The new year arrives not with thunder, but with a whisper—soft, persistent, and unyielding.
It carries the weight of time gone by, the fragments of moments we let slip like sand between careless fingers.

Regret lingers like an unspoken truth, a shadow cast by the light of what could have been. We try to grasp it, to undo it, to reweave the threads of yesterday, but the loom has turned, and the past is a river that only flows forward.

Time was never ours to hold. It was a fleeting metaphor, a borrowed grace we misused with the arrogance of eternity. Hours became currency we spent too freely, years became chapters we didn’t bother to read.

But the clock does not pause.
It does not mourn. It ticks with indifference, a steady cadence reminding us of the gift we still possess: the present.

If the past is a lesson and the future a promise, then this moment is the altar on which we lay our resolve. To forgive ourselves. To treasure the seconds. To write poetry where there was silence.

For though time does not turn back, it offers something greater
a chance to begin again.
And in this beginning, perhaps,
we can finally learn to live.





                                            @Erennwrites

12/18/24

I choose fingers,
among the array
of many wonderful
parts on offer,

the other sensory emissaries protest,
but the multi-fluency of fingers,
fluent in all Romance languages,
nay, in every dialect, tongue,
tippling the balance in their favor

for the fingers are wonderful conversationlists, trumping the
cooing coyness of sweet wordy
verbs, fingers defy nouns, pronouns

and are fingers the finest conjunction
that was ever conjured ot conjuncted?

the ears hear poorly when upom it
a long  slim finger casually traces outlines
slow~sensually and the eyes shut tightly,
reflexively, the tongue froze to the
mouth roof, muted into inaction

even the the sense of smell lies powerless
should we block the nostrils with but
*******, and breathe mouth mightily

we do not diminish the orchestration’s
totality, the blending of sound ‘n sensation,
but the blind and deaf all must bow before the power of fingers speaking to
every part of the bodies totality

~
Hand and needle,
weapons of mass protection.
Mending day called solace,
bitterness in every stitch.
When all guides disappear
the hand begins to tremble,
that is the material point.
Listen to the water,
the sea is full of memories.
It knows everything,
it feels nothing.

A rage is building.
The sails unfurl,
the wind follows.
A hundred years of
traversing the deep
on a ship full of opiates
and other distant mermaids.
This blood vessel,
cresting the heart of the wave,
you will never completely cross
this body of water
until you learn to trust
the hands that hold back
death and it's squall.

Even now they drop anchor, singing
into the starry sky:

"Gather ye fishermen's wives
As thy men roll out to sea
Pray one and all
Thy sails hold strong this day..."
~

When I was young the days seemed longer,
the weeks, months, even a year an eternity,
but then the ensuing speeding decades seemed
to melt away like winter snows. Reminding me
that life is a brief and fleeting thing not to be
taken for granted or wasted.