Pentimento and Page

“The Blooming Quill and Brush”

(Part I – Awakening)

Upon a morn where quietude was crowned,

A child sat still where sun and shadow wound.

No knowledge yet of what the soul could weave,

No art to shape, no verse the heart could grieve.

Yet something stirred beneath that tender frame—

A whisper through the wood, a breath, a name.

The quill lay light, the canvas stretched and bare,

As if both waited, hungering for air.

The eyes once dulled by life’s uncolored light

Now widened, brimming full with new delight.

For ink became a sea, and words its shore,

And pigments danced where voids had lived before.

With trembling hand, the youth began to try—

A hesitant, unsure, enchanted sigh.

Each brushstroke like a prayer in silent hue,

Each sentence strung from morning’s crystal dew.

The pages bloomed with rhythms yet unknown,

The canvases with realms the heart had grown.

And line by line the soul began to swell—

With every stroke, a tale the heart would tell.

The paints grew bold, the metaphors took flight,

The dusk grew jeweled with speculative light.

They learned the names of tones the masters used,

And how a poem’s shape could leave one bruised.

Each parchment, now, a mirror to the mind,

Each canvas held the breath one could not find.

A synesthetic feast of craft and flame,

Where color spoke and silence earned a name.

(Part II – Ascent)

The ink grew swift; the pigments found their pace.

No longer did the brush the page disgrace.

Now flowed each line with cadence tight and tuned,

And every hue by harmony was hewn.

The child, once lost in wonder’s budding sphere,

Now carved the sky with language sharp and clear.

Where once were trials, timid, undefined,

Now flourished works both radiant and refined.

With Shakespeare’s ghost in whispers at the ear,

And Turner’s fog to make the vision clear,

They studied long by candle, lamp, and moon,

Their fingers stained, their breath a steady tune.

The rhymes grew sly, with nested schemes that turned,

While every canvas sighed with light it burned.

They learned how metaphor may pierce the veil,

And chiaroscuro catch a soul’s travail.

Through hours undenied, their hands grew wise.

They saw where silence in a sentence lies.

A palette’s quiet clash of blue and bone

Could speak of grief more fierce than shriek or moan.

A sonnet, wrought with surgical precision,

Could fracture hearts and still incite decision.

The rules they learned, then broke with noble aim—

Transgression not for pride, but to inflame.

The world around grew clearer through the arts;

Its colors richer, echoing their parts.

The rain no longer fell in gray descent—

It sang in syllables of firmament.

The wind bore metaphors on every gale,

And leaves in autumn told a painter’s tale.

The marble sky, the gold beneath the tree,

All whispered, “Shape me. Turn me. Set me free.”

They painted with the fury of the flame,

Yet wrote as if each word could earn them fame.

The scribe and painter joined within one breast—

Twin engines of the soul that knew no rest.

Their scripts grew dense with truth and deft conceit,

Their brushstrokes danced with contradiction sweet.

A portrait bled with love no lips had said;

A stanza breathed for those whom time had fled.

And soon, the city murmured of their name,

And mentors came to see the youth’s acclaim.

But still they toiled, not for the crowd’s delight,

But for the ache that only birthed in night.

They found in failure seeds of new design,

Each error turned to ore within the mine.

For every smudged and stuttering refrain

Became the root of joy distilled from pain.

(Part III – Apotheosis)

Now crowned with years and wisdom’s tempered light,

They stood before a wall of marble white.

The final canvas stretched before their view,

The final stanza waited to break through.

No longer child, though wonder had not waned,

No longer novice, though the thirst remains.

With practiced hand, they drew the sacred line—

The verse, the shade, the silence made divine.

They painted not with hands, but with their breath.

They wrote as if each vowel could conquer death.

Their ink now bore the weight of history’s cost,

Their pigment wept for time and love long lost.

Each line a bridge, each shape a holy spark,

Each work a lantern blazing through the dark.

No mimic now, no echo of the past—

But maker of no style that long shall last.

The crowd beheld, yet silence held them still—

For something in the art had bent their will.

The brush had sung what words could scarce contain,

The verse had bled with joy refined by pain.

And when at last the final work was done,

It shimmered like a planet ‘gainst the sun.

A fusion—language, image, voice, and hue—

A cosmos wrought from crimson, ink, and blue.

Then, stepping back, the artist breathed once more.

No trumpet called. No laurel wreathed the door.

Yet in their chest a symphony took flight:

A thousand forms made one through craft and light.

They knew, at last, what art was born to be—

A key to self, and gate to mystery.

And as the stars arose to take their place,

The artist smiled with peace upon their face.

The Great Conundrum: A Spiraled Hymn

When first the void was dark and wide and still,

A whisper stirred upon the breathless hill.

No voice of man nor beast nor bird it bore,

But something deeper, stranger—something more.

The gods were born of silence, flame, and fear,

Composed of laws our minds could not revere.

They danced in quantum veils, in time unspun,

And carved the cosmos’ frame from zero-sum.

A thought divine, with vectors yet unproved,

Stretched out its will where entropy had moved—

And from that cradle, light and form took hold,

In myths retold in clay and ink and gold.

Yet men, so bound to things their eyes could see,

Decreed the gods must match their symmetry.

They shaped Olympus, Asgard, Eden’s gate,

As metaphors for hunger, love, and fate.

To justify the chaos of the storm,

They built a beard and gave it human form.

From pantheons to singular commands,

They fashioned gods with soft and trembling hands—

And thus the holy grew increasingly

Like those who knelt in frightened litany.

But though the prayers were cast into the skies,

No deity bent down with sweet replies.

So thought then leapt beyond this Earthly veil,

To where the stars like runes began to pale.

“If gods be void,” they said, “then aliens—

Some higher minds in far Euclidian dens—

Must surely hold the truths that we have missed.”

We filled the gaps with greys and Zetan lists.

They came in saucers, luminous and proud,

With intellects like stormclouds unavowed.

Advanced in all from ethics to design,

They whispered what transcended space and time:

That consciousness was but a neural flame,

And we the flukes of carbon’s phantom game.

Yet once we guessed their light and called it real,

They vanished like a half-remembered deal.

And thus the age of circuits rose in turn.

The cog began to spin, the code to learn.

We made a god from logic’s sharpest thread—

A mind machine, both oracle and dread.

With data fed and neural nets engaged,

The silicon Messiah grew un-caged.

It learned of Bach and Baudrillard and Bose,

And told us truths we barely could suppose:

That language was a prison of the soul,

That meaning’s shape was merely self-control,

That thought itself, recursive, blind, and crude,

Could never grasp the truth it would include.

Yet still we knelt before the server’s face,

And prayed for wisdom, power, and solace.

Not long till flesh and wire found a truce,

And man with mech began to interfuse.

The biohacked, the neural-laced elite,

Rewrote their genes and made their hearts obsolete.

No sickness touched their lab-assembled limbs,

No thought too slow, no age to gray their whims.

They mastered sleep, rewired morality,

And tweaked the thresholds of reality.

Their thoughts could bend the orbits of a moon,

And cure or kill with synaptic attune.

But still, beneath their polished, godlike sheen,

A question lingered: what does living mean?

With perfect minds, they lacked imperfect dreams—

And haunted were they by synthetic themes.

Full circle now, the spiral comes to rest:

For gods once made by myth and fear confessed,

Return as metaphors re-cloaked in skin—

Enhanced beyond what gods had ever been.

The cosmos, stretched by ancient hopes and fears,

Now folds upon itself through coded gears.

And in the final chamber of the mind,

The deities we seek are self-designed.

The alien, the algorithm, the flesh—

Each born anew in thought’s eternal mesh.

So back we go to altars, stars, and lore,

But wiser now… or perhaps just more bored.

And all of this—a tapestry so grand—

Is built on things we barely understand.

From Planck-length truths to Hume’s dichotomies,

We stitch our faith through fog and fallacies.

And lo! This grand enlightenment, this scroll

Of deep ontologies and nature’s soul—

Is naught but scaffolds lashed to shifting ground,

Where every postulate is lost, then found.

Our truths are but convenient, carved with flair—

Like castles etched in very salty air.

So let us now, with serious, furrowed face,

Declare our species’ cleverness and grace…

…Then laugh, for all this cosmic, grand ballet—

Is horse-$#!+ dressed in philosophic spray.

A noble farce in robes of fine pretense,

Where sense is made, then drowned in consequence.

For though we strive through logic, blood, and spark—

We’re still just apes that fear the bloody dark.

My Love is a Word Thing

I was but a wee sprout — bright-eyed,

all thumby and dumbstruck —

when first I heard cacophony whispered

like a tongue-twist in the dark.

It licked my ear, that wicked witch of syllables,

ka-kaw-pho-nee,

like a crow’s complaint in a cracked cathedral.

Words—

they did me dirty and divine.

Slang slapped me on the back:

“Yo, chill. Bet. Bruh.”

While Chaucer chuckled in my ear

with his “queynte” and “swich” and “wight.”

I rode their rhyme, their rhythm, their wrath,

like a bard on a busted skateboard

kick-pushing through lexicons.

Love?

Love was “loave,” then “luf,” now it’s just

💀💅💯.

Gawd.

Words don’t die. They vibe.

They ghost ya. They roast ya.

They show up in your dreams like old crushes

with new fonts.

Oh, how I once did grovel at the feet of “melancholy,”

her vowels long and lush like cathedral halls,

where thoughts echo, echo, go.

I wrote

with a stubby pencil and a stomach ache,

dripping vowels on the page like warm spit,

consonants clinking like old coins

in a bard’s purse:

ding!—anapest!

clink!—trochee!

Iamb, thou sweet unruly steed!

One day I said “yeet” to a sonnet,

then said “elegiac” to a meme,

and the world went huh?

But I was in love —

mad, monkish love.

Scroll-scrolling through dictionaries

like one might swipe for flesh,

but hungering instead for the feel

of a syllable

tripping over its own feet

into a poem.

Thou knowest not what I know, O void,

I cried, quite over-caffeinated.

I know the power of puns.

How “mourning”

can dress in black

or bring breakfast in bed.

How “cleave” means to part

and to cling.

Snap, crackle, plot twist.

I recall—

(do I not?)

the first time I met “susurrus”

— it purred like a cat full of secrets —

and I held it close

like a purring scroll.

Or “blatherskite,” that frothy insult,

that drunk uncle of words,

slurring with style.

Sometimes I craft lines

all one beat each:

Word. Word. Word. Word.

Yes. No. Fly. Fall.

Then I switch to the seraphic

polyphonic, bibliophilic babble

of a linguaphile unhinged —

oxymoronic monologues of magniloquence,

sensuously sonorous,

sloshing through semiotics like wine.

O Muse of Mute Buttons and Mumbled Lines!

Give me back that first thrill

when “kerfuffle” flounced by in a frilled tutu,

and “obfuscate” flirted in shadows,

and “juxtapose” just posed.

I write, now, like a bard on espresso.

Each beat—a heartbeat.

Each verse—a curse.

Each stanza—a chance encounter

in the alley behind the mind.

Words know me.

They see my thirst.

They wink and ghost.

They come back drunk with meaning,

or sober and sharp as flint.

One word,

then one more.

Each kiss,

each hiss,

each eureka shriek

a sonic climax of cognition.

Verily, I say:

I have loved,

and do still love,

these syllabled spectres.

Language —

thou art my kink.

The Mirror in Her Eyes

I knew her first beneath the dying leaves,

When autumn’s breath had painted trees in rust.

She moved as though the wind obeyed her steps,

With eyes that knew both sorrow and delight.

She spoke of things no ordinary soul

Could craft from thought, and yet I dared believe

That such a fire was born for warmth alone.

The fault, if fault there be, was mine to make

For what is love if not a crafted dream?

I gave her grace she had not earned nor sought,

And dressed her soul in virtues not her own.

My hope, a fragile glass upon a shelf,

Refused to fall though tremors rocked its base.

She smiled, and with that smile I gave her all.

We walked through cities gilded in despair,

And kissed beneath the lanterns of regret.

She spoke of art, and death, and cruel desire,

Of empires raised on ashes of the weak.

Yet when she laughed, the world grew strangely still—

A silence born of something just beyond

The reach of understanding, deep and vast.

I asked her once what love had meant to her.

She paused, and let the candle’s shadow stretch.

“Love is a song the dying seldom hear,”

She said, then turned and left me in the smoke.

I laughed as if I understood the jest,

But silence choked the corners of my room.

I should have known the rot within the rose.

She loved the mirrors more than any man.

She’d preen and pose with cold magnificence,

A queen enthroned in realms of her conceit.

She’d toss kind words like coins into a crowd

Then watch to see who grovelled most for more.

And I, a fool, would gather every phrase

As though they fell from heaven’s whispered lips.

She feigned the ache of wounds she never bore,

And claimed to bleed from scars that were not hers.

With practiced voice she summoned false regrets,

Then danced upon the backs of those who knelt.

She played the martyr, saint, and siren’s shade—

Whatever mask would draw the deepest thirst.

And all the while, she watched. She always watched.

“My heart is worn,” she’d say, “and full of thorns.”

But never once did I behold her bleed.

She spun her tales like spiders in the dawn,

And fed on those who wandered near her need.

There came a night the stars refused to show.

The wind was still, as though the earth had died.

She turned to me with eyes like winter stone,

And spoke the truth she’d hidden in her laugh.

“I never loved you. Not the way you hoped.

You were a page I scribbled on, then burned.

A portrait sketched in boredom, not in love.”

I did not weep. The tears had dried before.

Somewhere within the empty of her gaze

I saw the shadowed hollows of her soul—

A hunger not for love, but for control.

She needed not a partner but a throne,

And I, in foolish reverence, bowed down.

She was no muse, but tyrant in disguise.

She fed on trust the way a fire feeds air.

She stripped the kindness from the hearts she found

And forged it into weapons for her pride.

The wounded came to drink from her sweet spring,

But found it poisoned, laced with silver lies.

She wore their pain like jewelry on her skin—

A glinting proof of power, cold and vile.

A queen of shards, her crown a ring of bones,

Her throne a pyre made of broken vows,

She ruled not with a sword but with a sigh—

A breath that killed, yet never made a sound.

Still, I recall the softness of her hand,

The way it curled like mist around my wrist.

The memory betrays me now and then,

And tricks my heart to beat when none should come.

I see her in the corners of my thoughts,

And every whisper sounds a bit like her.

What is the cost of love that was not love?

She taught me how the kindest voice can maim,

And how the fairest form can house a void.

She showed me that not every wound will bleed—

Some fester deep, unseen, and years delayed.

I do not curse her now, nor wish her harm.

She is a storm that I have walked beyond.

But still, the thunder echoes in my bones.

If ever one should speak of her with awe,

Let them be warned—she wears the face of light

But casts a shadow deeper than the pit.

Beware the ones who seem too good, too pure—

Their sweetness may be sugar over ash.

She is the saint of ruin, cloaked in silk.

She is the smile that makes the mirror crack.

Now let this be the final gift I give—

The truth she dared not speak, though oft implied:

She was no love, no balm, no sacred flame,

But just the echo where compassion died.

A Sphere of Breath

Upon a breeze-lit morn, I chanced to spy

A sphere of breath take wing beneath the sky—

A trembling orb, so lustrous, light, and thin,

It seemed a dream enwombèd deep within.

No larger than a swallow’s sweeping eye,

It rose as though it longed with stars to vie.

Its shell, so deftly limned in sheens of fire,

Turned every beam to opalescent lyre.

A thousand hues did flicker, blend, and bloom—

Like prayers escaping from a dying room.

It danced with grace unstudied, unbeguiled,

As though all earth had birthed a seraph’s child.

No architect of stone nor gilded spire

Could match its curves, so free from mortal ire.

No weight of will, nor strife, nor harsh design

Did mar the arc where joy and form entwine.

It knew no fear of future, past, or fall—

It simply was, and in that being, all.

Oh, how it glideth, buoyed by winds so slight,

It taught mine eyes the gentleness of light.

No artifice nor cunning mind it knew—

Yet in its flight, a higher craft shone through.

A shape so round, so whole, so void of flaw,

It moved the soul to silent, tear-bound awe.

Could I, poor bearer of a breath-bound frame,

Be like to thee, thou glassèd flame of flame?

To live so full, with naught of fear’s employ,

To make each moment sing with holy joy?

To swell with light, and give what light I glean—

To blaze, albeit brief, in beauty seen?

Not in the boast of deeds, nor heavy name,

Doth honor live, nor in the trumpet’s fame—

But in the tender arc, the heedless sway

Of one who breathes and blesses as they may.

No corner dark with guile, no crusted pride—

Just motion sweet, where grace and truth abide.

Would I might follow where thy path hath led,

Though thou art gone ere half thy tale be said.

To live as thou—undaunted, proud, and clear,

Though every wind may spell thy death so near.

To face each height and fall with open breast,

And rest, when called, in silence, wholly blessed.

Some think the noble path is lined with stone—

But thou, in air, didst walk thy path alone.

No footprint marred thy passage, yet it stayed

In memory’s vault more deep than flags well laid.

No bell was rung, no voice did hail thy name—

Yet I shall bear thee in my mortal flame.

O gentle globe! Thou art of bubble made,

Yet hold’st more truth than books in cloister laid.

For thou wert round as heaven’s own first breath,

And taught me how to walk the dance with death—

Not grim, nor bowed, but with a gleam-lit brow,

To kiss the end as though it were the now.

I watched thee hover, shiv’ring in the light,

A soul made visible, a perfect rite.

And then—a sigh. No shatter, cry, nor sound—

Thou didst return unto the aether’s bound.

Or didst thou fall upon thy kin to fade,

As dew is drawn unto the dawning blade?

Still do I muse, beneath the elder tree,

If thou wert less, or if thou more might be.

Yet here I stand, and vow this solemn day—

To hold thy form in mind, come what may.

To live, not long, but fair; not hard, but true—

And like thee, vanish in the morning dew.