Waking Consciousness

The world is but a jagged, hollow thing,

A chorus of the horrible and base,

Where all the songs

that bitter spirits sing

Have left a soot upon the morning’s face.

"It matters not," the heavy heart declares,

To prune the ugly with a rusted knife;

For who can catch the soul within its snares,

Or map the wind that gave the bird its life?

Yet still the river runs beneath the ice,

And still the breath is borrowed from the gale;

We pay the toll and pay the bitter price,

To find the faith that lies behind the veil.

Though we may break the vessel and the bone,

The love remains—

unmeasured and unknown.

......

The marble was cold, but his hands were warm. He sat in the center of the plaza, a man made of pulse and prayer, offering the only currency he had: a steady, unblinking affection for the very air that others used to curse him.

He was full of it—a heavy, golden saturation of love that felt like honey in his veins. He saw the fretful lines on the baker’s forehead and loved the man’s exhaustion; he saw the sharp stones held in the children’s hands and loved the strength in their small, misguided arms. He was a vessel with no lid, spilling over.

And for this, they hated him with a rhythmic, communal fervor.

The Weight of the Radiance

It wasn't a quiet dislike. It was a jagged, visceral loathing. To them, his kindness was a mirror that showed them their own scars too clearly. His peace was an insult to their chaos.

"Why do you smile at the mud?" the guard hissed, bringing the butt of a spear down across the man's knuckles.

The man didn't flinch. He looked at the bruised skin, then up at the guard’s eyes—eyes that were tired and hollowed by a life of taking orders. He felt a surge of pity so sharp it tasted like copper. "Because the mud holds the rain," he whispered. "And the rain is a gift."

The guard spat. The crowd gathered, their voices a low, rumbling storm. They wanted him to scream. They wanted him to be "ugly" like the world they understood. If he would just strike back—if he would just show a sliver of the same poison they carried—they could forgive him. They could understand a monster.

But they could not forgive a man who looked at a firing squad and saw only brothers who needed a coat.

The Severing

By sunset, they had decided to "cut the head off" the problem. They dragged him to the edge of the river—the same river that lived in his meditation.

"What happens to your song now?" someone mocked, the knife bright and hungry in the fading light. "Where does the love go when the heart stops pumping?"

The man looked at the sky, where the birds were beginning their final flight of the day. He didn't feel fear; he felt a strange, soaring lightness. He realized that the hate was just a shell, a hard crust they had grown to protect themselves from the vulnerability of being alive.

"The song doesn't belong to the bird," he said, his voice as soft as the wind in the reeds. "It belongs to the air. You can kill the singer, but you cannot silence the atmosphere."

When the blade fell, there was no sound of triumph. There was only the sudden, deafening rush of the wind, the sharp intake of breath from a hundred guilty lungs, and the river—unbothered, rhythmic, and silver—carrying the soul of the hated man back to the source,

where the ugly and the

terrible are finallly

finally

washed clean.

......

The fog comes on little tortellini feet.

It sits looking over the kitchen and the wreckage

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

I see the city with its jaw broken,

The steel ribs of the skyscrapers picked clean by the wind,

And the smoke of the Great Fire finally lying down to sleep.

They say, "It is finished. The ledger is closed."

But here is a man with flour on his forearms,

A man with a thumb-press for the pasta’s heart.

Under the red sky of the final Tuesday,

I am folding the corners.

One tuck for the faith,

One twist for the love,

One pinch for the kindness that survives the blast.

The bombs were loud, yes;

The shouting was a terrible, jagged iron.

But the boiling water is a low, rhythmic song,

And the steam is the ghost of a garden.

Go ahead, world, shatter your glass and your pride.

Break the clocks and the monuments of the loud men.

I am here with the yellow dough.

I am making a small, salty circle of peace.

I am a maker of pasta at the edge of the pit,

Singing a soft, floury defiance into the dark.

The world might be ending, but that kitchen

sounds

like a sanctuary.

.......

In shadowed halls where fluorescent wires keen,

Like banshees trapped in linoleum's cold embrace,

The caterpillar boy drags his weary frame,

Knees bruised on geometry's unyielding grace.

His heart, a gyre of frantic, flickering light,

Pulses 'gainst the institutional grey,

Where grilled cheese sizzles—yellow as false dawn—

A greasy unction for the soul's dismay.

O heavy perfume of the end's approach,

Processed comfort on the flat-top's sigh,

Bread burnt to parking-lot sunset's hue,

Salt-tears for children born to the "terrible" sky.

The electric hum—a wire stretched to snap—

Vibrates in skulls that see too deep, too soon;

Orange cheese melts, the only thread to bind

When teachers' shouts carve blades from classroom gloom.

Crawl low, dust-brother, to crumbs' hidden truth,

Close to floorboards' whisper, waiting the cocoon;

Yet transformation mocks the crawling youth—

No wings shall burst this husk beneath the moon.

Childhood sticks like butter to the tongue,

Visceral memory, existential thread,

Where nostalgia hums its jagged, endless song.

.......

In corridors of linoleum, where shadows stretch and crawl,

The caterpillar boy moves slow, his knees the linoleum's thrall;

Fluorescent hum—a wire taut, vibrating skull and bone,

heart beats frantic in the gray world's moan.

Cafeteria's geometry, cold angles sharp as fate,

Government cheese sizzles yellow, sealing Monday's heavy weight;

Processed comfort, butter-slick, salt as tears in bread,

Sunset over parking-lot—a greasy grace for dread.

The electric keen, too tight-drawn, sings in boys who see too far;

Orange melt binds soul when shouts like blades the teachers spar;

To crawl is truth—dust, crumbs, floorboards' whispered lore,

Cocoon withheld, transformation mocks forevermore.

O visceral stick of youth, dread tasting on the tongue,

Childhood's end perfumed in grill-smoke, where lost wild things are flung;

No wings for him who hugs the dust in institutional night—

The caterpillar dreams of flight, but wakes to endless flightless plight.