Treadmill.
Walking and waking in my shadow that encases my dreams.
The father i walk away from you,the closer you seem.
Like walking toward a stranger,that seems to be walking away.
The closer I hold you that stranger seems to draw nearer with an uneasy sway.
The road is long,I can see you running back toward home.
It's where you belong,like the restitched welcome mat that you've become.
It's time for me to run 9itii9ii9wards a shadow,o wo⁹l9i9i9iiiiiii9i,the darkness purifies my lonely embrace.
The arms that use to hold me have disappeared with a faint trace.
Still Being Built
My mind as a house let's see....many many rooms...hundreds...old memories...new memories in each one...some I visit a lot...some I've locked...others I wish I could enter again but cannot...there's a building crew here constantly adding on new rooms corridors....they say we use only ten percent of the brain so I've got a lot of room to build....
Friends
Jenny is an ex-model. She struggles with substance abuse. Tommy is a big-time preacher now. He only waves in passing, at the grocery store or in a restaurant. Dianne moved away. At first, everyone supported her, but then maybe some resented her. She never calls, but on Facebook, we see her pictures of the West Coast. Peter was always a little different, but we all loved him anyway. Now he is a recluse, and we don’t know anything about him. Jack is a high school baseball coach. He is married with a wife and kids and claims he never has time to hang out because of them, but everyone knows it’s because of his multiple affairs. Most people say I never grew up, that I’m stuck in a dead-end job, and a waste of potential.
Looking back, things began to fall apart when we were teenagers. Tommy went on a youth trip with his church one summer and was never the same again. He made new friends and was always busy after that. Peter wasn’t cool enough in high school, so he was bullied. They didn’t associate with him as much. He stopped hanging around. Dianne and Jenny were best friends, but when Jenny and Jack started dating, Jenny didn’t have as much time for Dianne. Dianne turned to her schoolwork and decided to get a scholarship and leave this dusty old town the moment she graduated. At first, they tried to ostracize me too when I tried to hang out with Peter, but I was a star athlete on the tennis team. Crazy how being good at sports makes you cool enough. When Jenny and Jack broke up senior year, that was the final straw. Jack focused on baseball, and Jenny turned to parties to numb the pain.
Forgotten are the days of our youth when we roamed the woods together and defended our fort among the trees. Gone are the days when we painted our faces with mud and played hide and seek. The oaths of friendship we made in childhood are all seemingly past recall. Perhaps they are right, saying I never grew up, because as I ponder, I realize that I have never forgotten.
Homesick
You do not know, but when you speak of this place far away, your home, I feel like I should go.
You are homesick for it, but I also long for this land I have never seen. This place is where I want to be, where the mountains kiss the sky, and I would never have to say goodbye.
It hurts too much. Do you really mean it when you say you want to keep in touch?
I fear I am losing you, and the days are growing far too few. Will you ever miss me? Will I ever be free, free from this longing to be with you?
In May, my heart will break. You will smile, and I’ll have to fake. I’ll have to pretend I am happy to return to the place where I belong, my home. You will believe me, but you could not be any more wrong.
When you leave on a plane and return to the place where the mountains kiss the sky, every day, I will cry.
Here, you could never stay, because I see what it does to you day by day.
I was not born there. I have never known that mountain air, but how I long for this home where my heart is free to roam with you by my side, and there would never have to be a great divide.
One day I hope to visit, and I pray you don’t forget it. You tell me not to worry, but why do I feel like my heart is going to break, and why do I feel like there is so much at stake?
But if you care as you say you do, I know you will always be true.
Void
The air is silent and unwavering, while a buzz substitutes its normal liquid movements around all of the material entities that are tossed about the yard. It’s our HVAC unit reminding us we have finally received the so-longed for heat of summer.
In the farthest corners of my vision, this little man stalks his prey. His movements are calculated, shoulder blades tucked in and low to the ground making a visual slow rumble with each step, articulated and soft. He snatches a small bug, chomping through the intermittently shining life that symbolized dusk.
He has made his way through another long day of hunt and play, and now it is time to rest. His slender body lays flat against the still dew ridden ground. Weeks of rainy spring time unrest soaked through the shallowest layers of the earth, helping cool his belly from this long awaited sun.
His fur is as black as the void, but in the summer light you can see the tawny undertones, representing his many ancestors of perfect predators before him. He revels, proud of his simple accomplishments of the day, and for a moment, I too find myself able to kick back and appreciate the similar opportunities that can be so easily taken for granted.
Yellow
Yellow means caution:
My liver failed and my eyes turned yellow. My gallbladder failed and my skin turned yellow. My kidneys failed and I filled up with yellow. My pancreas failed and I shit yellow. My bone marrow failed and I bled yellow. My spine failed and everyone called me yellow. All of my other organs, tissues, and cells failed, so they paled yellow, as well.
My heart, the last to go, finally broke when I inevitably died from all of the yellow. It broke because I loved living so much. But it couldn't do it alone and had to give in to the yellow. I should have minded the caution.
Corvus: Lapis parvus
The young lad stormed out of his father’s house. He leaped over the wire fence, and rushed into the meadow. He rushed over to lay down beneath a jacaranda tree. The sight of the purple flowers put a smile on his face. The sound of birds chirping made his heart feel much more at ease for the time being. He tried to push out all the mean things his older brothers had called him: lapis parvus, a small stone. This upset him, and then what made his day worse was that his elder brothers were all way taller than him, stronger than him, some even told him that they would be much richer than him, too. The young lad felt something irritating underneath his butt. He quickly stood up, and picked up a smooth, but shiny little pebble. He liked the way that it shined in the sunlight. When he heard the sound of a wagon approaching, he hid the small stone in his front pocket. When he finally decided to head back home, he noticed that the house was very quiet. It was eerily silent that if he decided to drop his pebble on the floor, he would be able to hear it. The young lad went to check the kitchen, no body was there. He even checked the bedrooms, and they were also empty. He ran back out of his house, tried calling out for his brothers, but then decided to just enjoy his time of peace and freedom. Suddenly, there was a loud piercing roar that echoed all around. This frightened the young lad. He ran and hid underneath the kitchen table. Then he thought to himself: I need to go outside, and protect the jacaranda tree. So, he leaped out of the house through the open kitchen window, and ran toward the meadow. He tried to run as fast as his feet would go, and when he finally made it at his favorite spot— he made sure to look around for any signs of danger- then he spotted it: some kind of strange looking human. It towered over him, and the house. The young lad gulped. He wondered if this thing had eaten his family. He wanted to turn back around, and hide from it before it had spotted him. Alas, before he could hide, he heard the giant say: Halt. You there. I challenge you to defeat me. The kid turned around, and said: I am a poor boy. I need to head back home, and do not accept your challenge. The giant laughed, and clapped his hands, then said: You will have to fight me here, right now, lad. With no where to run, or hide~ the young lad sighed. He would just have to fight the giant with…something. At first he thought to himself: Maybe I can try to ask the birds to help me defeat the giant. All they have to do is peck out his eyes. The young lad shook his head. He did not know how to ask the birds for help. Then he remembered he did have something to use. He started to run toward the giant. At this moment, the giant had been laughing at the sight of the kid running toward him. The young lad also had something else in his pocket which he liked to use when he had wanted to hit bigger objects like a heavy beehive that had lots of honey. He pulled it out of his pocket, along with the pebble. He placed the pebble in his shooter, a device that he had made with some branches, and a piece of rope. He pulled back on his device with the pebble placed in a pocket like part, and then let go. The pebble shot through the air with the speed of a bullet. It landed right in the center of the giant’s forehead. The giant was not laughing anymore. It fell backward onto its back, and the ground shook, almost making the kid land on his butt onto the ground. But he had managed to center and steady his feet firmly on the meadow’s ground. He smiled, leaped, and kicked the back of the heels of his feet in the air. He recalled now that his father had a sword in one of the kitchen cabinets. The kid took off like he was being chased by a pack of hungry wolves. He grabbed the sword from one of the the kitchen cabinets, and ran back outside. When he was back in the meadow, he made sure to check first if the giant was still breathing. It’s heart was not beating anymore. The young lad climbed on top of the giant, and plunged the sword deep into the giant’s belly. This created a hole big enough for anyone in the giant’s belly to escape. The sunlight beamed into the hole making the hole much more visible even from the inside of the giant’s belly. The young lad’s brothers were happy to be rescued. When they finally all climbed out of there, they were shocked to see their little brother standing in the meadow looking like a newly appointed knight to King Arthur. From that day forward, the young lad’s older brothers never made fun of their little brother ever again.
#Corvus #Lapis #parvus
29/05/2025 Thorsday.
Philomena
Oh! Hello there. You are coming home with me.
Kayla felt slight guilt as she knelt down and picked up the Philodendron piece from the floor of the home improvement store.
It's technically not stealing, right? I mean, scraps like this are just going to be swept up at closing time and tossed in the trash, right? What a waste. I'm actually rescuing it if you think about it. Yeah.
She carefully tucked the heart-shaped piece into her hoodie pocket.
On the drive home to her tiny apartment, she placed her passenger on the dashboard and excitedly brought her up to date on all things Kayla.
“…and I am soooo close to graduating. And when I do, I'm definitely gonna land a kick ass job somewhere — maybe even in one of these places,” She gestured upward toward the towering glass buildings as she drove through the medical center streets. “And you're coming with me, of course. You are going to have your very own spot on my desk!”
Kayla prattled on, feeling excited for the future and surprisingly, a lot less lonely all of a sudden. It felt good to speak her hopes and dreams out loud— even if only to a drooping leaf.
When they got home, Kayla placed her new roommate in a glass of water and set her on the kitchen window sill. She made a mental note to pick up some potting soil soon.
It will be so nice to have someone to talk to for a change. Now, she needs a name. Hmm…
Kayla smiled as it came to her.
“I hereby dub thee Philomena. For it is a strong name and a good name for a friend.”
The Physics of Math: Where the Ass Meets the Road
I slipped on some ice on the cement today. Ice, of course, is frozen water, or H2O below 32ºF (0ºC). At this temperature, the water molecules lose energy and slow down; they self-assemble into a hexagonally-structured crystal lattice, forming a solid state of slick substrate above which floats a thin layer of liquid water from the friction pressure of my foot lowering the melting point.
Liquid layer, it turned out, had hydrogen bonds less tightly bound, moving freely enough to become an excellent lubricant, reducing the friction between my foot and the ice, making it slippery.
It’s all chemistry, after all, which is harder to understand than the pain of a suddenly dislodged coccyx at its sacral attachment. (You don’t need to look to the heavens to see stars; they are all around us, kept in a crystal lattice themselves—one of potential energy in search of the right kinesis.)
Of foot.
And while my right foot can garner Oscar chatter, it landed my ass very kinetically onto the cement below.
Ah, chemistry.
Beware! If you go too deep into chemistry, you're suddenly doing physics.
F = M x A
The mass was my ass. What a difference one tiny, little letter makes, especially when you accelerate it. The terminal velocity of a human in a stable, ass-to-cement position is around 120 mph (193 km/h). This speed is reached when the force of drag from air resistance equals the force of gravity acting on the person, resulting in constant speed.
But this is incorrect.
The terminal velocity when my ass hit the ground was 0. Sudden and terminally stopped. My irresistible ass met the immovable ground.
That’s when I realized, if you do phsyics deep enough, it’s all math, or in my case, calculus where I met my fate at t=0. Yet, standards of rigor have evolved over—dare I invoke it?—time. Calculus, originally founded on ill-defined infinitesimals, transitioned to the modern, more rigorous formalism reliant on limits.
And I met mine. I’ve got the X-ray to prove it, so buzz off, Gödel! And come on in, Euler.
Euler’s Identity, for those who missed that class, is
e^ix = cos x + isin x
Bear with me. Hear me out.
Euler’s identity states that when Euler's number (e) is raised to the power of imaginary pi (iπ), the result, when added to 1, equals 0. Pretty scary when you think about it. I didn’t. I was in a hurry. Down I went. I was the one who went down. Euler is the one who pulled the rug out.
I was the “1”; but my ass stopped moving at “0”.
And seeing the stars, I realized that if you do math deep enough, the physics becomes metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that explores what is hubristic “first principles” of things, such as the abstract concepts of being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space.
And nothing explores being, substance, cause, and space like falling on your ass. (The knowledge of the knowing and time it takes to know—truly know—comes with the stars.)
Time, from ambulation to inertness, from motion to frozen in time like water frozen into ice, can be reverse-extrapolated to t = 0; however, the opposite of extrapolation is miscalculation. Look it up.
There are quantum effects that emerge at Planck lengths and Planck time, miscalculated or otherwise, both of which become evident when one hits the ground sitting. (Alternatively, hits the sitting grounded.)
Thus, deep math is quantum physics. In math, though, wrong assumptions cannot occur beyond what is provable or unprovable; but in quantum physics we are deluded into thinking we have a choice. Prior to slipping on my ass, I walked in a probability field.
When I fell on my ass, I was in a definite field: The field of pain.
And that, my friends, was definite! With the collapse of my ass, so collapsed my probability field, and with it, my sacrococcygeal ligament. And as we all know…
…the hip bone’s connected to the thigh gone…
…and on and on. You realize the interconnectedness when you remember that all pain is perceived in the brain. Acute pain engenders anger; chronic pain engenders depression.
But there is hope.
The stars—like hip bones to thigh bones—are the result of somatosensory neurons connected to the occipital lobe; and when the descending pain modulation pathway fails and, counterintuitively, amplifies the pain, deep quantum engenders religion.
And this is when I found religion. Does that sound irrational? or just complex?
Thus, reads the postulate, “More people, in these troubled times, should fall on their asses.” (You can quote me on that!)