Better to lay your spirit low.
Don't upset the ones who like you quiet.
And when your spirit freezes on the window screen,
The birds will watch the frost softly fall off into the snow.

In the bleak winter
under hurrying clouds,
the wind blowing, bitter
gusts through trees’ barren boughs.

A small house: Its nooks
in new Gothic style
once housed the old books
of a forgotten king for a while.

It had been a library,
a place filled with words;
now all that here tarries
are the winds and the terns.

Its glassless peaked window
looks out on the sky
to waters that flow
by the small palace hard by.

The window is incised
in stone shaded gold —
a warm tone that belies
its touch that is cold.

The red palace is crowned
in gold and white marble.
They shine out, gowned
in hues that spite winter’s pallor.

Now blue waters and birds
add color to the scene
that fills this blank window
with nature’s stained glass serene.

This house has stood waiting,
empty in wintriest times —
now it’s filled by nature’s painting
brushed in hushed hues divine.

A cobblestone road
in a dark night dyed with woad.
Faint glitter under pale street lights.

Icy blue fog in the late night
turned electric by the passing lights
of rumbling cars that rush on by.

They leave their streaks of LED beams
that quickly fade as if a lost dream.
The night watches with a hint of a sigh.

I was chasing a perfect picture of myself
till now
Fooling myself, I thought the outward was the answer
Realizing the impermanence of our bodies
Sends warm shivers and prickles down my spine.

Where one is fighting gravity
Another one is fighting life itself
One may embrace poverty
Another one may struggle in rich hell

As strong as grief
The body will let go
Our minds repeat
The patterns ever-slow

This night's embrace
May only cause surrender
The outward image
Dissipates in madness

And only thing alive -
Quiet awareness.  
What's missing?
Our joy in hearts -
Therein lies only sadness.

The mountains keep their secrets well—
in their silence, they bear the grief of stone,
the centuries pressed into stillness,
each stratum a tale of what once was
and what shall ever be.
One looks upon them and thinks,
they have never known what it is to fall.
But does one not hear them groan
beneath the weight of themselves,
the way they shift in the night
like old men turning in their slumber?

Each crack in the rock does whisper
of pressures unseen, tectonics
of ancient sorrows long since stilled.
In this, they are alike to us:
holding fast to the unspoken,
wearing their jagged edges
as though they have no need of gentleness.
But hark—does one hear it?

The way the wind grazes their faces,
how even the stone does yield to that
which is so soft it has no name.

We come to them burdened,
bearing the weight of days
like a sack of heavy stones,
each one a moment believed
to be the end of something vital.

We hold them close, believing
they are all we have—
these small griefs that anchor us
to the ground we tread upon.

But the mountains know
what we have not yet learned—
that every stone shall one day
become dust,
every peak worn smooth
by the selfsame wind
that now does caress the face.
We are not less for this,
nor are we more.

We are but the shape
life has taken to know itself,
to feel, in this brief span,
the vastness of what it means
to be.

Consider this:
the stars, too, shall perish,
and yet their light does wander
the corridors of space,
filling the night long after
they have burned themselves out.
We are no different.
What we are now, in this moment
of small sorrow, shall pass.

It is not the end,
but a whisper in the vastness

of what we are yet to become.
So let the mountains speak to us.

Let them tell how even they
must break and bow to time,
how their strength lies not in
holding firm, but in the slow
unfolding of their edges
to the universe's touch.

We are not small,
nor are we infinite.

We are the echo
of all that has ever been
and all that shall ever be.

Listen, and one shall hear
how the mountains weep
not because they are broken,
but because they are becoming.

                                                  And so are we.

Beneath the rotted floorboards, time pulses,  
an arterial thrum of root-veined clocks.  
They do not tick for kings, nor bow for breath,  
but coil their echoes deep into the loam,  
dragging splinters of once-wooded oaths  
into the mouths of worms.  

What is time here, but the taste of damp?  
But the drag of green shadows across unblinking stones?  
A language older than lungs,  
a song of split seeds whispering their secrets  
to the weight of a thousand buried steps.  

Above, the weightless still mvoe,  
mistaking hours for thresholds,  
grinding moments into calendars  
as if order were a thing the earth might honor.  
Their laughter carries, thin as copper wire,  
breaking against the stone’s unhurried shrug.  

Here is the truth:  
roots keep the time,  
counting each second by the shade of moss,  
each century by the rise of the hawthorn's spine.  
And we are nothing to it,  
fleeting as the rain on uncarved stone,  
as brittle as the leaves  
crushed under their own arrival.  

I laid my ear to the ground once,  
and the earth opened a crack of sound—  
not a scream, but a swallow,  
a voice neither cruel nor kind.  
It told me this:  

"Do not fret your passing.  
Even your dust will kneel  
and grow itself into shadows.  
The clock of roots will claim you too,  
a heartbeat winding down  
to something soft and green."

I tried to build a world from quiet moments—  
small, whispered things that barely held their shape.  
But everything ran together,  
blurred like wet ink on skin,  
and I stopped knowing where it started,  
or when it stopped being mine.  

You once asked me what it felt like  
to carry the weight of so much.  
I said it wasn’t heavy—just scattered,  
like leaves caught in the wind,  
never settling, never landing  
where I thought they would.  

But somewhere in the chaos,  
I found stillness,  
a soft gravity that kept pulling me back,  
not to the things I’d lost,  
but to the things that stayed,  
the ones that never needed names.  

There’s a pull to what we don’t say,  
and maybe that’s where the truth rests.  
Not in the grasping, not in the struggle,  
but in the letting go—  
in the acceptance  
that some things are meant to drift,  
to settle in places we never thought to look.  

The edges of this world I’ve made are still rough,  
but now, they feel right.  
I’ve found peace in their sharpness,  
in the way they’ve held together despite the breaking.  
Even the void, it turns out,  
has a sweetness  
when you stop trying to fill it.

I don't want to live forever,
I don't want to be flattered,
I don't want the world to know
that I was here and that I mattered,
I don't want any wealth,
I don't want the baubles that it buys,
I don't care if the sun is setting
or if it's morning on the rise,
I don't crave your fleeting fame
Nor the glory that you chase,
I'll not be trapped in moments,
I'll be set apart, no trace,
I do not seek a peaceful life,
I wish not to be "free,"
I want to be as fathomed
and as forgiving as the sea