You don’t have to rise like the sun each day—
some mornings, it's enough just to open your eyes,
to sit with the silence,
to feel your heartbeat and whisper, “I’m still here.”

You are not the storm that passed,
nor the ruins it left behind.
You are the seed under the soil,
waiting for the right rain,
the quiet miracle of a soul not giving up.

Let no one shame the pace of your healing.
Let no voice drown out the hush of your trying.
Because surviving is not small.
And breathing, on hard days,
is a kind of bravery the world forgets to praise.

So rest, dreamer.
You don’t need to shine tonight.
You just need to stay—
soft, alive,
and wildly worthy of tomorrow.

There were nights I folded into myself
A silence not of peace, but pause,
Where memory clung like sweat to old Regrets,
And the dark was just thick enough to Speak.
A younger version of me still walks there,
Half-shouting at ghosts,
Half-sure he knows better.

The road I paved was not always stone…
Sometimes glass,
Sometimes the brittle hush of unspoken Apologies.
My hands, calloused from more than labor,
Have carried the sharp edges of Consequence,
Have held a child’s future like a fragile flame
And nearly dropped it once or twice.

Fatherhood did not come with a compass.
It came like weather,
Sudden and vast;
With no promise of shelter, only sky.
And still, I stepped out.
Still, I walked.

There were questions I answered with my Absence,
Lessons I taught by stumbling.
And yet each tear I have dried
Has felt like redemption.
Each scraped knee, a liturgy
In the cathedral of trying again.

You learn that love,
Real love,
Isn’t found in the perfection of the path
But in turning back for the small hand that Trusts you still.

Now, she laughs.
And in her laughter is a map
Of every right thing I did
Despite myself.

And I know,
No matter how far I wandered from grace,
It was worth it.
Not for a second chance,
But for the first time I truly listened
To what love sounds like
When it calls you “Dad.”

Of late:
this "silence" conceptual haunts,
an irregular daily daunt,
coming evenly but oddly timed throughout the 24 hrs.,
writing Psalms and Sonnets demands sacrifice, sweat,
tears, no blood as of yet,
   but who's to say, that it will
not be eventually requisitioned

in my life,
there are long intervals of intramural silences,
when afforded,
the art of contemplation assumes templar control, and my senses
to overdrive go

somber somnolent,
ironic that,
in the periods of deep surficial calm, creation is raging
in the fibered tissue of my neuronic cells, and though,
outwardly still, my heart chest pounding me to emit the
inner contents and context
of the 4 W's  of every moment of my existence

(who, what, when and why)

the quietude of silence
is never whole, notions fly in, runabout, then depart, without a word of farewell, leaving not a trace behind, and the potential poems shrivel into stillborn drivel, leaving only an undisputed but an undistinguished stain, a fact that they was, were, conceived, but the mind's  body was not fertilized sufficiently to see them nurtured to expulsive birth fruition, a less than subtle reminder that even and every state of being is regenerative even unto the very last breath,
when it is no longer...

fighting together—
cold white melts under warm sun
the truth bathes the lie

You and I—
we feel,
we love,
we regret.
Yet we remain
the binding particle
of a formless self.

They divide us,
pit us against each other.
We found safety
for thirteen days.

Before dawn,
we felt the breath
that seeps through cracks
into minds like a narrow thread of force,
and the fog spilled out.

Above our heads, false stars
created by warm bodies
to annihilate
what passed through the gate
of a birthing woman.

We write words to conjure
happy endings
at the ball of extermination
that tears apart
the pulsing light
of a thousand veins.

Please sit with me
before you go
Do you feel it—
the mourning procession
of human beings
transforming into a state of fission
and drifting away?

And a sigh is so sad
of trembling atoms
when the victim becomes the destroyer.

Feel the force of the fall,
and do not shatter hope
even if the world
trembles to its core
because there is still YOU,
still ME,
and still

OTHERS.

I was not trained for this—
no welcome packet, no handbook for gravity.
Just a name that clings like static
and a voice that trembles when spoken too clearly.

They asked me if I had room.
I said I had weather.
They asked me if I would disappear.
I said watch me smolder, and stay.

I have loved like a lighthouse
with no shoreline in sight,
signaling to anyone
who mistook reflection for return.

I’ve held their names
like breath under water,
carved pathways through others
just to find my own again.

But I do not sculpt.
I do not steal 'the good stuff'.
I inherit fire
and ask it if it remembers me.

If you see yourself in me,
look again—
I am not a mirror,
I am the window you opened
and forgot to close when the wind picked up.

Still, I arrive,
boots echoing in the hallway
of someone else’s myth,
offering only this:

I will not rewrite you.
I will not finish your sentences.
But I will stand here—
untranslated,
unsaved,
untouched by the need to be anything
other than true.

My sweet boy and my
Sweet girl how I love you both
Always and all ways.