Category: Uncategorized

The best of neighbors stop to say hello,

And scatter cheer before they make their way;

Their warmth can lift a heart that settles low,

Yet never will they overstay their day.

True kindness near the fence is rare to find,

A treasure that we ought to hold and prize;

For some will crowd the yard and cross the mind,

While gentle spirits bless our quiet skies.

They lend a hand to keep the grasses mowed,

Or watch the darkened porch while you are gone;

They bring a dish of supper down the road,

And ask for nothing when the deed is done.

So be the neighbor that you hope to meet,

And speak a gentle welcome down the street.

I began where the world was small and green,

counting the heartbeats of quiet beasts,

the air thick with a lucky, unburdened light.

I was a creature of the open yard,

mischief moving through the high grass

before the maps were drawn,

before the long winter arrived.

Then the horizon broke at the yard’s edge—

a sudden iron weight, a sharp theft of breath.

The right side of the world went dark,

the body redrawn in heavy, stubborn lines,

and the boy who ran was left behind.

The air turned thick and unfamiliar,

and the doors of the loud world slammed shut.

I became the stranger in a foreign climate,

carrying a quiet no one knew how to speak to.

For decades, I have lived along the perimeter,

a solitary drop watching the ocean move in pairs.

I left the crowded tables to the daylight people,

withdrawing into the cool sanctuary of the mind.

Stone by stone, in the silence of great halls,

I forged a kingdom out of ink and thought,

moving across changing hills,

standing before rows of empty eyes to pass down the flame,

yet always returning to the house with one chair.

I can navigate the vast, invisible stars of the intellect,

but I am lost in the simple country of a hand held out.

At 3:00 AM, the old questions still circle the ceiling:

How do you cross the distance between two rooms? What is the word that makes a stranger stay?

The solitude is a heavy coat I never chose to wear,

yet I wear it like armor now.

I am a builder of quiet history, waiting on the border,

hoping an eye will look past the heavy frame,

and love the hidden, wild music of a heart still ready to be known.

She sits at the sill, a carving of bone and gray fur,

anchored to the pine like a creature cast in lead.

No pulse along the spine, no shift of breath—

only the tip of her tail giving away the machinery inside,

a single metronome beating out the yard’s cold silence.

Out past the glass, the lawn holds its breath.

A shadow under the hedge, a dry leaf scraping the frost,

or maybe the ghost of a finch that never landed.

It makes no difference to the lens of her gaze:

the pupils dilate wide, swallowing the daylight whole,

then sharpen down to twin slits of amber stone.

The hindquarters shift, one calculated inch to the right.

The slight, kinetic tremor along the haunches—

a quiet calibration of weight and tendon,

gathering the spring against the sill.

Whatever stirs out there among the dying grass

moves entirely ignorant of its measured sentence,

held safe by the clear, invisible boundary between them,

the cold pane turning a violent arc into an empty glass reflection.

The silence stretches tight enough to snap.

Her chin drops low against her paws,

the stare deadlocked upon the target,

coiled for the fatal, elegant launch.

Then the yard stirs with wind; the shadow blurs to nothing.

The tension breaks like dry straw.

She lowers her ribs against the painted wood,

blinks twice into the empty light, and curls her tail around her feet—

the kill dissolved into an afternoon nap.

Loneliness had settled deep into the floorboards.

For eight long years, I was my mother’s anchor to the world—

The pugs kept watch by daylight, and I took over the night.

When she passed, the dogs and I carried the quiet together,

Until time claimed them too, and left me alone in the frame.

Two silent years passed. The quiet in the rooms began to sink in.

“Get another pet,” everyone advised. “Get a cat.”

“No,” I declared, adamant. “I am simply not a cat person.”

And then came Lily and Misty—the Terror Twins.

Lily, the exotic tiger, wrapped in sharp gray and black stripes;

Misty, the quiet aristocrat, draped in soft, seamless ash.

Separately, they are the gentlest creatures in the whole wide world.

Together, the peace is shattered, and the Terror takes the floor.

They bounce off the upholstery like stray cannonballs,

Scaling the drapes and turning the hallway into a speedway.

They launch themselves down the staircase in a flurry of fur,

Ensuring the house is never, ever quiet—

Especially at midnight, when the real mischief begins.

The heavy silence has finally fled the house,

Replaced by two wild, gray heartbeats.

The “Terror” remains, and my world is infinitely better for it.

I am the quiet geography of eleven distinct terrains, A tapestry woven from centuries of winter storms and rains.

I do not begin with my own first breath or the modern streets I see; I am an ancient map redrawn, a living, breathing history.

Nearly a quarter of my heart beats in the English breeze, Where Southeastern hills slope gently down to northwestern seas.

The East Midlands rise within my blood, a steady, grounding clay, While the rugged cliffs of Devon and Somerset watch the fading day. And from the West Midlands, a smoky, industrious thread is spun— Four distinct English corners, resting quietly under a single sun.

The map shifts wide, across the rolling water’s foam, To the Southern Germanic valleys that another part of me called home. Through Northwestern Germany, the ancient forests softly speak, leaving a legacy of quiet strength, enduring and unique.

Turn north toward the horizon, where the colder currents blow— I carry the silver light of Denmark, dancing on the snow. And the deep, majestic pines of Sweden leave their enduring trace, A Nordic resilience carved into the contours of my face.

Listen closely, and you’ll hear a wilder music start to rise, From Central Scotland down to Northern Ireland’s stormy skies.

A Celtic, Gaelic stubbornness, a love for song and open space, A fierce and beautiful longing that time can never quite erase.

Finally, the borders soften into the vast and open east, Where the rhythm of the old world has never fully ceased. In Northeastern Poland, where the amber rivers wind, and across the broad North Central plains, the remnants that they left behind.

I am a map of the old brought into the new, a tapestry of ancestors I never knew.