...or at least, I pray, the strength to bear the knowledge."




A lifetime of hardship
        weighs down on my shoulders,

  I've buried my hate,
                             but it keeps getting colder,

Cry out to the heavens, sky's beauty unfurled-
While I commune, here, with Atlas
           beneath the weight of the world.

I once walked the world  
                                           with open arms,  
my hands stretched w  i  d  e like branches.  

a canopy to shelter the lost.  
a refuge for the clumsy and blind.  

But the world pressed too hard,  

                      too often,  

and my leaves tore beneath its careless weight.  

So I became the thorn instead.  
Soft wood splintered,  
                         sap dried  
                                     to amber shields,  
and the shade I offered  
                                           withered.  

Now my arms are briars,  
worn close to my chest,  
                     curled into a hedge  
                                    the foolish do not cross.  

The world is full of stumbling fools,  
        drunken moths crashing into flames  
                      of their own kindling.  

They scorch themselves  
                                         on their own sparks,  
and still, they scream at the fire  
                                    as though it were cruel  
                                    for burning.  

I watch them now  
                       from a quiet distance,  
my roots deep, my bark hardened,  
knowing no vine will wrap around me  
                            without bleeding.  

It is not hatred that keeps me,  

                                              but weariness—  

the wisdom to know  
that the soft are devoured  
                               by the teeth of the indifferent.  

The world does not deserve my kindness.  
It spills its recklessness  
                                 like broken wine,  
drenching the soil in its waste,  
and waits for hands to clean it.  

But I have burned those hands  
                                       to ash and bone.  

Now I walk with thorns in my shadow,  
each step a warning,  
                      each word a needle  
                                         laced with restraint.  

Let the world tear itself apart.  
                       I am no longer here  
                                      to sew its seams.

    The world bites without thinking,
                                   and I will not be chewed.

Water holds no loyalties to memory.  
It will swallow your name whole,  
Churn it into a language  
Only stones can decipher,  
Then spit it out as foam—  
A frothy eulogy  
No one asked for.  

It moves like betrayal dressed in silk,  
Soft to the touch  
But sharp enough to carve bones into weapons.  
Do not mistake its stillness for mercy.  
Even in its quiet,  
It dreams of drowning cities  
And filling lungs with liquid sermons.  

Water does not mourn.  
It erases.  
It is the great unmaker,  
Pulling the faces of lovers,  
The hands of mothers,  
And the footprints of gods  
Into its endless, churning womb.  

I’ve seen it carry grief like a crown,  
Rivers wearing the ashes of cathedrals  
And the charred wood of promises  
As though they were jewels.  
And yet, it forgets.  
It will forget you,  
Just as it forgot the mountains that once knelt to it,  
Just as it forgot the villages  
That tried to tame its chaos.  

Drink from it if you dare.  
It will not quench your thirst;  
It will bloom in your throat,  
A garden of salt and regret,  
Each drop a seed of storms.  

Even the sky cannot hold it.  
When water falls,  
It claws its way back to the earth,  
Filling every crack with its liquid hunger.  
It breaks its mirrors on the surface,  
Each shard a fractured memory  
It refuses to keep.  

It whispers,  
But it never listens.  
You could spill your secrets into it,  
And it would carry them away  
Not as treasures, but as burdens.  
It does not care.  
It has no need for your pain.  

Water is the poet of forgetting,  
Writing its verses on the soft shores of time,  
Then dragging the sand away grain by grain  
Until no trace remains.  
It cannot love you.  
It cannot hate you.  
It only exists to move forward,  
Always forward,  
Toward an ocean that never knew your name.

Beneath the rotted floorboards, time pulses,  
an arterial thrum of root-veined clocks.  
They do not tick for kings, nor bow for breath,  
but coil their echoes deep into the loam,  
dragging splinters of once-wooded oaths  
into the mouths of worms.  

What is time here, but the taste of damp?  
But the drag of green shadows across unblinking stones?  
A language older than lungs,  
a song of split seeds whispering their secrets  
to the weight of a thousand buried steps.  

Above, the weightless still mvoe,  
mistaking hours for thresholds,  
grinding moments into calendars  
as if order were a thing the earth might honor.  
Their laughter carries, thin as copper wire,  
breaking against the stone’s unhurried shrug.  

Here is the truth:  
roots keep the time,  
counting each second by the shade of moss,  
each century by the rise of the hawthorn's spine.  
And we are nothing to it,  
fleeting as the rain on uncarved stone,  
as brittle as the leaves  
crushed under their own arrival.  

I laid my ear to the ground once,  
and the earth opened a crack of sound—  
not a scream, but a swallow,  
a voice neither cruel nor kind.  
It told me this:  

"Do not fret your passing.  
Even your dust will kneel  
and grow itself into shadows.  
The clock of roots will claim you too,  
a heartbeat winding down  
to something soft and green."

I tried to write you down,  
to cage your shape in syllables  
and carve your voice into stone—  
but you fell through the spaces between the words,  
your presence an ache I could not name.  

You were the shadow  
cast by light too bright to see,  
the ripple left by a hand  
reaching for water but finding air.  

I am tethered to what is not,  
chasing the echo of an echo,  
a whisper that refuses to rest.  
You linger where thought dissolves,  
where memory curls in on itself,  
a Möbius of longing.  

If I could grasp you,  
trace the edges of your form,  
I would not.  
You are not meant to be held,  
only felt in the hollow  
you carved into my being.  

And when I speak your name,  
it splinters—  
a sound too heavy for breath,  
too light to fall.

In the quiet corners of my mind,  
Whispers of love and loss entwined.  
A heart that beats with silent screams,  
Chasing shadows in fractured dreams,

Eyes that see but seldom show,  
The battles fought, the undertow.  
A smile that masks the storm inside,  
Where fears and hopes in darkness bide,

Yet in this maze of tangled thought,  
A flicker of light, a lesson taught.  
That even in the deepest night,  
The soul can find its way to light,

So here I stand, a paradox,  
A fragile heart, a sturdy ox.  
Embracing all that I’ve become,  
A symphony of all and none.

A spider crosses my path,
its steps careful, calculated.
It pauses in my shadow,
uncertain whether to move forward or back.
We share this moment, the spider and I,
both caught in the web we did not choose,
each bound by the rules of our nature.

I do not crush it,
knowing there is no triumph in such an act.
But I understand, too,
that this same spider would show no kindness
to a fly ensnared in its silk.
And that is okay.
We all follow the scripts we are given,
finding our place in a world
that is neither cruel nor kind,
just indifferent.

We part ways, the spider and I,
it continuing its silent journey,
and I, mine.
In this fleeting intersection of our lives,
there is no victory or defeat,
only existence and its quiet persistence.

And as I watch it disappear into the grass,
the day carries on,
but the spider lingers in my thoughts,
a tiny presence that feels larger than it should.
It reminds me of the countless lives
we pass by each day, unnoticed,
each with their own silent battles,
each following the threads of fate
that weave us all into this tapestry.

I think about the webs we spin,
invisible to the eyes of others,
and how often we find ourselves
trapped in the strands of our own making.
How many times have I, too,
hesitated in someone’s shadow,
uncertain of the path ahead,
wondering if I should move forward
or retreat into the safety of the familiar?

And yet, like the spider,
we press on, driven by something
deeper than thought,
some primal urge to survive,
to persist despite the odds.
There is a strange beauty in this,
a quiet resilience that speaks
to the core of what it means to be alive.

Perhaps, in the end,
it is enough to simply exist,
to find our place in the world
not through grand gestures or triumphs,
but through the small mercies we offer,
even to those who cannot fathom them.
If I can shape the world,
if only for a moment,
into something resembling kindness,
then perhaps the indifference
is not as vast as it seems.