Category: Secret Religion

– I stumble out; the sun still setting off the sky. The blues turned a hazy reddish purple. I’ve only had a couple of drinks. I’ve always been capable of holding more than just a couple. But I can’t. Not this day. I can taste nothing but the alcohol as it evaporates in my mouth, and I swallow dry. I can’t. I refuse to. The pulsing in my heart quickens and my heart strains. I shiver. As I stumble out, the dying light of day shocks my senses. I feel weakened. In the moment’s darkness, everything is lost. Everything except […]

-The sediment of breath rests, still, in the folds; I exhale a scattering of argon, your breath so long ago awakened in me; a warmth insulates my veins finds its way along the curvature of my spine. The next breath is mine, but you; across the restlessness of wind and the folds creased into memory to hide the bits of truth in every moment. Skin quivers underneath the layers: memory, dust, the thin fabric I wear to conceal the rupture; it is still there, after all these years, along with the smallest bits of you which I only imagine, as […]

-In the trance of time I stand. There, as the winds breathe and the ashen remains of the greatest before us are swept wildly into oblivion, I remain. Buildings erode by the nips of whispering breezes. I am diminished by their loss. I am lost in the aftermath of exhaling. The particles of argon collide with the moment, the present, and reach across time, beyond me and these crumbling structures.

-The soft sweeping breeze of spring turns violent in the embrace of storms water breaks free of restraints, colliding against us, this earth, in the way tears fall summer scorches through, only after we have suffered the inundations after the floods have carried us off when we’ve no footing left, or place everything dries and becomes parched in the gaze of the sun’s face, indifferent like the fallen tears, long since dried, no longer recalled or mourned or felt time is like this, we are like this, breath and breeze collide and cease, like this oceans, restless in their tossing, […]

-The ridges of wrinkles accompany the discoloration of hair. Time turns to sediment, scattered by each lost breath. Before the burning embers, eyes refuse to glisten. The whisper in the wind becomes nothing more than an echo. Only the night brings solace and surrender, after the day’s long hours. Sleep’s oblivion weaves its way between dreams and possibilities. The lost hope of childhood is reimagined, held together by sleep’s deep breaths. But everything scatters at the call of day, when the trench already dug reappears. The weightlessness of childhood becomes burdened by decision. Choice anchors the journey to the discovery […]

-All morning the house had been shaking, quivering in the same way lungs collapse, expand and collapse again, the small arteries shivering against the force. I stepped out. I could not stand the violence. You remained. Inside, underneath, holding to one of the door frames, pretending the wooden rectangle hid you from the sight of God. Pretending the quaking was from some unknown force. With a shy smile, wearing innocence as if it were yours and not, as was the case, what you had stolen from the neighborhood kids while they obliviously rode their bicycles and played hopscotch in the […]

-You weave into me, in the moments our breath meets, in the moments we share our failing skin, the same which becomes dust as we become dust together, in the moments we sit and age, as the world continues its spinning on the axis of our becoming more each other. We become more of everyone as we wipe off the dust and breath in the bits we do not see, inhaling the bits of you, the bits of me, the bits of everyone we’ve shared moments with; and we breath in everyone and ourselves, as our breath becomes diminished, and […]

-The light is dim, like setting; the sun before it’s gone. The fading citrus hue, cascading against the wall. The hills and slopes, silhouettes against an expanse of white. Movement crests and falls, a shadow breathing on the wall. The image of sleep, the silhouette, a last image before slumber. A paradise that only exists in moments, before sleep and in dreams.

-The stories my daughter tells at three… She lays on the bed. Morning light starting to invade the room. Her little arms resting on her belly, as if in a form of contemplation. She giggles to herself; every memory begins this way, every daydream also, and sometimes, her sleep is threaded around the same giggles of imagination. Her eyes glisten in the morning light, the way you imagine the spark of epiphany. With a curl to her lips, her head tilts, her eyes search for daddy, lighting up the room. Her smile widens when her search has ended, and for […]

-Words are not enough to save, though they maybe enough to fan that love, which comes before love, but doesn’t necessarily and often does not become Love. And so love is not enough to become Love, or become the love that comes before Love but after the initial spark of love, that love that also leads to Love, but comes after, After the first flame, and after love, and after words possibly, but not after Love. After Love, if you made it exist only words and words do not save.