldn’t take up
more space than I was given.

Called it adapting.
Called it maturing.
But what I really meant
was disappearing.

The worst part?
They liked that version of me.
So I kept it.

And somewhere in the silence,
I forgot what it felt like
to be full volume.

⸻

Outcast’s Odyssey is currently in review and will be live on Amazon very soon—hopefully by tomorrow.

I’ll share the link as soon as it goes up.
Until then, if this poem hit something in you… you’re not alone.

This one’s for us.

02/25/2025

The Weeping Philosopher's Lament

I have stood longer than memory allows,
a quiet sentinel between the worlds of light and shadow.
Time has carved itself into my body,
etching its sorrow into the marrow of my roots,
weaving its wisdom through the trembling lace of my leaves.
I have bent in the winds fury,
wept beneath a thousand storms,
yet still, I stand”
not in defiance,
but in knowing.

I know the language of grief,
the way it clings like dusk before the dawn,
how it settles into the bones of those who sit beneath me,
shoulders curled inward, faces turned to the ground,
as if the soil might grant them the solace
the heavens have denied.

They press their hands to my spine,
fingertips brushing the gnarled history of my suffering,
and I wish I could tell them”
the breaking is not in the bending.
That the wind is not an enemy,
only a force that shapes us,
only a teacher that whispers: Yield, and you will not fall.

I have watched the wounded come to me,
hearts raw, eyes brimming with the weight of existence.
They speak their pain in silence,
and I answer in kind”
offering nothing but the hush of my branches,
the cool embrace of my shade,
the steady, unshaken truth
that darkness is where light learns to rise.

For even the stars must be swallowed by night
before they are seen.

And so I remain,
the weeping philosopher,
the keeper of sorrows,
the gentle witness to the weary souls
who find, in my arms,
the strength to bend”
and never break.

02/17/2025

The Weight of Goodbye

Memories press against my ribs like broken glass,
jagged edges slicing deeper as I breathe them in.
I chase ghosts in the haze,
smoke curling around my thoughts, distorting the past.
But no matter how much I burn, how much I drink,
nothing numbs the hollow space where you used to be.

We were reckless, weren’t we?
Spitting in the face of fate, daring time to catch us.
We lived fast, wild, untouchable—
as if the world had no leash strong enough to hold us down.
We laughed in the face of consequence,
thinking we’d outpace the inevitable.

But time is patient.
It waits in the shadows, sharpening its blade,
and when it strikes, it does not miss.

I stood at your bedside,
watching the light flicker in your eyes,
two decades of chaos unraveling in a single moment.
The air was thick with unspoken words,
grief suffocating in the silence between us.
We both knew—this was the final act.
The curtain was closing.

And yet, even as your body failed you,
your mind clung to the ones you loved.
Your thoughts weren’t of regret,
weren’t of wasted years or lost time.
You held on for them,
for your children, your grandchildren,
for the life that refused to let go of you,
even as death tightened its grip.

It wasn’t fair.
It never is.
We fight so hard to exist,
only to be ripped from the fabric of the world,
like a thread severed mid-stitch.

You weren’t ready.
None of us ever are.
And now, I am left to carry the weight of what was,
what could have been,
what will never be again.

But you are not gone.
Not truly.
You live in the echoes of laughter,
in the wisdom passed down,
in the memories that cut and heal all at once.

A life doesn’t vanish—it fractures,
shards embedding themselves in those left behind.
And we carry them, whether we want to or not.

Some call it a legacy.
I call it the burden of love.

And I will carry it forever.