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.

Sometimes I leave these things way too late… but I got some words on the page so… here’s what ya get today.

Tired

Eyes closed tight,
but my mind hums, restless,
chasing thoughts like shadows.
The bed, too soft—
the night, too bright.
I wait for sleep,
but time slips away,
quiet as a snowy night. 

Let There Be

The page stares back at me
its emptiness more presence 
than absence.

The pen hesitates—
or maybe it’s just waiting for me.
An occasional flicker of
something that dissolves 
when I look too closely.

Words in my mind,
scatter like dust,
like sand in the wind.

I can’t see.
I press harder,
demanding sense,
demanding beauty,
demanding anything to fill the space.

Perhaps the struggle
is the poem itself. 
It will not be forced.

I’m left with the weight of trying,
the ache of creation,
the intense insistence
that something will emerge,
even if it doesn’t.