Octopuses above.
(or) Life without parole.
Restraint and patience. Wisdom and diligence. Kindness and generosity. May I seek out ways to practice these every day, and be thankful that I can.
4.23.2026
LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE.
I spend too much time
Thinking about death.
I do not spend enough time
Thinking about death.
One of those must be correct.
My eyes are thieves,
And my hands are the police.
Look, I am under arrest again.
I have handcuffed myself to the truth.
I am always in trouble,
Or so it seems.
In this courtroom
You make your own justice.
And in this courtroom
Justice rules.
Even
if I found
enlightenment
I’d still need
to clean up
this yard.
Dang.
BIRTH.
Experience, born of poverty.
Love, born in spite of abandonment.
Ability, born of failure.
Life itself, born from hope.
And death, born from life itself.
The world is here
And we have nowhere else to go.
The mirrors are still at last, and you are so tired.
You are listening to the wheezing breaths of the smokers. Even your mind is tired, and you don’t really want to think anymore, but you don’t know how to stop. From a dark corner of your consciousness you sense that the animals are slowly returning to the forest, and you wish that you could join them. You will die one day and until then you will never be free of this reality. Yes, there are cracks in time, you’ve seen them, but they are too small to slip through and escape. Your life is a slender being, moving from shadow to shadow, slinking in memory and loneliness. The room smells of disinfectant and the nurse with the cart is bringing the medication. You check the mirror one more time and then look up at the plain-faced clock and see that three minutes have passed since the last time you looked.
LATE AFTERNOON.
watching the valley sky
what would it take
to fill this sky
with octopuses
I don’t know but I bet
there’s a poem in trying
by James Lee Jobe
On my list!