This year has been a learning curve full of lessons which have tested our patience while reinstilling the importance of friendships, family, and selfless giving. Let today be a celebration for the spirit, for all that we have to be most thankful for. Here's to rediscovering beauty through poetry, to shaping hardship into timeless art, to sending the world tremendous love.  May your today be filled with joy and happiness. 💕

Happy Thanksgiving!!! 🦃

tasting morning air's divinity
we sample words through
swollen lips made gluttonous
from soaking in each other's eyes
fingers played out over
sumptuous skin, thoughts mingled
in early morning revelry
the aroma of your love
wafting in on tinted feelings,
these tender cordials
we sip upon til dawn

we claw through brittle days
       upon calloused hands
hearts chiseled into Celtic swords
                                  
                                       yet we hold on-

hunkering down through
       blistering nights,
trudging beneath
               the frosted moon,        
         awakening at mottled dawn, sleep deprived,
       riddled with a profound ache
for distant fairy stories
              
we will not surrender
      to shrieking banshees,
           to long-stemmed loneliness,
  to prevailing hunger,
                  to our minds' mischiefs fretting
        as shadows in    
                   unforgiving hours

      instead we galvanize as druids,
              extracting golden amber
from faraway dreams
        depositing them as seeds stowed
beneath winter's cloak-    
   lore keepers
                       of pandemic secrets

                                    -until spring
    thaws the frozen river beds
              of our poetic fingers          
    pollinating speech
                     while we spawn
into garnet roses
(blood soaked with piecing stems)

    a reawakening of voracious beauty,
the roaring Aslan,
             unmuzzled prophesier
                                   of breaking dawn

our palms form steeples
where friendships and family
fed a lean year -
sails align with stars' constancy,
assurances that celestial visions
will chart our course
from inter coastal brine
toward Prussian blue sea-spray
unfiltered sunlight,
blissful afternoons await
beyond today's uncertainty
splayed clouds break, reforming
parceled dreams,
awaken your heart to feel
the healing days outstretched,
this gravitational pull of love

"Anything you lean into deeply, with love and passion, will bring you to yourself."
                                    - @nohmtema


and what of these loves
and passions, what do
they speak
from our withered lips
when time has molded
us into monoliths baking
beneath a multitude of days;

will we recall the beauty,
the bloodthirsty rivers devoted
in toil of our worship?  
will our mind arc
in recognition of its inception;
will these feeble hands recollect
the efforts painted upon
the earth's cortex?  

will our devotions withstand
time's industrious use -
become memorialized in song,
penciled within leather tomes,
recited upon lips of lovers,
hung upon gallery walls,
or perhaps replicated
in a miracle as slight as
a child's wink?

should these devoted cathedrals
of our hearts' construction
withstand this narrow dimension,
may those who later feed upon
their artistry weld them into hope,
wander their naves and transepts,
sing from choir lofts and cultivate
their own melody of beauty
for eras to come.

Feed your heart, free your mind, surround your soul with those who are kind.  Channel energy toward positivity; be resolute in caring for yourself and others.  Punch in each day without regret; yet, don't forget to languish in day's end, to celebrate the peeling sunsets that ripen into nightfall.  You are loved, you are beautiful, you are all the dreams stored up in your heart. My love, find your happiness and never let it go.

i once believed
in the infinite hands of time,
  the metronome beating
as a distant storm front bleeding tears
for others' sorrows,              
      never my own-

now, a crackling pulse, thundering across splitting fields, beckons;
          I fall on brittle knees,
the slash of biting steel
caresses my flesh; the lion's roar
unburdens my soul.

Gravitating to an unfamiliar tempo, thrashing from former convictions, my eyes cast upward
            peering through the womb
of a universe unborn,
           where destiny lay
    still fused between my teeth,
upon the soft palette
of newly christened
        beliefs-

    lightning blisters a design
(once ordained) into rubble
     the misaligned truths-
             of who I am
what purpose my hands preserve;
           where do these
unparalleled seasons lead?

       I resolve
                to follow the heart
toward a liberating chasm
of    
steadfast dreams
       it seems
                 my  journey       begins . .