Sleep oft colludes with night,
Pulls wool over my eyes—
By announcing itself anon
On my station's platform.

Evermore delayed to reach this vessel,
It refuses to hypnotize a compliant patient
Despite the dated rituals performed
For slumber to thrive—

Prayers chanted in your name,
Darkness donned in your chase,
Silence kept vigil, sung as lullaby,
Consciousness sacrificed for your gain

Yet you refuse to sway me in my cradle,
Yet I lay squirming on your saddle,
Incapacitated by thoughts—untenable
Enslaved for their cause—unassailable

Many a sleepless nights were my penance;
Upon which, one of sleep's commandments
bequeathed...
To sleep—toil to reach the summit;
Inhale the thinned air
Exhaled by a content-shaped mountain.

The flickering lamp in your hand
sways as if to swim in peace to me
the lily scenting a warm ponder
ripples from the apple of my eye
and bobs across to bid approach
blooming with a soft absorbing sigh
which enters an essence close to reach

Your touch colludes in a light lashed usher
enticed to where my heart will sing
of finding lithe spirit mute from flesh
I slide into choral waters with longing
for the wonder of a parting life wish

Drumming soft
as butterfly strokes
swishing in the night
so close
and so remote
she could vanish
into poppy fields
at any moment
but will never leave
my sight
fluttering
I swim onward..
I swim
out..

Author's Note:

This piece is not an accusation.
It is a meditation on the invisible processes that hollow men from within, until dignity itself becomes foreign to them.

It was written out of love for what could still be restored—
and sorrow for what has already been surrendered.

It speaks not just to the fallen,
but to every soul tempted to trade courage for comfort, or brotherhood for collusion.

Its aim is simple:

To remember what is still worth standing for.

To remember what dignity feels like.

To remember that one man, rising rightly, can still light a thousand silent fires.


This is not a call to fight against anyone.
It is a call to rise for something greater.

And that rising always begins alone—
but never ends alone.

---

I. The Quiet Death of Courage

Cowardice rarely announces itself.
It does not charge the city gates or tear down banners.
It does not raise its fist or shout in the streets.

It simply withdraws.

A little at a time:

A small silence when truth could have been spoken.

A small appeasement when resistance was needed.

A small betrayal of the self, justified as "wisdom," or "timing," or "strategy."


Cowardice is the art of dying in small increments.

It is a death invisible at first—
but felt all the same,
especially by those who still remember what life tasted like.

---

II. The Architecture of Collapse

A man does not become a coward all at once.

It happens in stages:

1. The First Silence

At first, he says nothing when he should have spoken.
He tells himself it was prudence.
He convinces himself that silence was strength.

It was not.

It was the first small surrender of the ground within him.

---

2. The Second Betrayal

Next, he acts against his own spirit—
not because he is coerced,
but because he seeks the approval of the small and the fearful.

He trades his birthright for belonging.

---

3. The Third Rationalization

Then he builds a philosophy around his collapse.
He calls cowardice "compassion."
He calls compromise "wisdom."
He calls retreat "strategy."

He must call it something,
for he can no longer bear to call it what it is.

---

4. The Fourth Contagion

Finally, he evangelizes his collapse.

He cannot stand to be alone in his shrinking.
He must make others shrink too, so that his own fall will seem normal.

He calls cynicism "truth."
He calls bitterness "clarity."
He calls betrayal "maturity."

And so the infection spreads.

---

III. The Hallmarks of the Cowardly Spirit

What does the cowardly spirit look like once matured?

It has specific, predictable characteristics:

It ridicules what it secretly envies.

It mocks beauty, calling it naiveté.

It mistrusts love, calling it weakness.

It punishes hope wherever it finds it.

It colludes quickly with other cowards, for it cannot endure the mirror of a brave soul.


Most of all,
it refuses to stand alone in anything noble.

It will only move
when surrounded by a sufficient crowd of accomplices,
all murmuring together that cowardice is, after all,
"just the way the world works."

---

IV. The Consequences: The Inheritance of the Cowardly Spirit

The coward believes his failures die with him.

They do not.

Every surrender of the soul plants a seed—
and what the coward will not face, the next generation must.

Cowardice is not content to remain private.
It leaks. It spreads.
It builds hidden systems of decay in places meant to be sacred:

Brotherhood.

Family.

Love.

Trust.


Here, we observe the inevitable fruits of the coward’s hidden betrayals:

---

1. The Poisoning of Brotherhood

The coward cannot abide true brotherhood, for it demands loyalty to something higher than himself.

Where brotherhood calls men to rise, he calls them to collude.
Where brotherhood builds strength, he breeds resentment and small betrayals.

True brotherhood requires courage:

The courage to tell the truth.

The courage to stand beside the fallen and help them rise.

The courage to call out wrong even when it costs everything.


The coward, unwilling to bear these costs, transforms brotherhood into mob-hood.
It becomes not a place of strengthening, but a collective graveyard of broken wills.

---

2. The Contamination of the Vulnerable

The coward is not content to rot alone.
He must gather others into his decay — especially those still innocent enough to hope.

He mocks hope as naiveté.
He redefines loyalty as silence.
He teaches the young that the only safety lies in cynicism, deceit, and crowd protection.

Thus, the cowardly spirit perpetuates itself—
turning the next generation of seekers into scavengers.

The vulnerable, robbed of examples of true dignity, inherit nothing but confusion and despair.

The sins the coward would not confess
become the legacies his sons and daughters must carry.

---

3. The Formation of the System

When enough cowards gather,
their private collapses harden into public systems.

It is no longer just a man here, or a man there.
It is a construct—a culture.

A place where cowardice is normal,
where betrayal is cleverness,
where faithfulness is mocked,
where mercy is treated as weakness.

The system becomes self-perpetuating—
enforced not by dictators, but by the small daily collusions of those too afraid to stand.

And thus, without ever firing a shot,
cowardice conquers the city.

Not with weapons.
But with withdrawal.
With silence.
With the endless failure to love rightly when it was hardest to love.

---

V. The Restoration: The Only Way Back

There is no shortcut out of cowardice.

There is no clever argument that can restore dignity to a man who has surrendered it.

There is only one way back:

The man must choose to stand again—alone if necessary—before the gaze of God and truth.

---

1. The Necessity of Aloneness

To be restored, the man must abandon the crowd.
He must leave behind the murmuring alliances of smallness that once comforted him.

He must stand naked in the light of reality:

Without excuse.

Without camouflage.

Without borrowed dignity.


He must see himself as he truly is—
not as the victim of circumstance,
but as a willing participant in his own ruin.

This is why restoration begins with loneliness.

Because dignity cannot be borrowed.
It must be reborn.

---

2. The Cost of Repentance

True repentance is not an apology to the crowd.

It is an apology to the soul he abandoned.
An apology to the Source he betrayed.
An apology to the ones he harmed by his absence of courage.

Repentance is not a performance.
It is a slow rebuilding—
stone by stone, day by day—
of a life that will no longer lie.

It is the refusal to be a man whose silence feeds decay.
It is the refusal to call cowardice "wisdom" just because it is popular.

It is the willingness to lose everything false
in order to gain one thing true.

---

3. The Unfolding Strength

As the man stands,
he will feel at first as though he is dying.

And in a way, he is.
The part of him that survived by submission is perishing.

But what rises in its place
is something the system of cowards has no weapon against:

A man who can no longer be bought.
A man who can no longer be frightened.
A man who, even alone, even broken, refuses to bow to lies.

One such man
can dismantle the machinery of cowardice
simply by breathing differently.

---

4. The Lineage of New Fire

When one man stands rightly,
he gives birth to a lineage.

He shows others what it looks like to stop surrendering.
He awakens those still sleeping in their excuses.

He does not have to preach loudly.
He does not have to prove anything.

His existence becomes a rebellion.
His faithfulness becomes an invitation.
His dignity becomes a seedbed for the rebirth of brotherhood.

He becomes a true elder.
A true warrior.
A true builder of sacred things.

He becomes a man who no longer merely survives—
but who lives.

---

And so the story turns:

The cowardly system is dismantled
not by greater violence,
not by harsher words,
but by the silent rising of men and women
who refuse to live any longer beneath their birthright.

They will not key the beauty they envy.
They will not scavenge the ruins.
They will not mock what they are too small to understand.

They will build.
They will love.
They will stand.

They will remember:
that heaven was always meant to be built from blood, yes—
but also from breath, and bone, and unbreakable fire.

And so they will live,
not because they were the strongest,
but because they were the most faithful.

Sometimes while sleeping
I greet the twin sisters.

Subtle faceless apparitions,
that love to giggle
while skipping the ropes to reality.

coalesced dreams, some call them
Without an end or beginning.

in a state of drunken stupor,
set by feasting on the flesh of stars
they drive me back to the black lake
where we once buried the moon

effigies of time, burn on the shores,
the lake soaking its ashes.
does the time ever weep?
for what it has lost,
even in the interconnected dreams

an undecipherable hymn now,
colludes with my stupor
as the faceless twin sisters smile.

I shall remember nothing
except for their holy unison
and the figments of thread
sewing their thumbs together

Will Russia's election meddling ever
Come to an end? We keep hopin'.
But now the president blatantly
Colludes with Putin out in the open!

Recently, another phone call
Between Trump and Putin occurred.
Was Russian election meddling mentioned?
According to Trump, NOT one word.

But why would Trump want to stop
Interference in our elections?
If Russia helped him win before,
Why would he NOW raise objections?

He doesn't trust investigators
Here. He'd rather demonize
The FBI, while at the same time
He swallows all of Putin's lies.

Now team Trump seeks outside help
To hopefully tarnish the reputation
Of another political opponent.
Character assassination.

No maneuver is too low for Trump.
Will his actions come back to haunt him?
One thing we know: the Russians have
Donald Trump right where they want him.

People concerned about America's
Strength and safety should be upset
As Trump spins the cylinder
In a dangerous game of Russian roulette.

-by Bob B (5-4-19)

Once upon a falling far
I jumped off the world
to land on a star
and
looking behind me, I
looked on in awe at the world that I'd
jumped from
and the beauty I saw.

Racing through space amid
the dolly mixture of planets
watching the suns burn and die.
With wings on my heels it feels
like Achilles collides or colludes with me.
myths,mystics and history are
spoon fed to me
by the universal mystery.

The expansion expands but like all
rubber bands
one day it will stop
and
POP.
Exceeding all expectations, I'll return to the seed pod
of all of creations
and then I'll believe in
a God.

Woken. Rain agaain.
What did I dream -
hero or sinner,
watcher or actor?

When my mind
colludes with the day
memories corrupt.

I need to say, the evening with you was the best thing that has happened to me in a very long time. Watching the performances, walking to Kaldi’s our steps and gossip wandering about together, singing show-tunes in your car, being vulnerable to a person we barely know, and watching Broadway Youtube videos; you just feel like we fit.

I need to say, It’s tomorrow morning now and I haven’t had you out of my mind for a moment since we separated. I want to spend countless more evenings feeling this enraptured by your company. I want to build you a castle of experiences, filled with treasures of memories better than these first ones made last evening; and the evening’s were pretty stellar.

I need to say, “I’m crazy over you.” I think you are more beautiful than the sunrise breaking across the sky, and more comfortable to be with than a favorite pair of pajama pants. I’m feeling so much, and so much intensity. I want time to draw us together. I want to  become the one who kisses your lips. I want to be cuddled up with you on a couch sharing a lazy Sunday. I want to be your biggest fan, cheering you on from the front row when you perform.  I want to know your people and be your person.

I need to say, the hug in the passage between your dining room and living room where I held you and was held by you was a perfect singularity. I could have dissolved into it, were we hugging or were we dancing? I want to think it was a dance but neither of us knew the steps. I want to learn the choreography, to feel the artfulness of gliding across a dance floor in partnership that’s safe. I want to pull you in, hold you close, take three steps in unison, spin you out to watch you dazzle, then draw you back again to reunite and prepare for the next bars the band will play directing our movement together. I want to become your Fred and you become my Ginger. Or perhaps not, it could have just been a hug because you just needed a friend to hug.

I need to say, I will not ever send you this. I just don’t know how to risk saying all this. I wish you could know this: that you could hear these words coming from my mouth. I want to hope you felt all this too. Yet I live inside a mind that colludes against me, and the risk of these words is crippling. I don’t want to retreat, fortify a secure position, and avoid the perilousness of something amazing and new. Yet that is my modus operandi. I wish I were the person who could announce such a proclamation of your enchantment. I want to actually feel that 1000 anxieties accompanying  the chanciness of speaking these words to you; because there was an undeniable elegance to the easiness of how we click.

I need to say these things I type. That however is just not me. So another bottle of regret will get added to my emotional cupboard of elixirs I will never get to taste. Before I stock this away to be misplaced and gather dust on its shelf I needed to record it here; just to let the magic of what could be fill me up at least a little bit.

I won’t tell you about them-

The plants, I mean.

But…

I’ve kept them all cataloged

Nicely!

And the book is little, and green!

Heavy. And there’s…

Vines that bind it together when I give them light.

Also there’s a lot of pages

Blank.

Because I’m bad at drawing snakes

Of stems, and petals new.

They grow so quickly,

Quiet.

Soon we’ll see a Spring-

The plants, and me.

And I can seek more than seeds…

Little rounds things that describe nothing of their root network

So I wonder if I should be around all these plants that don’t speak-

Though I do record the silence in a heavy green book.

I also meet

The ground, and the Earth

I think in my head how I could see the roots.

Or draw colludes of quiet life matter-

I think over and over.

I think, and the vines are not binding the book any longer.

Sketches that I spent so much time with

And their loving, long aged descriptions

Fall around me.

I meet the floor

Take all of my plants

And I run out into the thaw before Spring.

The Earth!

And your Sun!

I hold up my pages so to again bring life!

I’ve just drawn some pictures of plants

Many more blank.

The Earth

And the Sun

The ground

Seeds, and vines

Do not bind together what no longer belongs.

I see this

And I see the clouds

Folded quietly around the Sun.

I think

And envision a life.

Only without the plants to be my friends.

I feel

Like a lot is lost,

But in a tiny way

Like sort of a seed.

Carried on the wind.

Blown out of its deep, but fragile network of support.

Away from the book

Binding

Failed.

In those pages were pictures of plants.

I won’t tell you about them-

My friends, I mean

But…

I’ll float away from the Sun

Separately.