I’m beginning to notice
how lonely I've been lately

Every breath is a steady unassurance
Dismissive,
Wildly accusatory

Summer left--
And with it,
Sunken splotches on my face
Freckles the color of tree bark.
Golden hue on the backs of my legs and tops of my shoulders,
An oil canvas gathering depth

But fall is here,
life transitions away from the heat
Even the Earth tilts away, shielding its skin

My body touches the ground and feels an echo
As if emptiness could speak

As if depression was cognizant enough to stir the grasses and whisper to me
Encouraging the deep draw inward into hollow vastness
Peeling away the fibers and stripping me down
Pointing up into the infinite blackness and saying,

Stay there.

Does Hope cause immunity?

The trees breathing vapor
Exhalt against the forest skyline
Intangible matter, dense, blends the cold
Condensing, Gathering
up from the ground;
the edges of a silken cloth.

This time of year is Dampness,
the heat dissipates and
drops the flower petals' clammy tissues
Roiling shades of ochre.

This time of year
Seeds are Summer Dreams incapsulate, Breaking free, drifting overhead
Gone, forgotten--
Rust that smells like blood
blooms over the countryside.

A second glance back--
Barren are the bones of winter.

Shrouded in branches under the rhododendron thicket, I remember
A time when I did not second guess at being brave.
Peering through a looking glass
My world tilted on the edge of
the universe--
To create is to die a thousand times as an imposter,
Reincarnate as a master.
Beheading the strawberry flower
early in the season
to yield more fruit, later.
In moments of insanity
real logical progress happens,
masked in spontaneity.

The blue jay swaddling seeds in its crop
Mechanical bird with singular purpose
Notes a mechanical song,
Lives to forget--

For every acorn he caches in rotten trunks
Or clay soils, with abandon
Another rebirth
He gives life to the forests by inadvertently,
statistically, giving one seed a much greater
chance of ever becoming something
than the rest.