Photo May of 2026

So perhaps there is something sacred in learning to look gently at ourselves as we disappear and become.

Still | May 14 2026

And I believe that this appetite for domination — this culture of self-veneration, entitlement, emotional extraction, and spiritual indifference toward one another — is one of the very things undoing humanity itself.

What a way to dissolve—

to relinquish my crown

with both hands open.

Love once passed through me

like warm weather through a valley —

it shaped the land,

then went on.

I’ve let something go, and am happier for it. I’ve become a red balloon rising, escaping — not fleeing, ascending — and I win. I don’t take this sordid prize. I win by being honest and possessing integrity, by moving on with my name still intact.

This goldfish is one of those things that will never tarnish in my mind. He remains fixed there — luminous, and unreachable, and so beautiful. Many things are this way in my life.

One dim hour folds into another dim hour.

One disappointment closes its eyes

as its child opens its own.

One face practicing its lying

rehearses in the mouth of the next.

I have the birds not asking my name,

the sun dropping its gold into my hair—

I have this solitary, difficult, exacting thing.

I have the animal world, wild and free,

whose many faces open like an invitation:

witnesses asking for nothing back.

And then, at last, the only question

that contains all the others:

Where are you?

Oh, my life.

What a thing to finally say aloud

when the light is already dimmed,

when the window holds its own cold.

All night I work him against that taut expanse,

pigment opening like a mouth,

the wood-pressed departure of each stroke

leaving its ghost in the surface —

evidence of arrival and leave-taking

in the same gesture.

I am not waiting for it.

I have already walked into the pellucid distance

and become indistinguishable from it—

wide,

ungoverned,

finished with grief.

It seems

people have a worse time of it.

Honesty—

a losing move

This is what makes it so bewildering to encounter in people who present as feeling, thinking, and/or complex. The capacity exists. The choice not to use it was made anyway. That gap between what someone is capable of and what they choose is where character actually lives. Or doesn’t.

When a crisis becomes undeniable — when you can see it, every day, in real time, on the screen in your hand — it stops being a political opinion and becomes a personal reckoning. You have to decide what you stand for. Not in theory or merely in your affiliations. But in your actions.