words

what now
in the charred crater of this life
all these broken neural connections
reaching out to you
now in that other cavity
where the dead go to live
what now
every evening lost
in the infinite windings of what if
all of it lost in an instant
broken headlights
all of it, everything stolen
from you

2025sm

Every moment of my life

Races ahead of me

Like a child playfully bolting

from a loving parental hand

“wait, wait!” I call out, afraid

Time waits for no creature, no thing

And every verb I elicit is taken 

As if it never were at all

Always being, reaching outward

Please stay, please don’t go

2024sm

My hands make valleys

On your skin, your hips and your thighs

As I run my fingers along the curves 

Of your immaculate form

You writhe, 

We wake up, our eyes open for the first time

And from that moment on is an endless stream of incoming sensory stimuli, that the brain has to process, compress and store in real time, so that we may continue to be. Every particle, every wave. Existence. 

Move forward in time, we cease to be. There is no more processing. What do we become? What happens to that energy that spins at the center of consciousness? Surely, it must dissipate back into the infinite soup, all components stripped to their bare elements, beyond the sub atomic, beyond the quantum, into the unknowable. And then what?

The trees encode shadows on the ground.

2024sm

When the light comes swarming after

The shattered evening glow

A rush upon your tingling lips

Envelopes morning’s rude awakening

Where are you in this 

Your eyes, your fingertips

Elusive as the unfurling stretch of time

Day, night,

Where are you 

Are you with me?

My grip leaves valleyed trails

Upon your marble skin

Like ancient sculptures,

Wrought with dirty love

There you are

Curled up beside me

2023sm

Right there, hanging by a thread

Listening to the same thoughts endlessly

Like a mental junkie with zero remorse

Float through this life like o2 molecules

Cresting, stretching for that eternity

Keep reaching

2023sm

Turning over and over like a spiral

The mind grasps at the passing as photographs 

Pictograms illuminate the deep within

Each breath a tick, a tock

A fractional unit marking then from now

But if it could just cease for its own measure

This frequent domain

Swimming endlessly

At the edge of a great wave

But it moves on and on

Ever forward 

Carrying us toward the great nothing

The final moment

Another strike on the universal ledger

Of when

2023sm

“He likes me.”

A month ago he named a bottle of v8 Jerry

He never asks about Jerry

But boy Jerry sure asks about him 

“I’ll take him outside. Mr. Ladybug.”

I hear the storm door clack closed with a pneumatic hiss

Time stretches to the end and back

Then the door repeats

The sound of his little footfalls running down the hall

“Was playing with the bugs. I even found a rollypolly. Yeah I even found a rollypolly.”

I hope this is the memory that carries me into the after 

2023sm

The pain and the pressure. I awake each morning slowly, photons swirling in the canyons of my eyes, unfurling like a flower stretching toward the sun. I arise with a gentle purpose, a slight agency. My son rests a little longer, I sit in the morning light and watch the dew dissipate from the grass into the atmosphere. I feel only the pressure of the air as weather systems birth and perish in a breath, frantic like gas giants, frictionless like the cold reality of Neptune. Everything is exactly as it should be on the ground, at gravity’s dominion, and there is no time to worry about time, no rush, no fear, no shame, no guilt, no regret. All past moments are present in accordance with universal law, the sum of all previous waves present in this forward power. I write words as they leak from my mind, fulfilling whatever agreement my blood has made with those who came before to document and drive this engine onward, ever onward, this ancestral debt urging me to etch our collective existence into the stone of time. There are no towers wavering on the edge of architectural failure, no transmitters fluctuating and clawing at the electromagnetic spectrum’s strict laws. I close my eyes and still the photons flood the deep wells of my ocular cavities, swimming, like ancient fish, early lifeforms pure in nature and void of a prefrontal cortex, the first vertebrates discovering another dimension outside the water’s surface. There is no need for any chemical assistance, the brain and the mind working in tandem, parlaying peace against all odds. My son awakens and I feel his footfall upon the laminate flooring as he bounds through the house searching for me, fearlessly, as if it were all a game, every morning, noon and night a game with no stakes, winners or losers, a game simply existing for the sake of itself, its own calculus imprinted upon our little orbital lives. He finds me and we embrace, all smiles, laughter, sheer joy in this extraction of now. We paint, we play, we exist separately and together. There is no fury but for the raging of the cosmos, the physics of the system sustaining this moment, all memories combine effortlessly, endlessly, a serpent devouring its own tail, but no urgent feeling of failure or loss, no fear. No fear except that this will end, and even that is a distant vibration, the secret truth of everything, that all things end with or without our consent, and the light waxes and wanes but is always present, warm, welcoming, near and far, a soft embrace guiding us toward the horizon, toward each and own our zenith and our terminus. Night falls like a curtain, the stars erupt simultaneously and we retreat to our horizontal positions to maintain equilibrium, our bodies freeze as we dream like beings made from fables, hours of silence as we face the causeways of our lives unconsciously, safely, softly, before the cycle repeats. 

2023sm

I see your pale skin canvassed

By the glow of the television

What riddles we live within

These stories, those

You snore softly and occasionally mutter

Uncertain of your place in space and time

I softly whisper you back to sleep

Though I long for your flesh

Your spirit

The frequency of your moan 

Simultaneously high and low

We transgress antiquity

We lull and roll

Tasting one another 

Small ripples in the great pond of time

Urging one another onward

Moment to moment, 

Binary stars colliding out there beyond everything

Yet here we are now

Filling one another up

Lovely and depraved

Naked and unafraid

2023sm

Disappear

As I try to capture them

The thoughts

The essence of thought, 

the granular resolution

Of all these pixels of being

I feel as I feel

But how, how to translate

This deeply embedded

Solitary, subjective, experiential

Ripple

That moves through me

To another

I listen to and observe your love

And although I know, intrinsically, definitively,

That I am I and I begin and end in the same sentence

My sentience is speculative at best

That I am not the same

I cannot fill certain voids

All undulations of meaning are defined by the depths of their nulls

Everything is this way, it is the universal BIOS

and versed as I am

In the ultimate powerlessness to it all

I burn in the current 

Of all this processing

Another wire or strand or link

Dissipating purpose as heat

Do not speed read 

Inhale every word

For each was crafted, chosen

From the small inventory of communication

That is available to this wavering spirit

2023sm