On good days, I turn the pages,
Of the book with poems I once wrote.
So much pain in silent cages,
Words I bled but never spoke.

In black ink, lines carefully formed,
The pain I didn’t understand.
Black words my silence adorned,
Softly held by a warm hand.

It will get dark soon.
The white, yellow, and pink
houses will turn grey,
then black. The cacophony
of car horns will turn into
the chorus of locusts.
Summer's night will lay
a sheet of tranquility over
a city harassed by exigent
matters that matter not.
Soporific silhouettes will
soften the cityscape,
allowing us to escape
the frazzle of the hot day,
exchanging the frenetic
for the peaceful, the welter
for a sense of the well-being.
The susurrus of the evening
breeze blows the exhaust
of our polluted lives into
a distant day. Children play
in yards back and front as
laughter wafts through
neighborhoods like the sweet
scent of brotherliness, not the
fetid odor of finance and
foreclosures. There is a
sense of closure to this day.
As the sun sets, our eyelids
close, and we pray for the
soft rain for forgiveness,

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

I didn't whisper your name,  
but they heard it in my silence.  
I didn't paint your face,  
but they saw it in my dreams.  
Love, like the moonlight,  
cannot be hidden in the dark.  

- faiza

They will tell you there is a right way.
They will hand you a torch and call it the sun.
They will roll their words in raw linen and whisper:
"This is what poetry is meant to be."

And you will nod.
Because they have made it so that not nodding feels like blasphemy.

But listen—
the ink does not check your credentials.
The meter does not ask if your suffering is organic.
A line does not collapse because it was crafted instead of bled.

They will tell you a poem must be naked, barefoot, aching—
as if there is no beauty in a well-cut suit.
They will decry the temple and build a pulpit in its ruins,
preaching freedom in a voice that allows no dissent.

Good poets are cult leaders,
and the first rule of the cult
is that they are not one.

So write the sonnet, carve the sestina,
sculpt the page in iambic steel.
Or break it, shatter it, scatter its bones—
but let no one call your wreckage untrue.

And if they do,
smile.
Because poetry does not kneel to priests.

Heaven rained on me,
I breathed in the petrichor,
Bathed in the downpour.

i believe,
even the stars
get tired.

when the night sky
had folded them away
back into the darkness

and the moon,
that lonesome thing,
has doused itself in shadows.

so will you too, my friend
shy away from the light
as if it would burn
if it reached you.

maybe you feel,
you just are not strong enough
to face the day.

that the midnight hour
is a broken thing

and oh, the silence
is deafening.

and you and i know, even the stars
are tired.

you mourn for them
as their light expires.