It’s strange.
Lilies still in the wind.

An extraordinary wind at that.
Wind with a purpose so impertinent
It became love.

If you didn’t know any better,
You might name it something sweeter:
Abhorrence.

Your eyes sharp
And soft with desperation
Look at me for answers.

I’ve never seen anything quite like it
I marvel and speculate alongside you
We fall into a steady and cyclical dissonance
Are the lilies still anymore?

Yes, the sky is still blue. The grass,
Green.
It’s rather lovely.

I feel a tug. A pull.
With ease I lean into its plea
Spilling into silence,
I am gone.

You are here alone.
Delicately gilded, you are safe.

The lilies still in the wind.
Utterly strange.

Stand atop
your                                                            ­                                         dunes
manifested
Dreams
from infallible convictions
Eyes — open
with pretentious ecstasy
Gawking
Your waves — in a waterless sea
Stand
facing the winds
permeating
your pedantic desert
Eyes — water
Assurances — seeping in
Indifferently
ravishing your                                                             ­                      dunes
Lie — buried
The sand’s absolute
Like sediment —
manifestations overlaid
Eyes — close
against the winds righteous pursuits
You wonder
how you missed the direction
whence they came

You strike a matchstick
and name it hope—
watch the flame gnaw
its own tail, a hungry ouroboros.

Your hands tremble like cities
under siege.
The skyline cracks, a porcelain plate
held together by spider silk.

We are all archaeologists here,
digging through ash
for the bones of who we swore
we’d become.

Some nights, the moon is a pill
that won’t dissolve.
You swallow it anyway,
let its cold light pool in your ribs.

The world is a fever dream,
but listen—
even wildfires leave behind
soil thick with tomorrow.

So let your heart be a dandelion:
ugly, stubborn,
and impossibly
easy to love.

From the harshness of Everest,
To savage war trenches,
There's the will to survive,
While keeping your senses.

And once you do,
Life has a way,
Of taking it all,
anyway.

another workday -
ignore the catastrophe,
bury your conscience.

another number,
type away the foreboding,
count down the minutes.

another dollar,
think about the bottomline,
excess overflow.

another warning -
it is coming to an end.
when will we wake up?

a body is an archive: unveiled
when i stumbled open--
claw-click, serrate-jaw,
wet antennae mapping paths i had never known.
skin, then flesh, then
(oh—how the soft explodes)
a threshold becomes a feast,
& i was alive for it.

they sang in that minor key,
the one tuned for
half-breaths.
sinews hummed electric as
the burrow began--
an architecture of frenzied mouths
churning absence into corridors,
each passage alive with the memory
of something never buried.

and is this not the nature of hunger?
to make the once-firm
a slurry of purpose?
they never meant to unravel
all i held,
but the burrow was me now.
(to be remade is to perish inside out.)

what the insects did not take
were pieces too sharp to swallow:
a wrist pressed to pulse--
the wrist itself forgotten;
an eye, emptied of meaning,
but still watching--
watching even as the body became
a hymn sung low
in thorax vibrations.

and there was no end.
no death.
no quiet.
only their small & perfect hands
reaching
(yes, always reaching)
for the marrow,
for the root of whatever i had been.

what remained was not myself.
but the insects
were full.