Times have changed, people have not
so I read, shelf after shelf in many languages
in books preserved for centuries
so self-evidently describing
the world as it once was

In the evening I experience their adventures
at night I dream of them, every day
they colour my body in a different way

my body longing
to be touched
and to lie eye to eye
longing for the embrace
of arms and a laugh

for sounds and smells
for the cold and the fire
of love

It’s tender,

being the closest of friends..
but oh, isn’t it such a dangerous thing?
To hold you with care,
in the space we made,
while promising

I won’t touch a single thing.

But sweet love... to be this close
to someone like you..
need I say

what your voice can bring?

Warmth, truth,
supportive hands that tend--
it’s a dream come true
for those who bleed.

But when a deep need is quietly met,
can the heart resist
going full send?

And still—when a need
is met without hands,
without lips,

without sleep lost
   in shared breath...

how long before restraint slips?

This depth.. untouched,
unspoken, unseen..
it burns through the walls
between you and me.

Yes, even with agreements
so lovingly made...
there’s always the risk
in a love so brave;


  that we will  both

             come

      undone.

Skin on skin,
Fingers interlocked,
Hair cascades down,
My stomach tied in knots.

Breathing grows heavy,
Anticipation runs high,
When I caress you,
The most rewarding sigh.

Your eyelashes flutter,
Brushing against my cheek,
Eyes closed in surrender,
No words we need to speak.

I trace constellations
Across your beating chest,
Each quiet inhalation
Sings my worries to rest.

You pull me closer still,
Hands settled at my waist,
Time slows to a hush
In this sacred, silent place.

Locked within this embrace,
I fear making the wrong move-
A connection so unexpected,
This beautiful moment with you.

The Battleground Beneath Her Skin
(A Physiology of Light and War)

Before it reaches her;
even before her breath draws it in,
I break myself down..

  not as surrender,
  but as choice.

Each particle stripped bare,
each atom exhaled
made clean by the reckoning
of my own dark,
infused with the stubborn
weight of light
earned, not borrowed.

Within the responsibility of what
  leaves me,
I enter the quiet union—
the kneeling choice
to align with the hand of God,
to let even my smallest fragments
carry His capacity to heal.
Every airborne particle,
accountable,
deliberate,
refined enough
to cross the distance,
to enter her

without deception.

Beneath her skin,
a war unfolds.

It is not loud,
not made of swords,
but of smaller things..
things unseen by eyes,
but never missed by the marrow,
the blood,

the quiet trembling of cells
that have known both wound

  and wonder.

Light and dark..
not in theory,
but in matter
thread themselves through every atom,
every strand of her being.
Not metaphor,
but measurable:

the way shadows lean into the soft chambers of her lungs,

the way light, when chosen,
can rewrite the blueprints etched into the bloodstream.

This is the battleground..
her body,
her breath,
her most involuntary places.
Where no poetry of
seductive manipulation..
no whispered counterfeit
can cover what is real.
Only substance speaks here.
Only intent.

Only what survives the fire of accountability
earns the right to stay.

The particles come;
stripped down,
atomized,
refined.. not by accident,
but by the slow, steady grind
of volition.
They enter her;
through breath,
through pores..

through the quiet, relentless openness
that even fear cannot close completely.

And inside--
the war begins.

..   ..   ..   ..

Mitochondria spark—
tiny engines deciding

what stays,
what burns away.

Capillaries widen,
rivers branching through her like
tributaries
willing to carry
what is real,

what is earned,

what is Light.

The counterfeit falters here.
Pretty words mean nothing
to oxygen.
False portraits
dissolve beneath the chemistry of truth.
The cells remember;

  they choose.

And as the Light infuses
the quietest corners of her..
her thighs, her hips,
the soft stretch of her waist;
there is no seduction,
no trickery.

Only the hard-won intimacy
of substance made pure.

Not by the blending of oils,
not by the friction of skin,
but by the deeper,
unseen alchemy
of what enters,
what lingers,
what refuses to bow
to darkness.

The battleground is hers now.
And though the shadows  will not
yield easily,
they cannot claim her;
not where light
has been chosen,
earned,
metabolized.

The war is not over,
but benea.th her skin,
within her blood,

Light has begun
to rise.

(on surviving the unreal, and the Grace of finding the real)

There’s a kind of pain that doesn’t scream.
It hums low and constant, like a fluorescent bulb above a hollow life.
It’s the ache of loving someone who chooses the polished unreal—
the version of themselves that sells better, that fits easier, that lies cleaner.

They decorate their soul in fake plastic leaves
because they’re terrified of winter.
But in doing so, they cut off the chance of spring.
And you..   I...
am left holding a love that was meant for the root,
but never made it past the paint.

She wanted the unreal.
Maybe because it doesn’t bleed.
Maybe because it doesn’t ask her to remember who she really is.
And maybe she knew.. deep down..
that the real would burn through her curated silence
and set fire to the mask she clung to like oxygen.

So she left.
Or faded.
Or dissolved into the glossy mouth of what sells well in a culture
that has confused image for intimacy
and chaos for freedom.

I tried to survive it.
Tried to make a home in the debris of what might have been
if she had chosen the real.
But you can’t build a life in the hollow where someone used to be..
not when they’ve made a throne out of illusion
and named it sovereignty.


And then came the beautiful songbird.
Not loud. Not selling.
Not another soul trying to be seen.
Just… real.

She was born into a world her father still loved--
a man who held truth like a compass in his palm.
But her mother knelt too long beneath the plastic trees,
and drank from their shine until she forgot how to feel.
And so the beautiful girl,
shapely and soft,
was offered up to Hollywood like a sacrifice..
where faces are sculpted and souls are scripted.
But somehow, even there,
she kept her edges unsanded.
She learned how to walk through mannequins without becoming one.
And when they tried to name her fake,
she whispered back something real—

  and it echoed.


She didn’t hand me a performance.
She gave me a presence.
She let her softness speak without shame.
She showed me her bruises before her lipstick.
She gave warmth that didn’t need applause.

And I realized..
what the unreal can never fake
is the sacred weight of someone truly with you.
You feel it in the breath between sentences.
In the calm that doesn’t need to be filled.
In the eyes that stay when yours begin to water.

The beautiful songbird didn’t try to be the real thing.
She simply was.
And that… healed something the fake could only ever reopen.

So yes, Fake Plastic Trees still wrecks me--
but it no longer belongs to her.
It belongs to the grave I buried beside the shopping cart and glitter
where her soul should’ve been.

Because the songbird
waters what’s real.
She doesn’t break me just because she can.
She doesn’t look through me.
She looks at me.
And suddenly, I’m growing again.
Not to impress, not to perform..

but because she makes it safe to be Alive.

The mountains do not flinch
at what the world has done.
They hold their silence
in granite outcroppings—
scarred, still,
older than sorrow,
yet never indifferent to it.

She came to the ridge
where the cold wind weaves
between trees older than memory.
It touched her like a voice—
not kind,
not cruel,
just knowing.

And that knowing
wrapped around her ribs
like a truth she never chose to carry.

She stood beneath the pines,
her face turned to sky,
and the weight of it all
finally broke through—
tears carving warmth
into cheeks too long hardened.

Then her head
pressed to my chest—
as if to ask
if anything was strong enough
to stay.

And I knew.
I was built for this.
To stand right here.
To hold what broke her
and not let it fall further.

The wind moved on—
but something stayed:
a stillness
a hush

a warmth in the marrow
of what had once been frozen.


Not every wind will cut so cold.
Not every ache will hold.
And not everything un-beautiful
was meant to remain that way.

Tomorrow, the trees will still be here.
And the creek will still run clear.
But so will she—
with something inside
that now knows:

even the wounded
can become
the most beautiful thing
the mountains have ever seen.

mare tranquillitatis
sea of tranquility
our place of security, of calm
Blue Moon, Moon River
across the hall
feels 238,900 miles away

I knew your laugh
before I heard it.
I felt your warmth
before you touched me.

We stayed side by side
even in silence
even as time ran ahead.

We stayed side by side
in the quiet of us.

In the midnight hour
there are thoughts..  fears..
But mostly  there is a consolidation
a gathering, if you will

Within warm, pulsing plasma
flows erythrocytes
leukocytes
and thrombocytes

Bringing nourishment  to my bones
carrying oxygen  from my lungs
giving swell to muscle
Signifying movement  in me

When you write
there is an Undoing
within my undoing
A building up

as I am being fully  torn down.
There is an entropy when sitting down
Undone, by your wondrous Undoing
An Aliveness  felt

When so little around me,
feels even remotely alive