I store measured meanings
all definitions neatly arranged in drawers,
to calm the mind and heart.

I see with human eyes,  
carefully tracing the pulse of the planet.
In this apparent chaos, a strict order reigns.

In the cycles of the nightly day and daily night,
the same thoughts come to me like wistful friends,
longing to bridge micro and macro scales,
to merge into oneness.

Waiting in line for health,
I heard that time is relative.
What insightful words
shift meaning
in different contexts.

Trees, animals, human beings—
Each one perceives the flow of time
through a different lens…

If I were a butterfly
its three weeks would be my entire life.
How sad it is that
I cannot truly appreciate
a single second of a butterfly’s day.
Its rhythm moves beyond my awareness.

To people, Eternity is a never-ending story
of unrecognized fields of unknown space.
To ethereal, thoughtful giants
just a fleeting instant,
the blink of the universe
across the slender strait.

I can whisper or scream,
cry, laugh,
or remain silent for years,
but on a grander scale,
it will be nothing more than
a dainty breath of spring wind.

So please don’t be upset with me
that I can’t feel the same as you do now.
To you,
this is the endless painful abyss.
To me,
it’s just a passing memory
of deep night vanishing
into a new dawn of becoming.

this summer, i witnessed my first thunderstorm.
a flicker of flight or fight and a soft flutter upon the frames
on your skin, i share this moment with the sky.

drinking this can of coca-cola, i am reminded of you
only briefly, as brief as the bubbles fizzle to the
surface, and catch a glimpse of a life beyond their own

”do we ever catch a glimpse beyond what we know?”
like taking in the first smell
of freshly washed laundry. breathe it in with me.

i know it lasts as long as we know it. eating away
until it becomes a void in a carcass; i begin
missing a piece of myself in someone else.

if only you had told me what you’d been thinking,
what had been missing in yourself.
we are nowhere as close to what we miss in one another.

except when i see you again, the shadows in your eyes
are replaced by the sound of your heart, pounding with gasoline.
i watch you drift away in the sea of bodies, finger on the trigger.

yet i can’t take that away from you so my own greed
fills the place of my heart, reckoning without reason.
we held the world in our palms, infinite and true.

was it because of your fins,
much too brittle for this ocean,
became too soft for me to notice?

please;
let me tell you, dear friend,

i wish you
would have been
more selfish

He arrived ,
fire-tongued
wings lacquered in sunlight,
like a breath the garden forgot to exhale
green burning against green.

I was a child
with small hands that believed
giving was enough
to make something stay.

I fed him,
chilies plucked from the crooked vines
my father planted
bright little tongues,
burning red,
barely ripened,
all I had.

He bit me,
a clean puncture,
as if to say:

Love is no debt I owe you.

Blood welled up,
startling, hot,
the first truth nature ever gave me.

I stood there crying
while he finished the offering,
then flew away,
lighter.

What child understands hunger
until it pierces skin?

The next day,
I was waiting,
small hands trembling again,
opening as if the bite
had never happened.

I have taken the flowers.
Ripped them from the light,
peeled their bright faces back
like something skinned alive.

They did not scream.
They only folded—
like lungs emptied of air,
like mouths pried open
with nothing left to say.

O, love is a quiet violence.
A hand that plucks.
A hand that presses.
A weight that does not crush—
only keeps.

Here, a lilac curls,
like a severed breath.
Here, a daisy chokes on dust.
Here, a rose—veins milk-white,
mouth frozen in a paper-thin hush—
a relic of something that once burned.

And tell me, do they still remember?
The wind that kissed them last,
the trembling hands that held too tight,
or only the silence left behind?

I listen—
ear to time’s brittle ribs,
to the breath of pressed petals,
to the ruin love leaves in its wake.

And somewhere,
in the marrow of silence,
I swear I hear them—

whisper back.

Out-dated
Understated
Strange clothes and hair
That make some stare
Or all snazzy
And jazzy
Dressed to stun
For love or for fun

Whoever we are
And whatever we are
Fashion freaks
Cool and chic
Couldn’t care less
Overdressed

The one thing
We can all wear
Is a smile

Because a smile -
Is always in style