Now.
Here.
This.
What else
can be
as deserving of honor,
as worthy of worship,
as in need of reverence
as these fleeting wonders?
Hold them gently, friends,
and let them go.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Readying for a new day, week, month
like a crumpled sheet of paper,
seemingly spent, tossed aside,
just in need of a little smoothing
under careful hands. The soothing
tug from a finger and a thumb
easily opens and unfolds, but
even encyclopedic heft can’t
erase the memory of these creases.
No matter — fresh ink can find
new use for old contours and
even scratched out lines,
in morning’s warmth, can
pipe up and sing new truths.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Seated and strapped in, we have no
choice but to ride the ride. How can
we stand up to two-thousand tons
of fear-fueling steel? All gasp and
momentum, designed for shock, sheer
stomach-drop and awful thrill-feasts—
gobbling up our screams for its next
marketing scheme. Eaten, we heave
unheard across their screens, bulging
eyes seen, but not our sight, just fright:
delicacy served piping hot,
meat pie following a fresh shave.
I don’t think we can handle this,
we whisper, as our falling fate
clicks closer, unavoidable.
And once it comes and takes and hurts
and then fades, why do we pay it
to take us for a ride again?
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Brake lights backed up through
a four-way standstill signal
a nearby new beginning:
months of discomfort,
delays and detours as years of
quick-fix concrete and steel patches
are remade more enduring.
The Right Way hurts, you see:
smarts and throbs and stays sore
for far longer than we’d like.
Inconvenient and infeasible —
an unreasonable expenditure;
a clear and present assault on
a normalcy with invisible risks
and unseen harms — it asks patience
from a short-fused powder keg.
But for healing to be ours,
so too must be pain.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Metaphor Warning:
What You Are About to Consume
Is Pure Fabrication.
No Words Were Harmed
In the Making of This Fiction.
Do Not Be Alarmed.
whether “love is blind,”
or “a red, red rose,” or
“life is a cabaret,” or
“just a bowl of cherries,”
I can’t be sure. But
what I do know —
the rock and the root
of my heart and my every move —
is this: love is
life is love is life
is love.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Transformation is an act of love,
for self-loathing can not change us,
only harden our hearts apart from us.
Yet we need not feed our actualization alone.
Love, like breath, goes both ways — flows in
and builds reservoirs to be tapped by all —
while shame must be thrust upon us.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
stars open and shine up at us
from their beds, tiny alarms
telling us it’s time to say
goodbye to a winter that never
quite took hold, an old man,
maybe, but one whose eyes
glinted with perpetual spring
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
let beats given be breaths taken
blows dealt be unknowns known
even brief pauses can open
us to growth ungotten
how using the yellow to slow
not speed lets fear recede
how yielding can be shielding and
waiting can be gaining
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Unearth the shards of millennia-old
jugs to hold space for creations to come.
Remember: what barley gives the water,
the water gives to us. Imagine wounds
sewn into our skin and soaring. Reborn.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
we’re never not we
can’t stop weing our ways
with each other and often
when we forget we fail
or fumble over weness
we hadn’t yet perceived
we is the water within us
the ground we stand upon
and the air we breathe
yet we need more than we
can offer each other
and while we can’t be weless
we can be meful as well
indeed our wefulness grows
when I ignite me and you
in your inextinguishability
light you
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
What if —
and I know
I’ve been telling you
often
of the virtues
of openness
of the joys
of yes anding
of the love
of flow
but lately
and maybe only sometimes
facing all this
noise and nonsense
— no?
love notes
a ritual to start the work week