when you smile the whole words brightens
and your own roses bloom
and your love of life thickens
when you smile the sun recognizes itself on foot  
and places its warmth at the front of your hearth waiting for kind thoughts and hopeful rhetoric to push it into your fire
and when it's added, I can see the gleam
emerging from your eyes

when you smile even though it has been rough
I see my humanity in you and I smile, too

when you smile the whole world bears fruit

You had a dream,
Then set your goals,
Invested your time,
Now living, the roll.

Years have passed,
Your ideas changed,
Also, physically too,
\How to rearrange.

Risk what you can,
Keep security inside,
Head either direction,
Our bodies, waiting to die.

This one journey, so short,
Of our future, and past,
Enjoy adventure now,
Any moment, your last.    
Tom Maxwell ©

I’m crashing,
looking,
searching
for connection.
Touch.
Laughter.
Not cheaply.
Only genuinely.
The task seems huge.
Thank goodness that you
(my illicit love that could never be)
left me with this self-confidence.
It gives such strength and
reassurance.

Sometimes I wonder.
I wonder about you
being the right one.
  I wonder about you
  living in a different world than mine.
   I wonder about you
   knowing how to deal with me.
    I wonder about you
    noticing the difficulty of speaking about my insight.
     I wonder about you
     seeing me as the vulnerable person I am for you.
      I wonder about you.

       I wonder about us

A hard reset
Just turn it off
and on again

A reboot
Control, alt, delete
and then the task manager

A factory restore
A blank screen
a fresh start

Tabula rasa
The clean slate
is a myth

We come in to the world wailing
Live wailing, or wanting to wail
and then the death rattle

Yet, in a world of robots
Fluorescence and computers
we long for that factory reset

The great do-over doesn't come
The ability to create anew arrives every moment
We choose it or we don't

Control, alt, delete
Should be
Surrender, function, create

Clean my cache
Delete my history
surrendering to the mystery

This human doing needs a reboot
An upgrade, if you will
to being a human being

you live there now
taken up real estate
built a home there
welcome