Hell is full of
Heat
Anger spun in ***** like Cotton Candy
Pink and Red
Hues of hurt and hate

The Earth is
A blue canvas
Of stretched out sky
And fresh dirt
Hues of humanity

Heaven is like stretched glass
The truth looking out
A vision of infinity
Infinity at its finest

And limbo is stuck in between
In between waking and sleeping
Between heaven and hell
Earth and the Afterlife

Its being neither here nor there
A decision left unmade
A book never finished
The truth stuck on the tip of someone's tongue
Unspoken
A waiting room
To await
Waiting

We frown on Limbo
For being undefined
Except sometimes Limbo
Comes before Heaven
And After Earth
Sometimes not Knowing
Is part of the Journey

This moment is final
They tell us
This is the end
Coming up against a new beginning

But how do we make sense of time
How can time
Be framed in bookends
One hour marked apart from another
One day pulled apart from the next

We try to take things apart
But graduating
Doesn't end our education
Stories live outside of their pages
Ideas
Stretch beyond their words
And People
Live even outside of their bodies
Their ashes swept up by the wind and water and mountains
Their genes alive in their children

Some moments
Some people
Are too big
They continue
To live
Into infinity

I think our ancestors had it right
When we began to wear time on our wrists
Not in a Line, or Square, or Single Dot
But in a Circle
To Infinity*

~JLH

The carnival was asleep
It had been for years
A stiff frozen Big Top
Unused gelato machines
Fading in streams of color
Like a crying watercolor painting

Falling asleep on the Ferris Wheel
Was never my intention
It had been standing still
In the heart of the abandoned circus town

We travelled through it
Like cells of life
Permeating
A ghostly forgotten world

Our eyes twinkling with the wind and stars
Our feet living inside our boots
Stepping over
Clotted patches of dirt

And then we began to climb upwards
To the stars
Reaching to the sky
I climbed high enough
Trying to brush up against the ink black sky
Fireflies dancing in circles
The moon's craters smiling to me
In the most genuine kind of smiles
The lopsided and distorted kind

And we climbed upwards
In the frozen ferris wheel
We climbed like ants
We crawled through its spokes
Like we were suspended in a giant bicycle wheel
We climbed into faded pastel passenger cars
In our tiredness
We fell into them
Our thoughts suspended
Like the sky's stars
Hanging in the sky
Resting

We were in the most abandoned place
Yet we were breathing life into it

And then
The ferris wheel began to turn

Even the most abandoned places
Even the most ghostly
Can be awoken

By life

And with that
The Ferris Wheel began to turn
Joining the earth in its motion

And we each fell asleep
All of us
In our own faded passenger cars
Separate but connected
Turning with the world

Like a lullaby
Gently being rocked to sleep
By the Earth
Under the midnight sky
Earthlings, all as one

~JL

She thought she was broken
So she began to search
She looked through lonely drawers for thumbtacks
Through soft cardboard boxes
For superglue
On worn wooden desks
For staplers and tape

She looked for
Fastening devices
Fixing tools
To piece herself together

She felt her heart was fraying
And that her buttons were pulling at their thread

She wanted to fasten
One sleepless night
To a restful one

One bad dream
To a good one

One rush of tears
To clear eyes

One cluster of confusing thoughts
To a simple idea

But fastening is for dolls
Dolls need fixing, adjusting

People
Don't

We come undone
Only to find ourselves
More strongly
Stitched back together*

~JLH