There is a tender way to touch you,
not more than a brush across your cheek.
I seek a gentle kiss so not to miss your soft
and red-rose lips that meet mine, the glory
of your golden hair that falls upon my face
as I unlace your flowered blouse to place
my fingertips upon your silk-like skin to begin
to love the rest of you. I lay you down on soft,
blue sheets, your head upon pillows made of
wild willow leaves softer than robin's feathers.
I bare you beauty slowly that glows like a candle's
flame in a room that is at once so dark and bright.
The light comes from your luminous eyes that smile
at me as I reveal the rest of you from waist to knees
to heels and toes. No one knows the tender touch
I bestow upon your gentle being that I alone am seeing.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

There is a difference between personhood and behavior. Everyone's personhood is divine, inviolate, whereas so many people's behavior is often uncaring or hurtful or even much worse. It is not unusual to react to one's untoward behavior with at least displeasure if not outright hate, even ******. But this latter response is unknowing. When one encounters bad behaviour to any degree and wishes it were not so, do not exacerbate what is already deleterious by making it even worse through punishment. Instead, constrain this negativity, but love this forsaken person. Love is the cure for all who suffer pain. It may take a lot of love to heal a hurting soul, even a lifetime, perhaps even longer. But love is the antidode for all emotional maladies. But for one to be able to love others, one must first be loved, preferably by one's parents, but if not by them, then by someone else who was loved and thus has love to give those who desperately need it. This dilemma is what our world most suffers from. Wealth, fame, power--all are illusory and therefore feckless. They are but unconscious efforts to compensate for lack of love, and that is why our world has been turned inside-out for millennia. Only being loved, and then being able to love, will we be able to turn our world right-side in. Then and only then will we have Peace on Earth forever, and for the first time.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

Lincoln came to hate slavery. When Lincoln was 19, his friend and he watched a slave auction in New Orleans. Lincoln's fists, his friend said, were so tightly clinced that his knuckles turned white. Suppose it had been whites who were slaves, not blacks. Suppose you saw your 14-year-old white daughter being ***** right in front of you by your black slave master. Suppose the woman you loved was sold one morning to another black slave owner who took her away from you forever. Suppose you tried to learn how to read the Bible and your black slave master caught you doing that, so he he tied you to a tree trunk and gave you 60 lashes on your bare back. Suppose you thought slavery was morally grotesque, but there was nothing you could do about it, because you had no legal rights of any kind, just like all your forebearers. What a shame you were born white. What a shame that the U. S. Constitution made slavery legal when it was drafted and ratified. Life is, after all, not fair, even if you're white.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

What are we to make of one lifetime? Any given lifetime. Is there a goal for everyone? If there is, clearly each goal is not necessarily the same as all the others, though it might be the same, or at least similar to, one or more than one. If there is no goal to any of them, then what is the reason we live? That would be nihilism. Why, in fact, has the human race proagated for untold millennia? In some respects, human life has evolved progressively positively, but in many other respects, it has devolved disastrously. The way each one of us has lived our lives is a function, I believe, of whether we were loved enough, if at all. If we live a loveless life from conception onward, we wind up unconsciously compensating for the emotional dearth we have suffered by accruing wealth, achieving fame, aggrandizing power. If we look at the 3,400 years of recorded history, there have been exponential advances in warfare, but humanistically relatively few by comparison. As of 2021, there are 10,000 diseases that can and do afflict us, but only 500 cures for the ones to which we fall victim.. We have been fighting countless wars against our fellow man and killing millions and millions and millions of them, but discovering an exiguous number of cures for illnesses that often **** us. Why this gross, this grotesque, disparity? And we now find ourselves on the cusp of extinction from catastrophic climate change and the existential threat of nuclear holocaust. So, are we here on Earth simply and inexorably to destroy it and all its living creations? Or are we going to have soon enough a worldwide epiphany:  to begin and never stop realizing that first we all need to be loved to love others;  that there is but one land, one sea, one sky, one people;  that the boundaries that now divides us are not on maps, but in out minds and hearts;  that while we live on a small planet, it is big enough for all of us if only we are first loved so we can then love all others.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

The way that winter comes at me,
as if a stranger from a side street
cold and dark accosting me. I turn
my collar up. He hollers, "You, there!"
Faster I walk, fear chilling me,
a lamp post but a grey ghost in the fog.
This ****, winter, mugs me. He hits me
in the face with frozen fists. He grabs me,
stabs me in the side with knives
of ice, slices at my heart, the home
of hope. Supine, frost forming on
my brow, I pray to boughs of willow
trees;  pines will sing my elegy. My mind
drifts like snowdrifts:  a mitten lost...
fingers, nose, toes frostbitten...
a lake of isolation...a sleigh with no
horse...a blizzard of insanity.
My blood thaws the frozen ground,
then freezes.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

Simone, Simone
I'm all alone.
Simone, Simone
I'm all alone.
Simone, Simone
please come to me
and bear your breast
for me to rest
my weary head
and shattered heart
upon a part
so soft and warm.
Simone, Simone
I'm all alone.
Simone, Simone

Tod Howard Hawks

There will come a time
when time doesn't matter,
when all minutes and
millennia are but moments
when I look into your eyes.
There will come a time
when clinging things
will fall like desiccated
leaves, leaving us with
but one another. There
will come a time when
the external becomes eternal,
when holding you is to
embrace the universe.
There will come a time
when to be will no longer
be infinitive, but infinity,
and you and I are one

Tod Howard Hawks