It remains to be seen

That whatever may be

Whatever anyone says

The worst of these days

Have been the best of my life

No matter grief

No matter strife

I will pull light to me

As a magnet pulls iron

And forge something new

Again and again again

The world is burning

And i

I am staring at a screen

Incapable of comprehending

The value of any action

It’s what we do

In the face of the unstoppable

We freeze in place

Deer in the headlights

And we wait

The world is a green cathedral

And this suits me today

As i sit in my pew

Upon my front porch

To ponder the great exhale

That is this sacrament called life

While arches and columns

Of ash and oak and spruce

Surround my walkway’s nave

Silent witnesses to this quiet penitent,

And the wind sings hymns in the leaves

Remember those times

When you just didn’t think

About anything really

You woke on summer Saturday

And vanished for the day

In the wild woods

On your bike

Climbing through windows

Exploring the abandoned

With abandon

And you never knew the meaning

Of words like anxiety, stress, or depression

You swam and climbed

You lived like this was forever

Like you never needed anything else

we are pressed up against the glass of this world
with our eyelids pried open and stapled to our heads
that we might consume EVERYTHING
every lifedeathbetrayallielovesexhatecrimedisaster
it all pours into us all of the time
and we would shut it all off but we are addicted
to the point that it will leave us corpses
bloated and grey bodies littering the world
still finding a way to ingest as much as possible
and than
maybe
a little more.

In the past few months my reading has amped up a tad. I have completed the following books which are really from across the spectrum of themes and styles.

• Catch and Kill, Ronan Farrow
• War On Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, Ronan Farrow
• I’m Glad my Mom Died, By Jennette McCurdy
• The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty
• Legion, William Peter Blatty
• In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
• Piranesi, Susanna Clark
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote
• Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari
• Everything is Tuberculosis, John Green
• A Billion Butterflies, A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory, Dr. Jagadish Shukla

I am currently reading:

• Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
• The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settlement Colonialism and Resistance from 1917-2017, Rashid Khalidi
• Interview With the Vampire, Anne Rice (rereading)
• Eat the World, Marina Diamandis
• Mindhunter, John Douglas & Mark Olshaker
• Letters and Notes From Prison, Antonio Gramsci

Once there were

A thousand, thousand voices

Then there was but one

Still now they have dwindled further

Until one has become none

And we find ourselves alone

Completely on our own

Standing in the silence

There are no words

Once so abundant

As the prairie grass

Only desert remains at the last.

Sitting still

At morn’s dawning

And everything

Is sounding the day

Every bird sings,

Every squirrel chatters,

In the distance

A dog,  bound and chained

In some fenced yard

Barks mournful

Regretting having ever left

The woods for these dopes,

While I,

I write words;

My songs, my chatter,

My mournful barks

Understood as much by others

As i understand

This wildlife cacophony

That plays meaningless about my head

Your soul is a song

That dances through my heart

It keeps time with the beats

And moves me through time;

Let it lull me too sleep

And greet me in the morn

Your soul is a song

Whose voice is compassion

Whose notes are empathy

Rising and falling

With the beauty

With the pain

Of the world

One year

The great tall spruce

Across the street

Was felled

By a powerful storm

That proud sentinel

That tower of life

Crashed to the street

Without warning

And it’s gone now

As if it were never there