A life is not measured by the sudden glare of its beginning,
Ideas are cheap commodities bought with a moment of inspiration.
The rare art is the heavy masonry required to keep the house from burning down.
Many are blinded by their own flash,
The face we fashion for the public square
is a strict accountant of compliance.
It trades the breath of original utterance
for the safety of applause.
In the quiet of the evening,
the mirror reveals the terrible bargain.
The featureless shell has grown into the skin,
silencing the tongue that once sought to belong.
By stifling the authentic cry to please the collective ear,
the performer becomes a permanent prisoner of the pantomime.
The applause fades,
but the silence remains.
The air in an empty room is never truly vacant.
It is heavy with the ghost of every choice not yet made.
A wooden chair sits in a pool of dust and light.
It is a seat.
It is a barricade.
It is firewood.
Until a finger touches the grain.
The heart beats in the stutter between the maybe and the must.
Reality is merely a lingering echo of a decision
that finally found its gravity.
Sorrow and joy dance in the blur.
Waiting for the weight of a glance to make them real.
Existence is a shy guest that only shows up when watched.
Everything is a swarm of maybes
until the attention pays the bill.
The universe is a stuttering shutter.
A flicker of friction.
A blur of becoming.
Choice is the chisel that kills the curve to carve the stone.
Do not blink.
The stillness is a lie told by a fast moving liquid.
A claim exists in the ink.
A title waits for a clerk to nod.
Possession is a social hallucination.
A consensus of stamps and seals.
We build a cathedral of contracts to hide the dirt.
But the dirt remains.
Void is the ultimate law of thermodynamics.
A biological verdict.
The empty belly needs no signature.
The hunger is a receipt from the present.
The void of need is a structural certainty.
Ink fades.
Empty pockets are indelible.
Light is a shy tenant.
It pays the rent only when the sun is evicted.
The candle does not argue with the night.
It simply waits for the match to strike
a match between the dark and the flame.
A wick is just a string until the shadow gives it a reason to be a sun.
Suffering is the heavy curtain pulled back to reveal the stage.
We find the glow not in the peace.
But in the desperate necessity of the gloom.
We pace its linguistic bars.
It demands a noun to wear the action.
A hook to hang the coat of being.
But grammar is not ontology.
The map is not the moving territory.
Relation resonates deeply.
Knots only exist where two threads cross,
But the threads themselves are in motion.
Perhaps the “I” is simply the friction of that crossing,
The intersection of the in and the out?
Sometimes I wonder if nouns exist at all,
Or if all is a verbing,
An absurd unanchored action,
The divine in the doing.