how odd, how rare. eyes connect,
and the irrelevant falls away, so,
to the end of the beginning we go,
how odd, how rare, she tired of
players, gamers, inevitable disappointment,
so she assays his
approach, snd speaks first:

What are you after?

no hesitation no guising, no uncertainty, he states with surety,
product of grace added to sadness of series of serious accumulations of
disappointment,

"A shared understanding..."

Equals in their shocked surprise,
both stare, hard, then harder,
examining faces and rising heat,
suppressing the intriguing intensity,
imagining outcomes, not endings,
futures, not casualties, and the
assessing silence, not uncomforting,

indeed, the silence soothes, the
attraction stirring and they answer
the overhanging questioning answered simultaneously, with a
yes, a simple supposition, an agreed upon proposition, a mutuality
calming, and the ending of a
shared understanding...and the beginning of a who knows untold
possibilities

Beneath the arch,
        among the branches,
      the maunder of her eyes
           finds noir in an afterimage,
every reflection is unique,
    explicit and indivisible,
        every reflection is her,
      there she looks close
       for gracefulness,
            in the essays of her skin
               and their brazen transparencies,
         she enters into her body fable,
      the shape of her resembles
           the tenor viol: where it widens,
                  where it narrows,
                where it digresses
              and monochromes,
           she reflects a fragile geography,
             a soft cargo, but
               an inkling of hurricane,
             rendering the fault lines
          beautiful and strong,
       in supplication tomorrow's explorer
will disturb the patterns
   until she's become her own lullaby

you left with no signal,
flying high, eagled eyed,
peering down at
all the towns
you passed over,
blue through burning
but never stopping, stilling
to listen but not hearing
those other throbbing tunes
playing in back of black rooms

oh, how you concealing
the ambiguous depths,
of ***** deals squealing,
the mess of contradictions
you can’t help revealing,
leaving rust, dimming dust
full in on the chokehold
of others hands upon my heart

still
your hearts are throbbing
in synchronization to
the river flowing of my
words needy & begging
for a timely releasing by,
in anticipation of ending
the sun’s confinement
on the other side of the
dark perimeter of the planet

where poets dare to tread
knowing the jeopardy to
themselves when their truths
are outed by the light shedding
come the morning’s birthing

11:44pm
2/28/25

can you guess what movie I watched last?

Wind-carved
spine twisted—feral, gnarled.
A body bent,
splintered—never severed.

Salt licked wounds raw. Brine sutured marrow.
Bark flayed to ribbons, limbs ink-blurred—
curling, unwritten. A thing undone, a thing refusing.

Roots plunged—teeth to brittle earth,
ribs against collapse.
Cliff crumbling, gravity unspooling—
but it held.

White-knuckled in ruin.
Fingers clawing the wind.
Wreckage. Crooked. Unnatural.

An old man exhaled— Survival isn’t always beautiful.

But what is beauty, if not this—
a body unmade, carved by violence,
and still, somehow, bloom?

Tar-dark world. The defining color is black, the inky night of her nocturnal hunts and the deep, bottomless dark of her alien retreat.

A watcher of men, she is everything and nothing. She might be too much of something, or too little of something else. Time will sort out the particulars.

There are no simple entry points – she demands engagement, and to be taken as a whole. Her discomfort is over her own allure, her undisturbed surface. It’s more about intuition and gesture than dialogue. They remain as echoes. They’ve made her beautiful in a real way, with hips and blemishes and dimples in her skin.

The imprint of the lives she begins to grapple with as her time on Earth extends, leads her to stop seeing herself as a mere conduit for her mission, and to start developing a sense of subjectivity.

Her life force is overlapping, shaping itself into a pattern of rings that simultaneously suggests a birth canal dilating, the stages of a rocket separating, and a lunar eclipse as seen through a telescope’s lens.

She's a life-form you can’t quite understand, but it’s carrying on relentlessly, like a beehive, moving backward through the constellations at first approach.