What resonates with you?
Leaving
The fog’s thick this morning,
I drag my tired ass out of bed,
feet cold,
head heavier than the world outside.
Leaves—they don’t care.
they just fall,
dull, tattered, and soaked,
smothering the ground like bad decisions, wasting away like forgotten dreams.
I rake them up,
but it’s pointless,
eventually they just scatter again
like too many people in life,
fading into the fog.
It’s cold,
and I’m tired,
but the leaves?
They keep falling.
They keep going.
So do I.
Principal’d contemplation.
I stepped into the gray evening,
the fog wrapping the jungle gym in a ghostly pause,
no squeals of tag, no bounce of the kickball—
just the echos of the day, fading.
Hallways hum with fluorescent stillness,
no boiler groaning, no papers rustling,
no lost-and-found gloves left behind.
My keys jangle, louder than expected
in this realm without citizens.
For a moment, the to-do list sits obedient,
not spilling over, not chasing me down the corridor—
and I sit in the quiet,
listening to nothing.
I don’t miss the chaos, not yet.
Not the scuffed floors, not the lunch trays clattering,
not the throng of hands reaching out
for pencils, for passes, for reassurance.
Still, the fog hangs heavy.
The building feels like a story waiting to happen,
its walls holding their breath for
the noise to return—
the sound of them,
alive and running, breaking the stillness
I thought I wanted.
For now, I wait,
this place mine alone,
fogged windows, empty desks,
a clock ticking softly toward January.
Trial by Fire
In the ash,
a single coal—
adorned in glowing red
still cooling
beneath my hands.
I stand,
smoke rising
from the folds
of my shadow,
the weight
of wings
I cannot see
bearing down
on my shoulders.
The fire waits—
it always does—
hungry
for the soft edges
of who I am.
Today I’m not answering-
Calls and emails can tumble into the void—
a distant echo in a canyon
I have no intention of hiking into.
Instead, I’ll linger here,
thinking about adventures ahead.
The woods wait for no one,
especially someone like me,
busy explaining my ideas to people
who will forget my words
the moment the meeting ends.
The trees don’t need a progress report.
The squirrels don’t pause mid-scurry,
fold their tiny arms,
and demand to know when I’ll deliver
on whatever request they’ve made.
It’s funny how the trail doesn’t care
if you’ve been gone five days or fifty years.
It’s still there,
under the canopy of leaves
that needs no approval to fall.
So I think today I’ll
spend the afternoon explaining myself
only to the wind—
which, for all its impatience,
never fails to listen.
I don’t like it, but it’s what I have for today.
Joy finds me in the hallway-
not in the spreadsheets
or board reports,
not in meetings where
I nod too much,
but in laughter.
Not mine.
(The quiet chuckle of middle age
has rules and volume limits.)
Theirs.
High-pitched, uncontainable,
giggles that ricochet off lockers
and sneak under classroom doors,
reaching me.
Today it came from two children,
heads bent,
reading their parts in class
inventing voices for the
characters in their play
They tried to look serious—
eyebrows scrunched
in forced studiousness—
but one snort escaped,
and they lost it.
Wild and breathless.
Glorious.
I turned my back so they couldn’t see me grin.
(I have a reputation, after all.)
But there it was, joy.
Simple, untaught,
with no return on investment
or measurable outcome.
It finds me, still.
Even now.
And I’m grateful.
A Sick Day
The world moves without me
beyond the window’s quiet frame;
the wind bends branches, stirs the leaves,
and whispers none to blame.
Here, still and tired, I lay,
the body's work under repair;
no tasks to chase, no field to tend,
but only rest and air.
The earth, I know, will wait—
its soil unchanged, its rivers sure.
This day is given not for loss,
but simply to endure.
Go Outside
It’s been weeks of gray and rain,
weather gnawing the edges of things—
But this morning, the sky
is clean as an empty page…
Ready for my verse.
I lace my shoes and step out
into the humming quiet of the world, light leans in like an old friend.
A crow flaps off the telephone wire,
its wings a slow applause.
I move through it-
the sharp air filling my chest.
Everywhere, wet pavement smells,
and grass stretching toward the sun.
Isn’t it something,
how quickly the heart clears
when the sky does?
The body remembers—
not the heavy weeks of gray,
but this:
the brief, blessed brightness,
the feeling of being made new.
The Life Poetic
Poets live lonely lives,
writing for themselves,
sitting in cafes,
coffee growing cold.
They pen verses
that may never be read,
or if read,
only in secret.
Sad and alone,
they drink whiskey and beer,
trying to soothe
their restless souls.
In the quiet corners
of dim-lit rooms,
they write their lives away—
cold coffee, heavy hearts,
and words waiting
for an unseen reader.
Ode to Obi
Oh, silent shadow, soft-footed sentinel,
you weave through my days, a whisper of fur
and amber eyes that hold the weight
of forgotten jungles.
You are not mine, yet you stay,
a creature of freedom who chooses
to curl in the sun-warmed corners of my life.
Each purr, a hymn, each gaze,
a question without answer.
What do you see in my rough hands,
or hear in my tired voice,
that you settle here,
like a guardian of calm,
or a thief of my weary thoughts?
You, small god of indifference,
pull me into your silence.
In the night, I hear you prowling
a labyrinth of dreams,
a shadow of your wilder self.
Yet here, in the stillness of morning,
you stretch beside me,
a quiet warmth,
teaching me the sacred art
of being.
Rainwalking
He walked without hurrying.
Hands in his pockets, hood up.
The rain falling steadily now,
dripping from the hem of his coat.
It wasn’t much of a night for walking,
but he walked anyway.
His toe caught the edge of a puddle.
Not deep, but wide enough to stop him.
The kind of thing you’d step around,
if you were paying attention.
But he didn’t.
He stood there,
watching the surface.
Raindrops splashing,
one after the other.
Ripples rolled out, circles,
colliding and breaking apart.
Perfect for a second,
then gone.
He thought about that.
How things come together,
then don’t.
How the world keeps moving,
even when it’s quiet.
The rain kept falling.
The puddle kept shifting.
He could’ve stayed there longer,
but he didn’t.
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