Last night I dreamed of rippling
turquoise

and sybaritic rhythms
as if

I was in my own echo chamber
made

of sea glass shaped
like a giant

tongue

the leafless tree branches.
clouds drift in the pale sky
and the deer leave footprints
in the snow

and all flowers fade,
so, throw the dead flowers
across my grave

and with time
winter's wounds will heal
so spring can follow
when the river sheds its skin of ice
and the deer footprints turn to mud

and the earth forgets the cold.
sunlight kisses, the flowers sigh,
tulips bruised red,
for-get-me nots whisper,
daffodils linger.

the sunrise whispers anew
and trembling in sunlight
the green leaves wave

as the wind dances with newborn flowers
that for tell of the Grace.

O, my wild garden.

The older I get
the less I search for

truth

because these days
a white face and honking nose

work for me

it's the simple and absurd things
in this life

that are all I need

I walked a road of thorn and stone,
Each step a weight I claimed alone.
The sky hung low, the air was tight,
And hope was but a distant light.

I bore my grief like burnished gold,
A gleam too sharp, too cold to hold.
It sang a slow, unyielding tune,
A winter sun that mocked the noon.

Yet in the hush between my fears,
A voice broke soft as falling tears:
“Release the chain, unbind the seam,
And step inside your waiting dream.”

The path grew wide, the thorns withdrew,
The air was clear, the sky was blue.
My heart, once caged, began to sing—
A song of root, of flight, of spring.

Now every road, though steep or far,
Is lit beneath one steadfast star.
For I have learned through night’s long test,
The journey ends in gentle rest.

Today, on the edge of the field,
I stepped out of my ritual,
not with dissent,
but with a kind of soft forgetting.

The wind did not ask where I was going.
It only lifted the hem of my certainty.

Behind me:
a trail of clenched gestures,
the echo of “should,”
a chorus of small silences
I had mistaken for peace.

A fear, unbuttoned,
turned its face from mine.
I did not chase it.

Instead, I listened.
The body spoke in heartbeats,
the breath in questions.
Even the grass seemed to murmur:

You are not your repetition.
You are not your ache.

I walked until the path unravelled.
Until the habit could not follow.
Until the sky,
unembellished,
welcomed me in.

The eye altering alters all
William Blake, The Mental Traveller

in this fall
it's the sky of the eye that's falling
in the aquarium of time
fish swim in the shape of our memory
my reflection dissolves in unfolded thoughts,
in the maze of forgotten hours
a mythical hope starves the multiplicity of dreams
light colludes with its absence but
it's mind time, the burning hours let go of self-deception
there are twists and turns in our soberness
love is the art of inside seeing
how the vulnerability of truth gets expelled
by the mouth of time