this summer, i witnessed my first thunderstorm.
a flicker of flight or fight and a soft flutter upon the frames
on your skin, i share this moment with the sky.

drinking this can of coca-cola, i am reminded of you
only briefly, as brief as the bubbles fizzle to the
surface, and catch a glimpse of a life beyond their own

”do we ever catch a glimpse beyond what we know?”
like taking in the first smell
of freshly washed laundry. breathe it in with me.

i know it lasts as long as we know it. eating away
until it becomes a void in a carcass; i begin
missing a piece of myself in someone else.

if only you had told me what you’d been thinking,
what had been missing in yourself.
we are nowhere as close to what we miss in one another.

except when i see you again, the shadows in your eyes
are replaced by the sound of your heart, pounding with gasoline.
i watch you drift away in the sea of bodies, finger on the trigger.

yet i can’t take that away from you so my own greed
fills the place of my heart, reckoning without reason.
we held the world in our palms, infinite and true.

was it because of your fins,
much too brittle for this ocean,
became too soft for me to notice?

please;
let me tell you, dear friend,

i wish you
would have been
more selfish

it is said that
“when once you have tasted flight,
you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward,
for there you have been, and there you will always long to return”
& i have never felt the same way.

the sky: broad & open as it is,
her great blue beauty
will never have the same grit &
smell that dirt gifts me.

i’d rather kneel on the pavement beneath me
than suffer the misery of clipping my wings.
because i’d rather seep into the soil
than have the stratosphere melt away my freedom.
i would have the earth eat my bones
than dissolve as a fleeting cloud

if i ever die,

please turn me into a blade of grass,
amongst mud & rubble,
perhaps in a cemetery
or a meadow.
maybe i’d become a sapling
growing in a park
or a rock, unearthed.

i’d be more at home with that;
tethered to this world
rather than a fleeting moment in the sky
in the air,
in the wind.

this world is mud-luscious &
puddle-wonderful
so the sky cannot be the only
limit

I never really noticed you for the simple fact that
That men grab at me all the time, when you do I
Thought you were one of them but…..I felt the
Love in your touch….. turn around and see you with your
Darkly and dangerous good looks  I want ed to talk to you
But I had to finish my dance after that I talked to you … you
Kiss me softly as well as well as your touch I still don’t know
Much about you.   But yet I loved  you being with me
Or love I thought was going to last that was until
You said that we could not I insisted to be with you
That drove you insane, the idea of being with me
Instead of you job
It hurt more than you strangling me
Why this betrayal of me
As I stilled loved you to the last breath

I thought I found love but
Only found my self  dead
On a hotel bed in a ******
Hotel room,
Murderer was the
One who I thought loved
Then I wake up in my own bed room
It’s 2024 and I am safe I think I am
But I am not sure
Memories of a past reincarnation

In another life,
perhaps it was
you and I—
there, we laughed
a little more,
held on
a little longer.

But here,
we’re fragments,
familiar faces,
strangers in the heart.

We spoke of other lives,
but, I wonder—
do you see
we’re bound to this one,
with only one chance
to learn our way through?

When the apocalypse comes, I will remember the days I was not allowed to be myself.
When the land will tremor, the insects inside me will crawl towards the edge of my soul.
The regrets beneath me will lay out like a web of cracks on an aged wall with no end.
When my body will be underneath the fallen ceiling, I will wail remembering the burden of my emptiness that once felt like nothingness.
When the keepers of my soul will put a name to my existence, I will designate it as "life",
And if they tell me that reincarnation is real, I will still want to be me but with a different mind,
And in any parallel world, if flowers would fall from the sky, I will want to be me but with a different heart,
And if they will tell me that life will be short, I'll be a chirping bird in the eyes of my cat.
I'll be the sound of dripping water that fascinates a little girl.
I'll be a saccharine melody in the times of war.
I'll be a moment of an autumn leaf falling onto a bed of dry leaves.
I'll be a nimbus cloud to a deserted barren land.
I'll be a book in the bag of a poor boy.
I'll be a candy in the hands of a child,
I'll be the essence of lilies to a pleasing garden.
I'll be a beam of revolt to a captured slave.
I'll be a proud smile on a martyr's mother.
I'll be the infinite possibilities of incarnation after the apocalypse.

I call to my own depths
and the love of my life appears
and manifests my long ago forgotten dream.

So now I live the dream
knowing it is illusive and imagined
and infused with the flavor of realness.
Yet, only I am real and it
is seen by no one that this too is
an unreality. Nothing sees itself.
Nothing yearns for nothing.
Blank void cries and laughs
at its own reflection and
make-believes its world to exist
only for its own amusement.

Come play, my only friend!
Go away then come once more
to me and let us dance and laugh
and sing again and again in being
all the varied endless waves.