As I drive through the west
realizing all the hills were built with water
I remember our islands will become plateaus one day
the motto of the world is “no existence is infinite”
global warming or not
the earth will find a way to change
it’s Earths way, and the highway
She needed my pen and writing pad
to write her own words, interpreted
toddler scribbles in between the lines
to a poem.
The two-year old was careful as she
scrolled her delicate marks
across the page, a balanced dance
like the gazelle.
Her shapes and curves,
ancient petroglyphs carved
into my poem with hidden meaning
for a volatile world.
Her gentle sceptre
resounds with joyful
marks, a Latin hymn
resonating from the angels.
Reaching and yearning
Definitive
Human attributes
Primitive
cravings.
Ravenous monsters
Deduced to this?
Emptiness haunts us,
A Self-induced
thirst.
Restriction, taboo
Unless, “The Food”
Addiction, to you;
Numbness,
ecstasy.
Sipping, slide away
With the wine wave
Dripping, with escape
From perpetual
flow.
Convincing, I am,
Eyes blazing blue
Must be desired
Unhinged, then
unglued.
Yes, insatiable.
Contradictions
Implored to ensure
Infliction
remains.
Wine. Control. Favored.
Three simple musts
But just like me, they
Are never
enough.
Harsh weather and long days
and cross animals tearing
at reins and children walking rows
and scrubbing walls and tossing balls
and parents swinging beneath
oak trees chewing tobacco
and tapping their thighs,
all swirling in a glass bottle
on a sea of glass bottles.
These are the stories pulled
from a cavern of blood, cacophonies
of voices once attached to throats
and the hearts below, and then
hands of cancer and pills
and torn calendar pages plucking
each into its own transparent-green
container for a journey across oceans.
This is a cave of echoes with a family name
hanging at its mouth, left empty
and vibrating, left hollow and cool to the skin.
Blue kisses and yellow hugs,
holding onto what is and not
what could’ve been.
Three feet from the cliff’s edge
and I’m scooting forward to
dangle my feet from
the edge of the world.
You’re a safe distance behind,
looking at the tree bark.
Snakes are tangled in the brush
in animosity or amour I don’t know,
probably both.
I touch with green and you with pink,
we spread the colors over eachother,
make ourselves anew.
EGO can make you such a tool
Hiding phones and pretending
Hanging on to hurt, that you caused too, distorting motivation, boundaries and leaving the feeling of Middle School
Egos are strange things indeed
Overwhelming to disdain to love to pain
Sowing the discontent of YOU in your daily seed
Because it was you, I couldn’t be feigned
EGO is why you always doubt, needing an elixir to make you shout that you are OK before YOU are truly found out.
Sassie 10/06/2025
I yearned for darkness
Consuming all my desire
Until I didn’t yearn for anything anymore.
But now that I’ve poked my head out
Into the light
I want
I want.
Consuming my insides
How much I need
Give it to me.
Don’t.
Please.
No.
I push and pull my aching to and fro
Convincing myself I don’t need it
I don’t want it
When it’s clawing its way up through
My throat and out of my mouth
Trapping itself in my nostrils until
It realizes there’s nowhere else to go
Except to reach brain matter.
Where it knaws and rots and squelches out of my ears.
Make it someone else’s problem until it chews them up from the inside out
And they have to squash it
I self cannibalize.
I eat myself alive until there’s nothing left but everything
And it’s too much
I’m too much.
Taking the catering
truck to Carlisle
for an afternoon wedding
enough food
prepared in back
to feed six hundred
of Nicholas county’s
most prominent
and well heeled
the meals were cooked
at four this morning,
how the kitchen clanged,
all hands on deck,
a coordinated
chaos, a whirlwind
of culinary arts
choreographed
spontaneously
chopping, slicing
grinding, kneading
bobbing, weaving
metal pans make
a racket, oven doors
open and slam
scents of mornay sauce
and roast beef
heavy in the humid heat
a cook stirs sticks
of butter into fifty pounds
of mashed potatoes
stations emerge
as the dinners complete
to pack and assemble
wrap and label
bundle up in
insulated blankets
when it’s all loaded
they take five minutes
to eat, then quickly leave,
running a little late,
he grabs his keys
and phone
from the counter,
realizes he left his
wallet at home
but there’s no time
for retrieving it,
rich folks don’t like to wait.
Halfway to the wedding site
in his rear view
he sees the lights,
red and blue,
the siren says
“Pull over”
the officer doesn’t ask
“Do you know why
I’m stopping you?”
but says instead,
“Where are you from
and why are you here?”
he knows he was going
six miles faster than the limit,
prays to God for only a ticket,
she sits beside him,
frozen, only one month
out of Mexico,
she grabs his knee
tells him to speak,
whispers please
He tells the officer
he is a cook
from Lexington
the officer suspects
his accent
and his skin
“Open up the back,
let’s take a look”
But the sheer
quantity of food
leaves him unconvinced
“You don’t have your license?”
“Don’t you know that
we have laws in this country?”
she gets an idea,
grabs some paperwork
from the clipboard on the dash
it is the work ticket
for the wedding.
The officer raises his eyebrow.
“Oh this food is for
the Judge’s daughter’s
shin dig!”
“He’d have my ass
if I don’t let you go”
At the event
she thinks she’s
never seen
a lawn so green,
a landscape so lush,
so much opulence
after six years
saving she came
to him,
so they might live
a life together,
to work
side by side
long days and nights,
to feed large parties,
and she only hopes
that one day
he and she, too
will have a grand
wedding party,
with friends and family
all about, of wine
and song and dance
she dreams,
and afterwards,
she won’t have to clean.
“Everybody is/ employed by the universe;
Stars, out standing in their field.”
— Coleman Davis
This is our call to action; this is where the trumpet sounds.
This is where the stars decide to gather up their gases
or allow surrounding darkness lull righteousness to sleep.
Speak about the judges. Remember the time of Kings.
Who did evil in the sight of the Lord, and who walked
in the way of David, his father?
Tell me the tales of men and women who stood up
when the nations chose collapse; remind me of Josiah
and how nurture cannot indenture us as slaves
to fate. How the heart sewn into the fabric
of a day can and must respond with feet fitted
for action. How the wise must humble themselves
to fools—if they are to change, to grow, to shine!
Do not allow this present darkness dwindle—
to but kindle. Ignite! Be ignited!
Do not think yourself so small, your light so dim
as to shrink, to shy away, to sit in secret corners
of the existential, cosmic room twiddling
thumbs, in bed with complacency. This is our Call to action!
This is where the final trumpets sound! Ball up your fists!
Rise—rise to your feet, you people, you nations,
you bits of dirty soil with hearts embedded
with the Spirit and the Stuff of Stars!
Without Him who gave you light was not
anything made that was made. And that light,
your light, this light that burns inside us all,
shineth in the darkness;
and the dark
comprehended it not! Wake up, Zion!
Do something! Do anything! Do not
be led astray by will-0′-the-wisp words. This is our call to action!
The trumpets are sounding, resounding, bidding, screaming!
The very stones are crying out—
while the scions of stars
merely quench themselves
with tears.
