12.10 First Fracture (poem)

After lightning struck your mind into a thousand and one fractured pieces,
You stood in front of that prismatic stained glass, pointed to the image of God,

And asked, “Who am I?”

12.06 On Writing (Poem)

I write to create space.
That’s all there is to it.
I take a piece of this, a piece of that, a piece of myself,
And I rearrange it to my liking,
Fixing the words like adjusting a picture frame
A little to the right, or a little to the left.

I write because the world happens too fast, or not fast enough,
And like a scientist, I put the most interesting parts
Inside a glass cage, and work it through an intricate maze.
I collect samples to put under a microscope
To watch the cells divide and grow, or die in vain.

I write because sometimes I overthink or I can’t think at all.
I need relief! I’m exhausted and I want to sleep!
I write to create space.
That’s all there is to it.

12.4 Gray Morality (Poem)

Gray Morality

“Nothing is black and white,” I say.
Good and evil. Right and Wrong. It’s all relative.
Morality is a social construct.

You laugh and say,
“One day you’ll be brave enough to take a stand
For what you believe in, and for what you know to be just and true.
And when they come for you,
There’ll be no switching sides in the name of relativism.”

One day you’ll have to choose.
Not between black or white,
But to run, or to fight.

12.1 When did you first begin? (Poem)

When did you first begin?
At your first breath?
Or in the womb as you develop from embryo to fetus?
How about at the moment of conception? When your father’s sperm meets your mother’s egg to create the cell that is you.

But perhaps you began even before that.
Perhaps you began at the formation of those two halves. If so, you began in your grandmother’s womb when your mother’s eggs were first made.
But then, you could go even further back through the lineage of humanity and through all the evolutions of our species.

You could keep going until you’ve reached the form that gave us our lizard brain,
And all the way to the first organic organism on the Earth.
And, inevitably, we’d have to look to the swirling stardust in a young galaxy before reaching all the way back to the conception of our universe.

But keep going. Even before our universe and into negative space and into the primordial darkness.
Before the universe. Before time. Before matter.
“When did I first begin?”

I have always been here.