The Marrow-Deep Way Dreams Sometimes Hand You Truth, 2026

I held the flowers like a question I didn’t yet know how to ask,

blue sky breathing around the stems like evening around my windshield,

the sudden impossible yellows and reds of them

alive in the middle of ordinary air,

and I thought,

how strange the rituals of petals are.

for the living.

for the apologizing.

for the newly in love.

for the quietly leaving.

the same fragile burst of color carried through doorways,

into hospitals,

into kitchens,

into rooms where someone is already gone.

and I dreamed,

that ancient telegram from the marrow

where the body writes truths the mind avoids.

I dreamed I was dying,

and the only grief that arrived

was not the dark,

not the silence,

not the unending sleep,

but the terrible unfinished arithmetic of time.

all the mornings I would not drink beside,

all the evenings I would not hear a voice,

wander through the rooms,

all the years that had not yet learned our names,

and waking I remembered the flowers again,

saw how their brightness refused explanation.

how from far away they were only color,

a confusion of warmth,

a field of accidental sun.

but leaning close,

close enough to breathe them,

the shape of them appeared through touch, through scent,

through a vessel of emotional weight.

as if love itself requires the body to move forward,

requires the face to enter the fragile center of the gift,

requires the small courage of believing,

that what is beautiful,

may also be temporary.

and that this

marrow-deep knowing,

is the strange mercy dreams sometimes deliver

in the quiet hours.

placing truth in my hands

the way I, someone,

once placed flowers in yours.

Today I Thought About My Death and Was Sad, 2026

Today, I thought about my death

and was sad,

which is new.

I have carried death like a folded receipt in my back pocket

since childhood,

creased, casual, inevitable,

a transaction already approved.

I have said,

Let it come willingly on a number of occasions,

I have lived with my chest open,

with nothing hidden in drawers,

no secret ledgers,

no unpaid emotional debts.

I have loved my ambitions like bright machinery,

slept clean,

woken ready,

told the truth even when it blistered.

I have never feared the curtain.

I have practiced my bow with a grin.

Death and I had an understanding,

we nodded at each other across the room.

Someday, sure.

Of course.

That’s the arrangement.

But today,

I dozed on the couch,

like an ordinary man with ordinary sunlight on his face having worked too many hours,

and found myself sixteen heartbeats from extinction,

in a hospital bed,

with the halo of finality humming,

and she was there.

Ivy.

Sitting in the chair beside me

like a cathedral disguised as a woman.

And I knew,

knew in the marrow-deep way dreams sometimes hand you truth,

without anesthesia,

this was the last conversation.

No drama.

No violins.

Just the unbearable mathematics

of one more sentence

and then nothing.

And I had to say goodbye.

To her.

To the way she says my name, my Beau,

like she is discovering it.

To the unperformed honesty in her eyes.

To the ordinary miracle of Publix buttercream frosting.

To the life that had just begun unfolding like a reckless promise.

And I woke up

with grief already in my throat

for something that hasn’t happened.

What is this?

It’s always taken a lot for me to cry,

I’ve taken beatings and willingly walked back for more,

I’ve chose laughter to subvert it,

however I’m crying now and it’s fiction.

I’m crying now and it’s fiction.

I have stared at the void without blinking.

I have walked through death and collapse

like a man studying architecture,

noting the stress points,

rebuilding the beams.

But this,

this is different.

This is the understanding

that someday there will be a last look.

A last touch.

A last half-finished sentence.

And I do not consent.

I, who have consented to everything inevitable,

do not consent to losing her.

Is this what love is?

This insurgency against entropy?

This sudden desire to bargain with physics?

I thought I was free

because I feared nothing.

Now I am terrified

because I have something.

Today, I thought about my death

and was sad,

not for me.

For her.

For the unfinished conversation.

For the coffee tomorrow morning

that might one day

arrive without me, or worse,

without her.

Concentric Circles, 2026

I used to live in a geometry of accidents,

ovals without orbit,

rectangles arguing with triangles,

a compass spinning drunk in the fist of my ribcage,

no fixed North,

no merciful middle,

just a misaligned center point,

blinking red,

like a broken exit sign in a rented hallway of mirrors.

I called it freedom,

that sprawl of shapes,

that cracked foundation giving way to added weight,

that carnival of almosts,

but it was drift, sister,

it was drift,

a life laid out like spilled hardware on concrete:

bolts, screws, hinges without doors.

I loved without measure,

which is to say I loved without boundary,

which is to say I poured myself into cups with holes in the bottom,

and called the puddle devotion.

I said yes when my bones said no.

I gave until my spine hummed like power lines in June.

I mistook self-erasure for generosity,

mistook chaos for charisma,

mistook attention for affection,

and I stood in the middle of my own life,

like a foreman who had lost the blueprint.

Then,

no lightning bolt, no desert prophet,

just a quiet click in the sternum.

The realization that the center was not outside of me.

Not in applause,

not in lovers who preferred my labor to my laughter,

not in rooms where I bent myself into shapes that fit their comfort.

The center was a decision.

A moral “right” not delivered by thunder

but assembled like scaffolding:

respect laid beam over beam,

self-regard tightened with deliberate screws,

a refusal to betray my own pulse.

I began honing,

like a blade dragged slow across stone,

asking:

What do I love that loves me back?

What work makes my lungs widen?

What fire warms instead of burns?

And there,

in the discipline of listening to myself,

a point formed.

Small.

Unremarkable to the untrained eye.

But fixed.

And from that point,

O miracle of geometry,

circles.

Not frantic spirals,

not desperate loops,

concentric,

deliberate,

widening.

Like a solar system assembling itself around a star that had finally agreed to burn.

Friends stepped into orbit,

not clinging, not draining,

but revolving in rhythm.

And they brought their friends,

and those friends brought ideas,

and ideas brought friction,

and friction sparked dialogue,

and suddenly community was not a word in a grant proposal,

but a living constellation,

voices overlapping in the gallery air,

laughter ricocheting off white walls,

arguments about meaning that ended in handshakes and beer and wine.

The foundation poured not just in concrete,

but in conversation,

a sculpture altering someone’s trajectory,

a photograph cracking open a memory,

a young artist seeing possibility where there had only been rent.

Lives tilting,

not dramatically,

but one degree at a time.

Circles widening.

And somewhere in the widening,

a love.

Not the old hunger love.

Not the “prove-yourself” love.

Not the caretaker’s quiet walk towards the National Razor.

But a love that met me at the center,

that could not have recognized me,

when I was an oval rolling downhill.

Because I was not then,

capable of standing still long enough,

to be chosen for who I was.

Alignment made visibility.

Visibility made recognition.

Recognition made possibility.

And so the circles continue,

me at the center, not as tyrant,

not as sun demanding worship,

but as a steady gravitational yes.

Respect as radius.

Passion as orbit.

Community as proof of motion.

The old shapes still visit sometimes,

crooked hexagons of doubt,

parallelograms of fear,

but they no longer run the blueprint.

The center holds.

And from it: rings of meaning,

rings of friendship,

rings of work that matter,

rings of love that does not require disappearance,

expanding,

expanding,

expanding,

until the once-misaligned life

resembles a galaxy

built not from accident

but from intention.