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  Jul 2023 Richard Shepherd
Maria Mitea
it's enough to breathe
to touch you

it's enough to breathe
let your voice sing

it's enough to breathe
to see you come and go
walk like an angel
The band was loud, but in the other room and the bar was jammed.
He set his drink down a little too hard and it over-sloshed a bit.

“Run away with me,” he said, spreading his arms wide, “I’m done with school!”
“Well.. you graduated - that’s why you’re done,” she said, somewhat amused.
“We share a gravity, you and I - we’re.. we’re like aligned suns,” he romanticized.
“You should’ve majored in sales.” she said, sipping her own beer.
“Our love is so real, so raw - it's pure and yet - so street.”
“We have ‘love cred’?” She asked doubtfully.
“Wherever we go, we'll navigate that urban maze, hand in hand, we’ll OWN those concrete streets, we’ll paint our own graffiti!
“Have you snorted something?’
“No matter what life throws at us, we’ll face those challenges head-on and we'll stay united.”
“Have you been practicing this?” She asked
“We’ll swagger,” he said, “our love will be timeless..”
“And rhymeless,” she interjected hopefully.
“Together, we’ll be urban legends..” he continued.
“Like Bonnie and Clyde?” she asked, making a yuck face.
“We’ll be living art,” he said dreamily.
“Sounds dope.” She admitted.
“Then you’ll DO it?” He asked.
“Until Monday,” she said, nodding in assent, “classes start on Monday,” she shrugged.
“It was worth a shot.” he said stoically, after a moment.
“It was a good pitch,’” she said, taking his hand in hers.
“I didn’t oversell - I wasn’t too pushy?”
“No, you were right there,” she assured him.
“Maybe next time,” he said.
“Yeah, maybe next time”
They kissed.
BLT Marriam Webster word of the day challenge: Stoic: to show little or no emotion in a painful or distressing situation.
In war everything new
turns instantly old.
Children missing childhood.
Only tears and fears they know.

How can people
throw bombs and fire missiles
knowing innocent children are there.
Are we that bad?



Shell ✨🐚
Sometimes it’s hard to understand why people do certain things.
  Jul 2023 Richard Shepherd
irinia
the night is darker on your lips
my hips are dreaming while
your touch is searching for its meaning
The Nighttime Skies have altered, altering us…

The nightly showing of twinkling heavens, fulsome,
brimming, as can now be seen but only in a planetarium
program, always was a delight to our ******* citified  
visitors, who received this free reminder of Earth’s  
non-centric role in the universe, happily, for it jived
senses with common sensibility, confirming an assumptive
reality with yes! my-eyes-can-see-it proofs, that many city
folk only hope & assume are yet true someplace  else
‘out there.’

Night light pollution, a life feature just assumed as
a costless cost of doing business of our modern
population distribution, has horrendous mental
consequences for a generation of me-me-me
young ones, who lack the lessons in real awe,
not by way of a video game, but by never having seen a
Milky Way,
constellations and planets
that were so necessary to
critical cortical thinking p,
human beliefs,
re the totality of
existence a mere
two hundred or
so years ago.

The star’s disappearance for so much of our population,
reenforces the notion of our own centricity, get it?

A world centered on the city.

The truer star studded sky knows not
of gender neutrality,
racial disharmony,
through a
“I am not the universe “ perspective,
for in this large than life realer than real
exterior externality,
which why, by the by,
is mega black and white duopoly,
makes who is bigger no better than smaller,
for all but magnified speckles
all now more of a minor
irrelevant relativity.

When all the worlds are watching, not just the world, but
a Universe of unknown worlds are judging, studying us,
and maybe our lives are mighty picayune,
but amore humbled and yet precious, do we not need to be
always on our best behavior?

the fact is that we who are but 80 miles from nyc’s borderline can no longer sky-testify, be reminded of our planetary’s liveliness- uniqueness and our proper place on the largest tapestry
of the always, of the forever, of the
majesty and harmonious coexistence.

I am naive and a proper fool, and I do not know if it is the new smoking of the planet, spread of the seemingly innocuous
city boundaries encroaching on our rural existence, or a new physicality condition that makes our nights a pungent blackened cloud, and that so many can not say of the awesomeness
mystery above us, and think
with humility
our destiny,
our alignment
                         “is in the star’s.”

Alas poor Yorick, even your creator, the poet William Shakespeare, who understood human frailties too well, conceded that,

”it is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves.”

But the again,
he could nightly gaze
upon them,
and we cannot!

He also conceded, to attempt to balance
the imbalances of our
visual scales,
and magnetic moral compasses,
writing,

indeed!

”there are more things in heaven and earth*”
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