Charles and my predawn jog was a sweat-athon and as the sun rose, a heat-dome brightness tattooed crisp shadows in every corner. Any lingering coolness was burned off - evaporated.

It was 94°f, 3 hours later, when I walked to campus - why don’t we use  parasols anymore? Drag on, radiant afternoon heat, please.
That was 100 proof sarcasm, in case you couldn’t tell.

Hot days seem to drag-on slowly, like waiting for a microwave or a droning, liturgy. It wasn’t in the forecast but I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear, “Today’s forecast is slow, really slow.”

Let’s start an Internet theory that the atmosphere is thinning or we’re just ants under a magnifying glass.

The finally setting sun left a blood red line under the falling blue dark, like a **** of wound in the skin of young-night.

Once my nightly obligations are done (classes, homework, reading), the silence can seem oppressive. I’m used to the never ending hustle, boiling drama and noise of seven suitemates - so there’s that.

On now empty nights, I’m tortured by the high-beating pulse of youth, and I pace my empty apartment, like someone restlessly waiting for their venti-mocha-latte at a Starbucks.

Can anyone suffer like a young woman left all alone?
Why, oh whomever, must I sip from this deep, bitter, undrinkably salty sea of solitude?

In this, my prime season, why do I only manage to exist?
My needs are in a shameful state of decay.
.
.
Cruel Summer by Bananarama
Habits (feat. Haley Reinhart) by Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox [E]
All That I Need by Ebony Loren, Matthew Ifield & Sebastian Kamae

When I was ten I stepped on a honey bee
resting in the gravel, it stung me and died

& in that moment I tried to bargain with death,
I said I will **** no more bees and in return

I too will not die. Death said nothing, of course,
he, or she, or it, was quiet as an elm or a shingle,

as the millionfold language of the grass.
I imagined assent but now, looking back,

I realize that nothing was finalized,
we never shook on the deal. No, the bee died

on my bare foot, defending itself against
a strange olive hide that blotted the sun.

Three and a half decades later I perch here
in my tower, my brain congested

with depressions, my heart a fallen fog,
my hands ache strangely and my legs tire -

perhaps the best I can manage is to further
the stoic philosophy of the slaughtered bee:

sometimes the best you can do is to slow
a shadow that's more real than the object.

wind through the willows.

bird song trilling
from where time is the silence
falling into the valley.

sunlight beneath the leaves.
the grass bends from where you lay.
foxglove gentle and blooming in your eyes.

each step
slow and certain.
i fall into your open arms.

love rests here, among the moss and mist.
the trees, the sky, the flowers
know our first kiss.

and the wind through the trees  
whistles every mystery gone.

we sigh the words we were always meant to say.

clouds may wander blue sky
but love stays
sure and stubborn
pressing white petals always in our hearts.