Poetry 8-27-2026

Sometimes, whilst one is going through the previous year’s poetry to put it all together, one finds something written by a kinder heart. I wrote this with a kinder heart. A heart that (erroneously, okay) started to open in the presence of gentleness. It’s a trip, knowing this feeling existed once, inside my chest. I guess that poetry is good for being the time capsule that reminds you, occasionally, that love was almost. I guess it is also, sometimes, good for reminding you that you were right to have put rocky ground between you and others.

Photo by Image Hunter on Pexels.com

Rocky Ground

the path to my heart

is unjustly perilous

even for me

the travesty of sharp drop offs

make it nearly impossible

to find to enter to heal

this hermit atop high summit

has banished herself there

a strong fortress

to defend against love

and all the ways it has

failed and fooled and lied to her

better the quiet solitude

and steep loneliness

better than to be drug down

the mountain ever again

I made the trail to my heart

impossible

but your steps are soft

respecting the land

the danger and beauty

of it,

just as it is

ever onward, every upward

to gently knock on

the spiked door

shrouded in thorns

and ask

I am still at home

am I here?

You’re here

want to come out?

the sunlight is beautiful

and I brought you

an apricot

to share

its only me

its only love

I exist,

I’m here,

even if you don’t

open the door

I’ll wait

The Tumultuous Writer’s Mind

I’ve struggled with a post this week. Either to launch into some deft and cuttingly beautiful poetry, or as Melanie Griffith once said in “Working Girl” to hit you with my smarts. I don’t have a lot of poetry or smarts today. Sorry.

Life has been chocked full of events. Some of them are little, and benign. Some of them seem like…not a big deal, but they rift something deep within the surface and you end up spending the week dealing with the ripples that have become tsunamis. Part drowning, part relishing the destruction of old temples and ideals that held you for far too long in subjecation. In any case…you start to question, where you’re at. What you’re doing? Are you living well? Are you loving well? Are you taking all the advantage of this one wild life? Or are you… stagnant? Have you slept too long in comfort and stopped fighting for something…far greater? Have you given up truth and freedom for discomfort for blissful ignorance?

And why not? Out of fear? Out of habit? Out of…this is how it’s always been and why should I wish more for myself?

It’s hard. As humans. As writers. To trust our own individual worth. Our creativity. What we offer the world. Why does it even matter in dark and vast sea of a million different voices?

Especially when cookie cutter, and formulamatic fiction seems to be the thing that draws in the most eyes… Well…shit I don’t know. There’s very little money in truth. There’s very little fame or fortune in telling the general masses something interesting and thought provoking and…god help us…challenging to their idiom. Please, as the Briar Rabbit once cried, don’t throw me into the thorn bush…Please don’t make me…think…

Is there room for the artist in this world? Is there room for the intellectual? The person disconnected from the constant spin and pizzaz of what constitutes journalism and entertainment (trick question, there’s no difference between the two now) these days. Is there room in the world for the person who chooses to turn of their screens and the voices and the barrage of constant, dumbing down information to sit still…and think… and write? About an original idea, about the absolute absurdity of life? To write something that makes us think? When was the last time you read such a thing? Such a strange soul-stirring thing? When was the last time you sat in silence, and contemplated the idea that in your not-so-distant-past, your brain kept you alive in a world full of real dangers and still managed to tell a decent story. That you were designed…for far better things. Not monetary, not status related. But…soul worth…When did you last wonder if all of this noisy bullshit was beneath you? Because I’m pretty sure it is.

I am weary of this world. It holds so little that matters. It has become so much neon pink and drowning narcissism.

I don’t have a blog for you.

I’m too busy thinking. On my own. Observing, with eyes, not videos. Listening to all perspectives, shouting to be heard… And even if I had something worthwhile to tell you, about you, your existence, about the white washed reality you’ve been fed, all the anxieties they’ve readily given you to keep you engaged on numbing little pills, I’m not sure anybody is ready to listen.