I never understood life.

Well, who cares –

Life never understood me either.

There is no glory in just managing
And small reward for only trying.
Flags cannot be proudly planted
Only half way up the mountain.

Footprints must be left in concrete
Never in the sand of trends
Where tides of fancy wash across them
With only ripples left behind.

Hearts blood must be spilled on altars
Situated in the realm of wonder
Never on the mundane pathways  
Always walked across by Rabble.

Raising up the tallest flagpole
Is a useless exercise
Unless the banner hung upon it
Imparts healing to the masses.

A follower is not the leader.
The helper never wins the crown.
The one who fires the starting gun
Is not the one who wins the race.

There is no gold in rocky caverns
That have all been dug before.
Diamonds can be manufactured
But their shine is not the same.

All that’s left is conquering
Impediments that bar the way
To ribbons, crowns and accolades
That etch your name in history
        ljm

~
Refraction
Love passes through
And changes
Direction
Let it hold sway
The heart leans toward catastrophe
In the blue headlights
Of parenthood
Mom and dad
Suspended from a pivot
Their offspring
Asleep on a sunbeam
~

How do I explain what I feel inside?
It’s like being underwater
not drowning,
but floating,
weightless in a sea that’s all your own,
where every breath tastes like salt
but there’s no shore in sight.
It’s the kind of emptiness
that fills you
until you forget what it feels like to be full,
until you forget there was ever anything
before this.
Would you care,
if I told you that I sometimes find myself
standing at the edge of things,
wondering if I’ve always been standing there,
waiting for something—
for you, maybe,
or for something that feels like you,
something that could make sense of this disjointed silence
I’ve come to call my life?
I’m not sure anymore.
Time is a ghost,
and I can’t even tell if I’m still chasing it
or running away.
The days have started folding in on themselves,
as though they were never separate at all?
Each moment a mirror of the next,
and every part of me
a version of something I used to be,
but nothing I recognize.

. (Mythology Re-Imagined As Fairy-Tale & Deconstructed) .

No one recalls when he arrived.
He was already there, in the corners of high rooms.
Carried in on wind or instinct.
Too composed to belong, too still to be ignored.

He wasn't from the sea, though he stared at it often.
Stared like a man who missed something he never touched.
He lived above things—above feeling, above endings.
He wore distance like other men wear charm.

And she—well.
She wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

---

They said she’d been sealed beneath water before time had a name.
Not drowned. Not sleeping.
Just paused.

A beauty left half-sketched.
A song trapped on the bridge, never reaching the chorus.
She existed in the almost.
The kind of presence that ruins men who believe in silence.

No one put her there.
But something had.
Something old and silver-lipped, a clockmaker with no face.

---

When he found out, he didn’t shout.
Didn’t storm.
Storms are for men who want to be heard.

He simply started unmaking himself.

Small things, at first:

Giving away secrets he never told.

Letting starlight fall from his shoulders like ash.

Standing in rooms long enough for people to forget he was tall.

Eventually, he gave away the last thing he had—
the part of him that never wanted anything.

And that was enough.

---

She came back like foam curling over marble.
Not as a lover. Not as a reward.
As weather.

She passed him by.

Looked at the space he’d vacated inside himself
and nodded, as if to say: “Yes. That will do.”

---

After that, things changed.

She walked through the city like someone who could end it.
Touched doorframes and left them trembling.
Spoke only when the sentence would shatter something.

He, on the other hand,
was seen less and less.
Not gone—just thinned out, like smoke after a gunshot.

---

Some say he became the silence in her laugh.
Others claim he left, unfinished, like a poem crumpled in a lover’s pocket.
No one’s sure.

But if you ask the sea just right—
after midnight, after mirrors—
you’ll hear it whisper:

“He let go of the sky, so she could walk through it.”

{fin}

If humans had no emotions,

poetry wouldn't have existed.

There was once a child
born beneath the sign
of unburial.

She carried too much—
not in arms
but in tethered memory.
Things with no names,
only weights.

A cracked watch
that ticked in reverse.
A button from a coat
that no one had worn
in three generations.

A feather
from a bird
dreamt once
by her grandmother,
never seen again.

She believed—
as those marked by absence do—
that keeping meant remembering,
and remembering meant
nothing would vanish.

Others crossed her path,
offered to help unfasten the straps.
She refused.
They did not know
which talismans bled
and which only looked like wounds.

So she walked.
Through salt seasons,
through bone-rattling frost,
through forests with no floor
and skies that never asked her name.

The bag grew heavier.
She grew cleverer.
Silent.

And then—
on a day that wasn’t special,
under a sun that wasn’t kind—
she set it down.
Not as surrender.
As an experiment.

The earth did not crack.
The ghosts did not scatter.
Her shadow did not abandon her.

She sifted the contents.
Some were dust.
Some were still singing.
Some curled away like dried petals
and begged to be left behind.

She took a key.
She took the bell.
She left the rest
for the moss.

She walked on.

Not lighter, exactly—
but less governed
by the shape
of her grief.