Invernal Solstice 2025 (05.01.026)

The Lake

took my grief, my heartache—

and as guilt blossomed in my chest,

it, too, dissolved in waves.

She nullifies the noise of cars,

the blind fury and indignance of their captive pilots,

screaming aloud or silently

to be recognized (needing to be held).

She does not deserve such sorrow and rage,

but I realized, then: size, and age;

for how many eons, generations

has she absorbed and absolved?

Am I maybe so small?

Do I deserve this embrace? 

Will the mass of my hurt be the final drop,

or will she take and take, as I Take and Take and Take?

I am so lost, until I feel

her landlocked tidal changes

greeting me each time with love and patience.

I am never not welcome (here, maybe anywhere).

How can she hold all of this?

How can she take so much abuse—

like so many human matters: unjust, unfair.

But my God, I need her

like I have needed no other human.

Ever.

I worry for her future.

A worry I will not let her take.

07.12.025

 

I want you

to cause God’s name to bloom

from my open mouth;

Tláloc’s lightning to proliferate

through mine iron-bearing vessels.

Glitching, blipping

In, and Out:

phalangeal tracings leaving

dopamine in their wake,

ascending a ladder

of spinous processes,

sacrum-to-crown somatic

piloerections; the chill

of invernal airs intaken

proliferating bliss throughout

a body to which

I can only, momentarily,

lay claim.

Please,

let me continue

to believe;

please,

allow mine

worship-at-your-feet;

please, I beg:

do not permit

me to leave.

I ache to see

it oxidize:

the gunpowder glinting

in your eyes.

11.11.025 Lies, Heavenly Bodies (God Is Gracious)

Bursting sugared lime inside you—

fleshy inguinal citrus—

tart and piquant, aching sunshine:

there were nearly tears in your eyes,

saliva dribbling dissolute chloride

from out your O-pen’d mouth:

suff’ring, longing commingling

as aetherous nobility with ionic sodium—

volatile white metal.

How can Pleasure be, lacking Pain?

Bite down on me:

black-peppered strawberry.

Alignment of suns,

meridians of energy;

autonomic plasticity;

co-regulation frenzy

of you-and-me.

Curled phalanges, eyes rolling

back into beckoning cephalic blackness,

to where only He bears witness.

Every motor neuron firing:

tension,

clenching,

hypertonicity;

embrace,

regress,

((guarding))

release me.

09.09.025-26.10.025 Invitation (Tin Mirror)

What a wonderful thing:

enough time face-to-face

to know the curves of your eyes.

Enough space: vocal folds vibrating diatomic air

to cochlear-hair receptors;

communicating how, when, where, why.

More smiling in a day than I’d seen from you

across a desk, across years.

It can be a terror to be known; it can be a pleasure.

I can feel like a mess most of the time.

I did not, that day (and still,

I worry I seemed that way) with you.

I worry too much.

I don’t worry enough.

I worry about the wrong things.

I don’t want to let the world in;

I don’t want to invite the future,

in all of its possibility.

I want you to be my world

in this present moment, solely;

I only want to know what is.

Let us take off our shoes;

walk into the woods; breathe in

evergreen; hear the willows’ weepings.

Please don’t leave so soon.

Don’t bolt, don’t wither

if I grow sad, if I anger—

those feelings will never be rooted in you.

Please linger, here: petrichor-wreathed;

warm-milkweed green.

To someday see our faces

florecientes, adjacent—

tangent in a tin mirror—

darling, that would be a dream.

I do not want to wake.

Please pause, please stay;

I have a soft spot waiting.

08.11.025 “Don’t Be Needy”

When you ask me how I am doing,

you are asking me to lie. 

You die for a relationship

with a pocketed picture of me at age ten;

forced smile, teeth bared

(because it’s normal, because

if I am normal

then we will all be okay, I’d say).

A twenty-six-year-old image,

sun-scorched and dog-eared,

clutched in digits victim

to muscle wasting:

white-hot grip beginning

when I, as I am now,

began to begin; ischemia letting

no new blood in.

The mind is not a muscle.

Isometrics bring no new tone—

only atrophy. Nothing more.

A white-knuckled mind will not let me go.

Again:

who am

I

to Be?

(You mistakenly/mindlessly

gave me back a scarf I made

for you, years ago.

It will now go to someone in need.)