Growing too quickly already

Loves meatballs and pisghetti

Stone strong, yet tender inside

My wildflower, my pride...

Roars like a dinosaur

Yet so sweet at his core

Curly blonde hair

Too young to care...

How do you both lay down roots and grow?

It seems like a pulsing, pounding contradiction

To dig in your heels and aspire to brush the clouds

Yet if the soil is right

It allows you to grow

Leaves so you don’t leave

Pedals… for tricycles

Thorns so the band-aids have something to do

The first blooms of firsts

Scrapes, unwrappings, unfoldings, cold calls

Chaotic, static growth in a house of ...

Icing on my lip

Crumpled silver gift wrap

A butterfly-shaped balloon

Childhood, sailing like a sugar-sweet ship

Not yet exposed to life’s trap

Years away, it loomed

Eyes still wide and bright

Your hands not as worn

Colors seemed brighter back then

You were and are my beaming light

Yet your heart was shredded and torn

Destroyed from way back when

“Why are you crying?” I asked in the birch-brush...

None of it made any sense.

I would’ve thought some archaic gondola would’ve been the vehicle to bring me to the afterlife. After all, many ancient cultures figured it’d be at least a boat of some sort. But no, it wasn’t that at all.

Instead, I stood in a giant wicker basket. A warm, strong wind rocked me as if I was in a baby carriage. Above me, checkered spectral squares spun and spiraled upwa...

By the time a hint of night was visible, no one in Underhill was stupid enough to find themselves still driving on the road. Except Colin. He blazed through the small mountain town’s flashing yellow traffic lights and stop signs in his dented junk-food-wrapper-filled jalopy, taking turns sharp enough to fishtail.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he yelled while slamming his steering wheel with one hand...

It's the fading evening before it all starts and I'm sitting out on the broken yellow bench that we always sat on when the sun sets on Sundays. I sit on the right side, my hand covering the gnawed chunk of wood where the dogs started chewing before you stopped them. My left foot is resting against a hard root. It is my usual position. I remain the same.

But you are not to my left.

Instead, you ...

Did you find what you were looking for down there? Or rather, it was a who, right? Where was he? Perhaps he was down in the deepest caverns of the void, where thousand-fanged, multi-tounged beasts chew on the souls of gossipers and instigators and those who fight in the comment sections. Maybe he was in the shadow-covered forests of wires, where technoaddicts are caught and strangled in knots and ...

Today, relief comes at a cost. Her pain is gone now. Her eyes are closed. A serene peace and slumber has taken her to distant lands in silence and warmth. She will be able to run and pounce and play again.

She is free.

The parents look down at the stillness and know that there is peace now for their fur baby, their first child. Tears stream down their red faces. There is relief, but, my God, th...

What are you doing out there in the misty, lavender Mountains of Ere, when you should be filling out spreadsheets and timesheets and TPS reports? Why are you James Nyder, dimension-hopping wanderer, instead of Jim from Accounting? I see you analyzing those ancient runes, those eternally spinning glyphs from gods of old. Your mind churns as it studies every inch of their grandeur.

You’re trying ...