How

How?
How do you get up
And get out of bed
And take a shower
And pick out your clothes
And climb into the lift
And get into a cab
And go to work
Push around some papers
Crack incestuous jokes
Come home
Kick off your shoes
Watch the food go round the microwave
And laugh with the friends laugh track
How?

With the
With the
With the
With the wars
And the earth
And the atmosphere
And the heat and the cold and the in-between
How
With the virus
And the pain
And the starvation
And the isolation
And the death
And the death

How
With the forests burning
And the koalas without homes
And the elephants without tusks
And the cattle in cattle farms

And the conflict and the riots
And the flags on top of temples on top of mosques on top of homes
On top of dreams and hopes
All trampled underfoot
In the name of better days
“For the greater good”

How
In a world of nothing
But flashing cycles
Of bad news
On top of bad news
On top of bad news
On top of bad news
On top of - you get the point.

How?
When every atom of every cell of every crevice of your body
Should be screaming, “this is an emergency”
How do you just
How do you just live?

~ Sam 

Scratches

The scratch of pen on paper - that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day, right? That’s what it’s always been about. Sometimes it’s scratches that turn into bytes, pen and paper that becoming clacking keyboard keys. Sometimes it’s someone else’s scratched out thoughts you turn to in books and blogs and memes and stories. Sometimes it’s an essay, sometimes a hurried cube drawn on the corner of a napkin, used and discarded and never thought of again. But always, permanent or ephemeral or somewhere in the long road in the middle, always it’s the scratches you turn to, to make sense of it all. Sense of the bruises and the cuts and the muddled befuddled puddle of thoughts in your soul, sense of the clouds drifting across the roiling landscape of your mind, the butterflies blossoming in your stomach, the cracks forming and freezing over and melting in your chest, the wheezing insecurity in your lungs as your heart alternates between a beat of “not enough” and “just this”.

Just some scratches, runes, hieroglyphics. That’s all there is to us.

~ Sam 

Yellow - Unedited

A clean yellow sheet
Spread out before me,
Laid out - waiting for me,
I’m talking about a sticky note, mind you,
Not a legal pad - ew.
What will I do with it,
With this wide yellow expanse
Of pure potential?
Will I make another paper plan,
A wisp of a smoke of a tendril of nothingness,
An idea of a thought of a dream,
Nothing more, nothing less?
All the numbers in place,
The figures and the data,
The pros and the cons,
The crows and the sparrows,
Everything ready
Except - me.

~ Sam