The Problem of Mental Causation

Thought moves the hand, or the hand moves thought?
Each nerve obeys a hidden, wordless throne.
Mind and body wrestle, endlessly caught.

What first ignites the deed that reason sought?
The pulse arrives before its cause is known.
Thought moves the hand, or the hand moves thought?

I name the will, yet every name is bought
by older laws beneath the weathered stone.
Mind and body wrestle, endlessly caught.

Some silent engine turns what cannot halt,
its gears concealed beneath the flesh alone.
Thought moves the hand, or the hand moves thought?

Each choice emerges from a shadowed vault,
a harvest sown by seeds we never own.
Mind and body wrestle, endlessly caught.

If freedom speaks, its voice is faint with doubt;
I hear its echo, never hear its tone.
Thought moves the hand, or the hand moves thought?
Mind and body wrestle, endlessly caught.

Paleogene Sleep

I wish I had stood where the heavens gave
their burning testament above the wave,
and watched the forests kneel beneath the fire
while every hill consumed its own desire,
my shadow entering the common grave.

I would have welcomed stone made bright with speed,
the oceans closing over root and reed.
The burden of the living mind would fade
among the ash the ruined daylight made,
where every pulse surrendered need by need.

I grieve that I awoke too late to fall
beneath that ancient cataclysmic call.
I linger where the lesser endings start,
still wearing this exhausted animal heart
instead of sleeping with the first of all.

Trepanation Explanation

Why did I drill the small auroral hole in my skull?
Ask the moon, ask the tremor in the tide-pool of my blood –
for I cannot answer without unscrolling the whole
chronicle of the self I abandoned like a ship too long in port,
its ropes frayed, its hull barnacled with yesterday’s uneaten hours.
I dropped out, yes – dropped outward, I should say,
as though the world were a shell and I were tunneling back
toward the first seabed of thought.

Turn on, turn in, turn the key of the vertebrae –
and there it was: a new life unfurling like phosphorescence
on a night shore, a trembling alphabet of light
rising from each wave-crest of sensation.
The drugs – oh, those tiny chemistries,
those alchemical insects humming the scrollwork of the invisible –
lifted the floorboards of perception,
and suddenly the quotidian corridor
filled with wind, with thunder, with the blue-violet candescence
of things as they are before we bury them in names.

I reached there: the inadmissible plateau,
the upland where the mind stands unhelmeted under its own stars,
chanting the private liturgy of pulse and filament.
Was it crazy, or what –
this decision to open a skylight in the bone?
No, no: it was the sanest thing, the dearly sane,
the one act that felt proportionate to the hurricane within.

But it required obstacles to be wooed,
difficulties to be courted like shy beasts at the edge of a glade.
There were nights when the drill’s imagined whine
echoed in my skull before metal ever touched it,
and I had to steady my breath against whole genealogies of doubt.
There were days when I rehearsed the incision
the way a monk might rehearse a psalm,
mouthing the syllables of courage to no one.

Ah still, the aperture.
Still, the opening like a secret harbor
in a coastline I had long mistaken for unbroken stone.
And through it – what?
A slow pressure, that ancient stranger of the blood,
slipping outward just enough
to redraw the inner cartography.
Some claim it is madness to grant the brain
a second window onto the world,
but I found myself calmer,
as though the storm-cloud had been given
a pet door through which to prowl.

Afterward, I tried – fumbling, earnest,
ridiculous in my missionary zeal –
to bring these discoveries to the public square,
to hold up the soft lantern of my experiment
like a lighthouse flame for others lost
in the opiate fogs and bureaucracies of their own minds.
But how do you persuade the unbroken-headed
that the breach is a blessing?
How do you explain that the skull, too,
must learn to breathe?

And so my later life became
a long, shimmering attempt to understand
what the operation had truly altered –
a review of days like sifting sands,
each grain a memory of thought clarified,
or passion unsealed, or sorrow passing through me
with a strange new tact,
as though grief itself had found the new doorway
and bowed politely on its way out.

I do not yet know the final judgement.
Perhaps no one ever does.
But I walk with the quiet sense of a lighthouse tender
who has finally entered the lantern room
and cleaned the last occlusion from the glass,
letting the beam pour out
over the black, beseeching waters.

Little Devils

They swarm in corners, tiny claws on bone,
a whispering legion in the pulse and skin;
each one a mirror of the mind’s sharp ache,
collecting every tremor of my own,
and gnawing quietly where hope had been.
They squat upon the chest, unseen, obscene,
their murmur presses like a tide of flame,
and every thought I lift becomes their prey,
a festering delight they shape and claim.

I feel them crawl beneath the hair, the nail,
a thousand judgments filed against my name;
their wings beat hot against the hollowed brain.
They chant of error, folly, slow travail,
of wasted hours that only stain remain.
Each breath invites them further into vein,
and yet, perverse, I lean into the hive,
for every sting confirms I am alive,
and every prick reminds the mind to strive.

All, One Neck

The earth bares forth its patient throat. The fog
threads tendon after tendon through the bog,
then buttons valleys with a surgeon's thread
that stitches living muscle to the dead.

Pines rake green lice from every passing gale.
The wind complains in resin, bark, and shale.
A river hauls its chain of mirrors slow
through clay that learned a million years ago

the grammar of erosion. Roots recite
their damp scholastic disputatio by night.
Moonlight, waterlogged, acquires the taste
of silver marrow, beautifully waste.

All evening heaven studies how to fall.
Cloud enters cloud. They misremember all
the treaties signed by weather. Stars withdraw,
like plague-house shutters closing without law.

Tomorrow leaks beneath yesterday's skin.
The dawn arrives before the dusk walks in.
Midnight flowers underneath the noon.
The wolves rehearse eclipse against the moon

whose orbit now declines to orbit. Time
misbuttons every hour into rhyme.
Calendars molt. Their paper vertebrae
grow feathers, fly, return as mouldering hay.

Language catches fungal bloom. Each noun
erupts with moss. Verbs trickle upside-down.
Granite conjugates the rainfall's tense.
The commas graze. The vowels climb the fence.

Philologists accuse the rocks of fraud.
The raven answers, impeccably awed,
then pockets every footnote in its beak.
The scholars spend six centuries to speak

the sentence that a salmon understood
while shouldering upstream through stone and wood.
The octopus computes with dreaming ink.
The jackdaw edits thought before we think.

What theorem blooms inside the spider's snare?
What grammar nests beneath the polar bear?
Who proved the tongue distinguished ape from saint
when wolves decline abstraction without faint?

Arithmetic perfumes the honeycomb.
The whale's deep calculus outlives the tome.
Slime mould elects the shortest road through rain
while senators debate the word terrain.

I keep a zoology beneath my ribs.
Hatreds hatch with translucent eyelids, gills,
compound ocelli polishing the gloom,
each memory another fertile womb.

They breed by fission in a glassless dish
where every wound invents another wish.
One hatred suckles numbers from a bone.
One flowers cartilage instead of stone.

One smiles through orthodontics made of frost.
One counts each tenderness already lost.
One molts into a parliament of flies
that legislate through thousand-faceted eyes.

Linnaeus coughs. Darwin rearranges dust.
Bataille baptizes appetite with rust.
Cioran oils despair till every seam
reflects the architecture of a dream.

Weil stoops to gather gravity like wheat.
Girard hears hoofbeats echo every street.
Plotinus finds the root beneath the root.
Eckhart plants silence in forbidden fruit.

Heraclitus laughs rivers into flame.
Kristeva salts the abattoir of name.
Agamben maps the threshold of the throat.
Taubes folds doomsday into every note.

Their pages mildew gently in the rain.
Earthworms annotate each mouldering vein.
The archives sweeten into fungal loam.
The footnotes find my marrow more than home.

A beautiful circulation. Rot
becomes another commentary wrought
by mouths without a language, yet they know
what all our lexicons forget to grow.

Each notification blooms like mold.
Its gospel's measured hourly, bought and sold.
The glowing screen absolves us with a swipe.
Desire matures before the fruit is ripe.

The market genuflects before its chart.
Algorithms cultivate the heart.
Each heartbeat enters metrics, graphs, and shares.
The soul accepts cookies with vacant prayers.

Augustine refreshes every page.
Debord scrolls onward through the mirrored cage.
Ellul watches machinery take root.
Weber trims ascetic branches into fruit.

Some cherub audits carbon in the rain.
A seraph balances actuarial pain.
An angel scans biometrics at the gate.
A demon moderates the town hall's hate.

Caesar posts tomorrow's afternoon.
Hildegard uploads another moon.
Plotinus dreams a neural labyrinth
whose neurons chant in Attic labyrinth.

Babel babbles beautifully askew.
Animal births anima anew.
Logos fractures into lo, go, then leaves
its golden husk among the autumn sheaves.

Earth whispers humus. Homo answers hume.
The vowels flower. Consonants exhume
forgotten beasts whose alphabetic hides
shed punctuation where the darkness glides.

Acts of excess blossom into glass.
Cathedrals germinate in molten brass.
A tyrant suckles orchids made of wire.
Stock exchanges photosynthesize fire.

The oceans chew through continents of foam.
Plastic pollinates the whale's blue home.
The satellites bloom lichens in the sky.
Advertisements teach the saints to buy.

How scholarly the massacre appears.
Each theorem irrigated by our fears.
Each white paper perfumed with powdered bone.
Each empire harvesting a seed alone.

Yet foxglove rings its poisonous delight.
Mushrooms illuminate the buried night.
A cedar meditates in fragrant sleep.
The trilobites remember in the deep.

I dream my palms upon mundi's great vein,
where granite pulses underneath the rain.
The arteries of basalt softly drum.
Whole oceans gather where the fingers numb.

I feel extinct anatomies return.
Old feathers smoulder where no feathers burn.
The mammoth's breath condenses in my lung.
Future birds rehearse an unborn tongue.

The pulse invades my pulse until each beat
confuses blood with continental heat.
Identity commits a sweet solecism.
Bone acquires botanical baptism.

The earth inclines.

Its throat remains unveiled.

History flowers where the flesh has failed.
Every beast, theologian, king, machine,
every cryptid lurking in the green,

every saint whose halo rotted through,
every market making gods from blue,
every child asleep beneath the loam,
every exile searching still for home,

enters one impossible refrain
whose every rhyme resembles growth and pain,
whose every slant rhyme wounds because it heals,
whose cadence thinks, whose metaphor conceals

a mouth beneath the mountain's breathing hide.

I hear it.

Then I answer.

Then divide.

Belaboring the Pointless

You pace the parquet, prey and paraclete, incomplete, discreetly beat
By clocks that mock in lockstep rhyme - the temps perdu, the stale repeat.
You call it Sehnsucht, call it lack, call it the black-backed debt of dawn,
A pawn withdrawn from every lawn where hope once grazed, then wandered on.

Your mirror majors in derision, makes incision after incision;
Each vision splits with cruel precision - prism-schism, self-collision.
“Memento mori,” murmurs mortar in the wall behind your bed;
The plaster pastor speaks much faster than the living in your head.

You count the costs in ghostly glosses, losses crossing other losses;
Your thoughts wear grooves like ancient roads through bogs and barrows, graves and mosses.
The moon hangs loose above the roofs, a noose of light, a pale lampoon;
It croons old tunes in silver ruins, out of tune and much too soon.

You study joy philologically, etymologically, pathologically;
Trace every bliss to an abyss almost comically, chronologically.
The French say ennui, Germans Weltschmerz, Latin mutters vanitas;
You hoard them all like stamps from hell, each phrase a small and splendid glass.

For every night refuses flight. The dark grows sharp; the dark grows bright.
The wound of being keeps accruing interest through the hours of white.
You curse the curse in seven tongues; you spit at stars; you damn the sky;
But still the lungs conduct their business, still they billow, still they sigh.

And there’s the joke that breaks no yoke, the pun no sun can quite outshine:
You seek an end to end all ends, yet endings fail to stay in line.
The grave remains a grammar mark imagined by the aching brain;
Meanwhile the sentence staggers onward through the weather, through the rain.

And you endure - not noble, merely local to the hurt you bear;
A tenant in a tenement of air, despair, repair, compare.
The years file past in masks of glass; the heart keeps artfully askew.
And every dawn, that tawdry con, arrives and rhymes itself with you.

Blooming

My ribs they shelter
a growing season.

My lungs they cultivate
a secret orchard.

Each breath scatters
a few more stars
through the fertile black soil
of the self.

My transformation proceeds
with exquisite courtesy.

A whisper.
A shimmer.
A slow transfer
of title deeds.

One day
the final document will arrive.

And I will sign.

The signature will flower
across the page.

Somewhere beneath it
another hand will continue
writing.

Cup of Unbecoming

O children born to gnaw at flesh and bone,
and tread the path where hope has never shone;
the first, best gift: to never rise,
the second: swift, unclouded demise.

Come hemlock, cup of merciless reprieve,
let numbness veil the eyes that strain to grieve;
let thought dissolve, let veins forget their song,
and loose the chains that fetter too long.

Remember Bruno, flame-enthroned,
whose tongue defied, whose body groaned;
the fire devoured, the crowd looked on,
yet truth endured when he was gone.

Such is the jest of gods and men –
to burn the wise, to praise, and then
to raise the gallows, pour the draught,
and mock the lips by anguish quaffed.

Till all is ended, breathless, blind, alone,
till birth and death are equal, dust to bone.

Ten Thousand Mouths

The desert bore no name upon its breath,
No sigil scrawled in sun or dune or bone;
Yet there it crouched – where thirst makes pact with death –
A temple hewn from aeons not our own.
Its pillars wept with mouths of dust and flint,
And every silence sang some whispered hint.

No mortal chisel wrought those gaping walls,
No priest designed that hymn-devouring nave –
Each spire, a scream that time no longer stalls,
Each stone, a tongue that licked a godless grave.
Through sun-bleached halls where none but wind has trod,
The ruin moaned the unsayable of God.

It spoke – not once, but always, evermore –
A choir of mouths in sandstone aperture,
Their chants like prayers drowned in metaphor,
Too vast, too full of teeth to still endure.
The voice was hunger. Meaning? Never known.
It praised a name too large to stand alone.

O thou, whose face no worshipper hath seen,
Whose breath is space, whose thought devours the stars –
Thy house remains, where all that might have been
Now curls in hymns through shadow-whetted scars.
The mouths speak not for thee – they are thy mind,
A latticework of hunger unconfined.

Once, pilgrims came, with candles, chants, and bones,
To beg for dreams or rend their guilt in flame –
But none returned with skin or sacred tones,
Just sand-swept robes and mouths that knew thy name.
Now only jackals pass, and they too leer –
For jackals know when old gods linger near.

I came alone, in dusk’s unfaithful light,
And heard the walls begin their ashen moan.
Each wordless verse reared up in soundless fright –
The hymn was sung, but not for me alone.
Something within me opened – cracked – became
Another mouth through which it spoke its name.

The wind still whines through throatless, howling stone,
A song of praise no ear was shaped to bear.
The temple lives, though flesh and time are gone –
It speaks, and all the desert bends to hear.
O traveler – kneel. The wind will teach you much.
It feeds on prayers. It waits for you to touch.

Why Bother?

I build, rebuild, in cold, precise refrain,
each proof a link within a tightening chain,
the forms align, immaculate, severe,
while every pulse grows fainter, harder, dear,
no passage cut, no mercy in the scheme,
each theorem trims the flesh to fit the dream,
and leaves me bound within a lucid pain.

The will inclines toward rest that will not start,
a hush that gathers, intimate, apart,
yet reason keeps its vigil, stern, awake,
each axiom another clasp to take,
till even longing learns to speak in law,
and drafts its end with disciplined awe,
a final line inscribed across the heart.

Periodically Tabled

I take a pill that tastes like grace,
a tiny mercy just encased.
Another dose to calm the day,
and file tomorrow far, far away.

The market calls it progress made  –
a polished form of lemonade.
It sweetens cells with careful art
and charges up the aching heart.

We pay in time, we pay in sleep;
the balance sheet is ours to keep.
The remedy arrives by mail  –
a miracle with interest scale.

It treats the world by smoothing pain,
and leaves the invoice in the vein.

Blue Light Psalm

I have loved you in pixels,
In the cathedral glow of screens,
Where devotion refreshes every second
And longing buffers endlessly.

Your face arrives compressed,
Your voice a small miracle of code.
Even desire must pass through servers
And be approved.

We leave our hearts on read.
We archive tenderness.
We type what we cannot say
And delete it
All too easily.

O modern love –
So public, so lonely –
We touch the world constantly
And rarely feel it touch back.

Drip-Fed

The feed refreshes with a fish-mouth flick,
a gill of glow gulping the plankton-news;
each thumb a tiny thaumaturge of quick
resurrections tailored to attention's shoes.
The screen unsleeps. The pixels pearl and preen.
A thousand notifications pollinate the nerve.
The eye becomes an aye becomes a machine
for granting every appetite a verb.

We breakfast on catastrophes in flakes.
We spoon up spoon-fed spoons of secondhand alarm.
The algorithm algorhythms through our wakes,
counting pulse by pulse, harm by purchased charm.
A headline hedges. A rumor ruminates.
A fact fractures into faction, then into feed.
Meaning molts. Significance migrates.
Every need grows knees and learns to breed.

The scroll unrolls its scrollwork. Soulwork too.
Each gesture genuflects before the glass.
The present tense grows tents within the view,
whole cities of attention built to pass.
An outrage enters salted, cured, preserved,
fit for long consumption, shelf-life grief.
A grief becomes a brief. A brief gets served.
The sentence seeks conviction and relief.

The good appears with absolution bundled,
shrink-wrapped in smiles and frictionless acclaim.
The bad arrives leveraged, stacked, and fundled,
a blackened dividend payable in blame.
We spend it lavishly. We spend it twice.
We spend tomorrow's outrage yesterday.
The soul accepts promotional sacrifice.
The conscience clips a coupon on the way.

And noon expands beyond all natural measure.
No evening enters. Shadow loses trade.
The clock develops chronic overstature.
Time itself becomes a brightly lit arcade.
A million dawns remain unborn, unfathered,
their gold still folded somewhere in the seam.
Around the bell of self the hours gather,
iron filings circling a private dream.

The metrics bloom. The numerals propagate.
Every count recounts the counter of the count.
I feel my inner weather bureaucrate,
turning rainfall into figures to amount.
My laughter leaves receipts.
My sorrows audit clean.
Even memory invoices its retreats.
Even longing asks what longing means.

Then comes the hush beneath accumulation,
the quiet sum beneath the summed-up sum.
A cemetery hidden in computation,
a ledger where all columns finally come.
Each swipe a little sanding of the spirit.
Each click a clerk inscribing further loss.
I hear the arithmetic inherit
the burden once assigned to god or cross.

The feed refreshes. I compress with it.
A mutual haunting. A mirrored consumption.
Bit by bit by bit by bit by bit,
a feast of gradual self-assumption.
The screen keeps offering immortal little morsels,
bright sugar discs of never-enough light.
I taste the future whitening into fossils.
I watch the day ossify into night.

I must set down the thumb that served as stylus.
And close the mouth that learned to feed on glow.
The bell keeps ringing, though it rings behind us.
The river totals what the banks still owe.
Tonight I choose an exit over endless entry.
Tonight I leave the ledger to itself.
I shelve my name among the unsent century,
extinguish the account,
and join the shelf.

Frozen in the Dark

The pale visitor rose above my bed,
her frozen gaze a weight upon my chest,
high breasts like moonlit ruins overhead,
the shadowed grove between her white skin pressed,
each whispered sigh a promise I might fall,
her laughter threading silence through my head,
and drew my failing soul toward the pall.

I could not move, could not refuse her claim,
her hand a frost upon my weary heart,
each breath a tide that whispered only shame,
the world dissolved, its mercy torn apart,
I felt the dark invite me to the deep,
its cold enough to steal my final sleep,
and leave no echo of my broken start.

The Covenant

There’s an oath beneath every sentence – 
breathed into the shape of grammar,
a covenant made in the quiver
between syllables.
One mouth meeting another
in a contract older than lips.

Mind calls it the cooperative principle.
But the body knows better.
The body calls it need.
The need to be touched
in a place no hand can reach –
not quite the soul,
but something nearby,
aching.

You’ve felt it too, haven’t you?
That moment in a conversation
when everything tilts –
not into love,
not yet –
but into possibility.
A pause that hangs
like a secret about to be confessed
or undressed.

Say enough.
Say it right.
Say it bare.
That’s the rule.
We don’t talk to share facts.
We talk to seduce.
To draw breath across the skin
of another’s listening.

Even lies play by the rules –
the tongue must still curl just so,
must still taste the outline
of what could be true.

There’s a rhythm to honesty,
but betrayal has its own melody.
It hums under your words
like heat under a locked door.
Even that,
if done gently,
can be forgiven.

Because what matters isn’t what we say –
it’s how.
It’s always how.

A look held too long.
A word dropped like a hand
on a bare shoulder.
A sentence slowed
as if unbuttoning itself.

We smuggle desire into the folds of speech.
We wrap meaning in tone,
gesture,
breath –
until it slips past logic
and lands between two ribs
where knowing becomes ache.

In the temple of speech,
we are not honest.
We are aroused.

Each phrase a finger tracing
what we cannot touch.
Each nod a sigh disguised.

What is language, really,
but a truce between minds
too hungry to be alone?

Novus Annus, Eaedem Curae

Earth, my foundation, my path firm as a thought unsaid;
Water, river of whispers, flow beyond thy own banks,
Carry the abundance that forgets to arrive,
Spilling yet never arrives empty, paradox of plenty.
Fire, spark and sigh of ambition’s quiet tyranny,
Do not consume me too soon, nor leave me cold;
Air, whisper your wisdom – your fickle, feathered favor,
To tickle my mind awake while the stars nap.

Jupiter, large-hearted lord of the increase, extend your long, long hand,
Bury in my lap a wealth that cannot be counted,
Venus, clandestine giver of love and luminous pity,
Toss the ripe fruit of passion onto this sullen clay;
Mercury, you mercurial messenger, swift with pranks and profits,
Deliver the joys of gain folded in riddles,
Saturn, black-haired sentinel of restraint,
Smite my foolish losses, or dress them in irony.

By the tincture of gold, of sun-kissed aurum,
And by the rare quintessence, which is neither here nor fully there,
I weave words like threads of moonlight through a net of shadow.
As above, so below, as within, so without,
A palindrome of universe – prosperity curls inward,
While doubt evaporates, leaving only the smell of rare herbs
And the faint tang of destiny.

With salt, I purify, and with salt, I renew;
I rub the corners of the cosmos as one might an old violin,
By the powers of the One, ineffable and unpronounceable,
I breathe into many, and call it multiplicity.
This year will be fruitful, this year will shine –
Or, perhaps, merely reflect the glint of stars
In puddles of our own making.

I call upon the moons of Mars and the laughter of Venus,
Upon the silence of Neptune and the cunning of Mercury,
To dance upon the tangled braid of my intention;
A choreography of chance, a masquerade of inevitables.
O ironies of the firmament, speak in tongues,
Twist meaning like a vine around the pillar of my desire,
Spell me forward into the orchard of the improbable.

By the alchemist’s art, by the philosopher’s sigh,
By the sacred light of the stars that dream of themselves,
By the secret syllables that no mouth dares utter,
By the quivering, incandescent hum of life itself,
As I will, so be it.
Let it be both a blessing and a curse,
A promise and a riddle,
A gold coin turned in the palm of infinity.

The Black Velvet Band

The Black Velvet Band is a traditional folk song with roots in Ireland and the British Isles. It tells the story of a young man who is tricked by a beguiling woman and sent to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) as punishment. Like many folk songs, it has been passed down through generations, each singer shaping the story in small ways.

I wanted to create my own version, as I relate deeply to the sense of fate and misfortune overtaking ordinary life. 

 

 • • • 

Her neck arched pale – a swan in flight –
Yet terror slept beneath that light;
The gentle laugh that drew me near
Was Zeus’s craft, precise and clear.
O heed, young lads, take warning well:
The fairest eyes may cast a spell;
What seems so soft may bind so fast –
I learned too late, and paid at last,
In the cruel black velvet band.

Before the judge I stood undone,
Seven hard years beneath the sun;
Friends and kin like smoke withdrew,
My youth went cold, my name untrue.
Yet still her hair, that swanlike grace,
Pursues me through each barren place;
Her eyes – her eyes – like diamonds gleam,
The afterimage of a dream,
Held tight by the black velvet band.

So hear me, lads, when ale is poured
And laughter skims the tavern board:
For beauty keeps a killing art,
And innocence a sharpened heart.
Her diamond gaze still takes its stand,
Her hair a wing at my command –
And I, by fate and lust unmanned,
Went down beneath the velvet band.

 

 

The One That Is This

I remember the nail first –
not the door,
not the house,
just the way it caught the light
like it had swallowed something 
and was still holding it in.
Crooked.
Like it had been hammered in anger,
or by a child,
or by someone who didn’t want to be remembered.

That was the beginning.
Not of everything,
but of me noticing the shape of what doesn’t fit.
What refuses to fit.

There’s a light –
not holy, not divine,
not the kind you chase or bottle for winter  –
but a light that burns
in a shape that has only ever been
itself.

It isn’t essence.
It isn’t type.
It isn’t “tree” or “door” or “man.”
I tried those words.
They tasted bad.

It’s the bark I pressed my cheek against
that one October
when my mother was inside
screaming into a pillow
so no one would know.
It’s the angle the sun took
when it didn’t ask
if I was ready to see clearly.

It’s how her voice broke
on my name –
not every time,
just once –
like a crack in a window
that you don’t notice
until it starts leaking cold
in the dead of March.

They tried to teach me.
They brought diagrams,
terms,
philosophies that sliced the world
into categories
and told me:
this is real,
this is not.

But the real thing  –
the this of it  –
never made it onto their charts.
Because it bled.
Because it bruised.
Because it curled up under a hedge
behind my childhood house
and wept like something
that didn’t know it was allowed to.

I learned not to say “thing.”
Too big.
Too empty.
It made what mattered flinch –
like it had been seen
by someone who wasn’t worthy.

So I stopped using names.
Stopped trying to trap the world
inside a box
and carry it home.

I remembered instead –
the man who looked at me
only once,
and never again.
The flame that stole my name
and carried it backward
through drifts of silent snow
until no one could find it anymore.

These were not metaphors.
They were not ideas.
They were not symbols to decode.

They were real.
They are real.

You’ve felt it too, haven’t you?
That pulse at the edge
of speech.
That hum
that doesn’t match the rhythm
of anyone else’s breath.
That thereness
you can’t hold
without losing it.

And you know –
you do –
that the end will not come
in fire or frost
or any of the endings
we’ve rehearsed so cleanly.

It will come
the moment we forget
what it meant
for something –
anything –
to be this.

This bark.
This crack.
This nail.
This voice.
This silence.
This flame.

This you.