Us Is Now

Category: Reflections

the softening.

There were difficult days
Days I wasn’t sure I had more tomorrows
Tomorrow wasn’t welcome anyway
Tomorrow promised little more than more of today

I can still feel those days in my bones
Saved like the rings of a tree in my layers
Deeper down below the surface every year
The foundation every new day is built upon

What I remember most is the fight
The biting and scratching for air, for light
A thousand hours of stolen smiles
Hours spent soaring, soured by the inevitable collision with the earth

What have I done I asked
Bridges destroyed, no exits in sight
Every mirror haunted, my face shattered
What have I done. Not a question so much as a prayer

It’s softer today
If I conjure the vision up clear enough, I still feel the splinters
The days are not a fever dream
The nights, not a nightmare

Back then, there was no horizon
Today, though… the sun is melting upward beyond the cool grey ocean
Bright and brighter still
Still, sometimes I miss those days

There’s shame in admitting I always will.

May 29, 2025
Death Rattle

You caught me in the death rattle
In the dying final breaths of a former life
A life clinging with sharp claws and poison fangs
Cloaked in a patchwork of burrs, evidence of the weeds wrestled with
Some days I march forward looking ahead at the path, dappled with sunlight
Some days I must tend to the broken skin that the claws drew open
Forward forward always forward
Progress only apparent to the patient observer
The former life more distant day by day
The irony that all there is and ever was is right now

April 4, 2025
Nevermore

It changes shape
But doesn’t fade
The fire flickers
Always burning
Days go by
Some days forgotten
A faint lost smell
Old love begotten
A poignant void
A pregnant pause
A remembrance of a nevermore future
Held in a quiet, heavy breath
Here again and beyond
Those gentle white wings of death

March 31, 2025
Not Today

Not today
Not tomorrow
In sorrow
We borrow
We whisper
We pray
Not now
Not today

Eyes glassy
Hearts shattered
A dozen years
Just one mattered

Not today, not today
A promise, a prayer
A spell we incant
A mantra we chant
We sing it to sleep
To wash it away
There’s one thing I know
It’s still not today

February 13, 2025
Residue

Remnants left behind
Residue, reminds
Like a knot in a delicate and precious gold chain
There’s no untangling the threads that bind the memories strung together like Christmas lights, one feeding the next
Not convinced that I would if I could
Feels good somehow like a painful tooth you can’t stop touching with your tongue
Fewer and farther between but the breeze of what was, and the picture of a white house still haunts the space between my eyes and my eyelids
Grease stains, scars, a particular time of day and a fading smell all stare blankly back at me, daring us turn around
Memories of the future, like photos from a movie scene, coffee stained and blurred by tears
What remains?
Residue

January 16, 2025
Snow

We haven’t even seen the snow
We haven’t had our moment in the sun
A thousand slow dances still to come
Half a lifetime to grow old
We haven’t even seen the snow

November 5, 2024
Darkness

There’s the darkness of the night.
The absence of light.
Where shadows and shapes dance and wrestle for prominence.
No telling which you can grasp and shove and which the sun would chase into nothingness
Viscous, like a silent bath for all things matter and form.
Squinting against it as if the tension in your insignificant eye muscles will convince the darkness to give way to something, anything, not that.
Resistance has no effect.
At least none that would chase the ghosts out from under the box spring.
Neither Logic nor leverage will speed up the sunrise.
Regardless of any promise that I will see the suns golden fingers clawing out from behind the darkened horizon, they likely will, like every day before.

October 31, 2024
Waiting

The waiting
We sit and we wait
We wonder and chase
Tomorrow is coming
Slowly embrace
A new pattern in place
The pain to replace
Longing and hoping
The sunrise to break
The dark night
The cold shadow
the endless tirade
Of unsleeping nights
Of days upon days
Bleed into each
No chance to recover
The lost time
The lost faith
The pain to replace

October 31, 2024
Us Is Now

Falling asleep last night
In the moon light
Caught a glimpse of my hand
And thought
How absolutely wild
I’m made of old butterfly wings, stardust, ocean waves and dinosaur teeth.
I’m used up memories ground to dust, recycled and reimagined
A reanimated spirit into form, a messy container for this impossible emotion.
I look around this absurd play we put on.
We sing and we dance to convince ourselves we’re ok
This menagerie of often pain and sometimes pleasure
I float in the sun and drown in the moon.
Drawn by a force like the tides, pushed… pulled… pushed and pulled again
An ocean wave crashing against the rocky shores for eternity

Like trying to grasp a moonlit cloud, we chase the elusive whispers of our hearts, only to find that the moment we think we’ve captured it, it turns to vapor. And we discover that love was never a destination, but the gentle hum of the universe itself, resonating within us all along. We embrace the longing as the sweet ache of our own existence, reminding us that we are but droplets in the vast ocean of connection, forever yearning to merge with the infinite.

Midway between the sun and the moon,
At twilight
Where the day meets the night time stands still.
For a moment, US is now.

October 31, 2024
Music Stopped

The music stopped and the clocks are ticking.
All the songs tell the same sad story.
I’ll let you be, to dance alone.
We’re only words now, I’m broken.

Don’t look at me like that anymore.
Don’t remind me what I was fighting for.
Let me forget, go back to before.
We’re only words now, I’m broken.

October 31, 2024