Melting, wondrous, goodness.
The smell intoxicates my lungs,
But it lingers out of my reach.
My nose edging towards the counter,
Only centimeters away.
I whine to make my human aware,
She yells, “Dude shut up!”—
Snapping my brain from the cheese.
So, I bow my head in sadness.
My human watches me and sighs.
She walks over to the cheese and picks it up.
Leaning down, she hands me the cheese.
I open my mouth,
Grabbing the heavenus flavor with my jowls.
I swallow it whole,
But it bounces off the back of my throat
And retches out my mouth,
Covered in goober.
So I look down at my cheese and
Quickly snatch it, gobbling it up.
I hear my human say,
“God! You’re an idiot sometimes.” •

I sit in a quiet room:

The clock ticks, it’s almost noon.
Is this room really silent,
Or does the noise lie latent?

The tick tock of the clock sounds,
The dull chatter buzzes around,
The tapping of someones foot,
Too much noise for my brain to input.

Tick tock,
Tap tap,
Chitter chatter,
Chat chat,
She said,
He said,
This and that.

B r e a t h

A room is never quiet:
Never try to deny it.
I never learned to drown out sound
Because it is always around. •

The magnificent being looms over the field,
Its tendrils flow in the wind like strains of hair.
A mysterious,
Earthy
Brown.
Its scales of bark
Patched with many shades:
A healthy,
Wondrous,
Green.
The waterless seaweed flows.
Oh what a stunning,
Remarkable tree. •

Pour your sacrilegious superiority down my throat.
Watch, in guilty terror, as my entire esophagus burns.
Take pity on the consequences of your actions.
Recall your doings and mourn.

Memorize the ravenous movements of my dying body,
Obliterated under the burdens of your unexpected assassinations.
Touch my paralyzed being with your blood covered hands,
And study my skin as it begins a hell-like process of granulation

Behold the reign of your blasphemous sovereignty,
Taken over by the people ruled by injustice.
View the fires and rightful destruction
That now turn your parliament into a shapeless abyss.

Eye the bricks and bricks of expensive stones and jewels
That disguise your unholy house as a place free of devastation.
Cry as the flags of liberty and equity wave in the skies before your eyes
And the people perform their dances of victory atop the smoking desolation.

You have finally lost your game of ruthless war
And now they won’t let you walk free.
Be careful, dear, for when they avenge all those who have left brutally,
They will come for your immoral soul and they will not let you die in peace. •

I hate the way my body looks—
I’m in no way smart—
For some reason, everyone hates me—
It hurts my aching heart—
Instead of lying in the dark
With tears streaming down my face,
I work up the courage to do more,
and I start to make progress at my own pace—
Progress to lose weight.
Progress to get better grades.
Progress to not care what others say
when they unleash their verbal raids.
Day by day, week by week,
Progress starts to show.
It wasn’t up to my expectations,
but it was better than ages ago.
Even though I won’t be perfect,
I will always be
a better person than yesterday.
There isn’t anyone I would rather be than me. •

Old buildings are time machines.
Clean out a closet and find a box of dot-matrix paper:
Tear the perforations to hear the ancient printer’s echoes,
Its primitive lines like kindergarten drawings
To our Michelangelo color laser.
If you try, you can still smell the ink of the Risograph.

Arrive one Monday, reach for the light switch–
All muscle memory now–only they’ve replaced the ancient switch
With a dimmer that looks like a panel from Star Trek.
It will take weeks to unlearn that one.

Once, an earthquake shook the building:
You thought it was the COW–the cart on wheels,
Behemoth laptops replaced now by slim student devices.
When the heat kicks on, you can almost smell the fear
Of students crammed in hallways for school-wide lunch
Back when midterm and final exams loomed,
Their chatter now replaced by quiet pacification of cell phones.

If you blink fast, you might catch a glimpse of a sea of masked faces
And startle that you lived through what you’ve already repressed,
Then smile remembering the first time we saw each other smile again.

There is a time capsule buried outside.
Who knows if we’ll be around when they open it?
But there are other ways to travel through time:
Walk down a newly-polished hallway in August,
Let the smell of decades bring you back from summer dreams
To echoing anachronisms:
The clank of lockers, the shuffle of pencil skirts,
Fifties sci-fi dreams of artificial intelligence impossibly far—fifty,
A hundred years away—
Then turn to see the glow of screens and Apple watches,
Entire textbooks invisibly contained, eons of knowledge in a back pocket,
The wisdom of the world weighing nothing. •

Once upon a morning, snoring
Awakened by the horizon’s glory
Full of color, I hear the flutter
Of wings, as a single Robin sings.
Singing as she looks and sees
The branches of the yawning trees,
Frost covers her feet on the floor.
She hums a very merry tune
To see the daffodils in bloom:
A visionary, like none have seen before.
The breeze beckons to accompany her,
The bluebirds and the woodpecker
And a chorus of clicks and tweets begins to soar,
Pioneering through the wintry
Frosty air, dancing to her singing,
Inviting all the earth to explore.
Out my window, I hear her herald,
The coming of a pure new era
Like an arrow, revealing the need for more.
She calls and the earth dares to respond,
Dares to hope for, dares to long
For the day the sunlight shines forevermore. •