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.
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.
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.
Untitled
A silent night.
A world asleep.
A hearth unlit.
A solitary figure.
A soul adrift.
A heart wandering.
The home,
a catalog of emptiness:
empty stockings,
empty chairs,
empty cupboards,
empty rooms.
The world outside,
wind worn bushes
ice-kissed trees,
muddy footpaths
rain-drenched streets,
a sky indifferent.
Wind whispered tales
of forgotten joys,
of loves lost,
of lives wasted,
of promises broken,
of dreams deferred.
A world in stark contrast
to the warmth and cheer
that should fill the air.
A reminder
of the fragility of joy,
the transience of happiness.
Untitled
It's not insults or slurs,
not the easy-to-spot kind of disregard.
No, it’s the sideways looks,
the half-smirks at meetings
when I talk about something
I’ve spent years
learning, sweating over—
my brain wrapped tight around it,
like a secret
I had to earn.
They nod like bobbleheads,
and then
some young spark, fresh out of training,
tosses out the same idea,
but shinier,
like it came out of a new box,
and they eat it up
like they just discovered fire.
Middle-aged guy—
yeah, I get it.
I’m not the underdog
in the story anymore,
not the fresh face,
not the one who’s got something to prove.
Just another cog
they’d swap out
if it weren’t for the decades
I’ve spent spinning.
And maybe they’re right.
Maybe I’m not new enough,
not loud enough,
not hip enough
to be worth
anything more than a guffaw.
What they don’t know—
what they’ll never see—
is how many times
I’ve kept my mouth shut
when they’ve been wrong,
how many times
I’ve swallowed the bitter pill
and smiled through it
because I thought
that’s what grown men do.
Bukowski would’ve told them to shove it,
probably.
But I’ve got a mortgage
and bad knees,
and I’m not trying to be a hero.
Just trying to keep the lights on
to get through the day
without screaming
in the parking lot.
They say the system’s broken;
maybe it is.
Sometimes, I wonder
if I’ve just been
standing in the wrong line
this whole time.
Too tired to move,
too old to care.
Waiting in the cold
Morning arrives cloaked in gray,
an indifferent haze that presses
against the windows, whispering,
Stay in bed. What’s the point?
The cold bites deep—
it settles in the bones, the mind,
where it gnaws away at warmth.
I move slower these days,
as though wading through syrup,
each movement agonizing
each task a mountain,
each hour a foggy expanse with
no glimmer of the distant shore.
Still, I light candles
and watch them flicker in defiance,
their fragile flames
casting light powerful enough
to remind me— that this darkness
will not last forever.
There is the coming spring,
a promise buried beneath the ice.
I hold on, even if by a thread
because I know
the sun will soon return
to warm the corners of
this heavy heart.
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