Two Poems. No Apology.

Some poems arrive through discipline.

Some arrive through trauma.

Some arrive through dreams.

And some arrive because the universe apparently has no respect for business hours.

Today’s post contains the first written release of two poems that until now have existed only as spoken performances.

ZIG, ZAG

emerged from the aftermath of a motorcycle accident in November 2025 and the strange geometry between momentum and stillness, survival and surrender, impact and continuation. It was first performed at the inaugural poetry reading at Freeland Hall.

B R E A T H E

arrived years earlier while I was living in Denver. I awoke in the middle of the night watching words scroll through my mind like an illuminated billboard moving across the inside of a dream. Knowing they would disappear if I waited until morning, I got out of bed and began writing as fast as I could. What emerged was part meditation, part philosophy, part comedy, part ritual, and entirely itself.

Both poems were written to be spoken. Both have now been translated back into text.

Neither asks for agreement.

Neither asks for permission.

They simply ask to be experienced.

So here they are.

Two poems.

One post.

No apology.

SEE POEMS BELOW

B R E A T H E 
Ok everybody we are going to do a Breathing exercise but I don’t want you to immediately start breathing when I do I mean u can breathe but at your own pace yakno ? (aside: I mean u wanna see creeepy … massage therapists have the lock on creepy… i sit quiet in a quite quiet room and put oils on and rub people and sync with their breathing …to put myself and they in a mediaitive state  

you ….. (breathe.) 

I just want you to chill for a second take a moment to recognize that you and you alone control your breathing…. 
 
No one can tell you how to breathe, let’s say that again …. No don’t say it just listen
No one can tell you **how** to breathe 

 it’s the one thing we can all do, until we can’t. 

This is where submission comes in (wait u didn’t tell me he was gonna mention creepy and kink .. ) 

you are gonna have as a second soundtrack an ASMR of my breathing as a soundtrack over the poem … yes my breathing… (yes you would be submitting to hearing my breathing but weren’t you already … anyway ? 
My breathing ….amplified…. 

Creepy? Maybe ?  ….

The act of letting a narrator take over and create a voice track over your thoughts 
And then you begin to realize the exercise is about to begin at your ready … the breath you are going to take will at first be slow through the nose feeling your chest start to tighten because we’re gonna make this much bigger in a moment, (your lungs not your nose … wait that’s not) 

save your energy for the second wind of the breathe,
You get to a certain point to where your chest expands the diaphragm muscle and your like alright…. i can start exhaling … that’s only half of your breathing capacity …

you can breathe past there through your nose starting a circular breathing pattern that is reflexive of the muscle on the inspiration of respiration’s flex and creates a kinetic reflex of its own energy 

*Show person speaking shaking as he expands further and an exasperated but joyful calmness of exhaustion where u feel the three ring shot show of your life nothing matters but you laying, breathing?*

Breathe 3 deep breaths

Doing that several times in a row when u go to take a shallow breath it’s a lot easier ain’t it …. Take a breath, take a bow no one can tell you how to breathe but submitting to consensual social vulnerabilism (see we did a cnc scene and no one even noticed) …

to learn a breathing pattern we expanded our mind (shakes head) 

I Mean our lungs to a point past where the easy and normal reflex would just have us exasperate our possibilities. What is life, but breath and energy?

You opened your mind you opened your breathing and you expanding your lungs for the past few moments I’ve been talking, it’s now easier to breathe now ain’t it ? 

it’s the one thing that if I take it away from you u that one breath that moment you can never get it back, that moment , that breath… 

but if we give our breath to each other

 we can empower 
and not take
each
 others 
 breath
maybe just maybe we can co-exist. 

So remember *give* each other your breath don’t take it. 

Breathe and Meditate more often

ZIG, ZAG

I remember the lie of continuity
how the road pretended to be a promise,
how velocity whispered that intention and outcome
were merely two dialects of the same language.
somewhere between zig and the refusal of the pole to zag,
the universe withdrew its signature from the contract I had scripted in my head 
The telephone pole stood there and I, still fluent in momentum, mistook its stillness for permission.

----

It arrived
not as pain
but as perimeter.
A red-dark glow, low… and slow… ancient and quiet as something that had been waiting longer than I had been alive to recognize it. 
It stitched itself deliberately, carefully, almost tenderly around the exact shape of me, as if for the first time the universe wanted to make absolutely certain it knew where I ended and everything else was required to stop.
Not burning.
Not warning.
Not punishing, not rushing, not claiming debt or demanding explanation.
Just… holding.

Holding like a hand that does not grip but refuses to let go.
Holding like breath held between two worlds that have not yet decided which one you belong to.
Like those sacred heart statues the ones that stand in impossible calm while fire quietly declares them from within, not destroying but describing, not consuming but revealing, not spectacle but certainty
fire, but polite, fire, but precise, fire that does not devour but simply assumes you were always meant to be seen this clearly, this suddenly, this completely, whether you were ready or not.

And I remember thinking
not in language, not in the clumsy alphabet of explanation, but in the deeper syntax of recognition that arrives fully formed before words can even pretend to follow

Oh.
Not fear.
Not surrender.
Not even surprise.
Just
Oh.
So this
is where I end.
Or rhyme.
Or bend the EXPECTED angle of my own continuation.
Or begin again, mid-sentence, mid-breath, mid-miracle, without asking permission from the version of myself that existed only one second earlier and knew nothing about this.

-----

CHIARO!
SCURO!

Obscure.
Clarity.

Light that knows dark intimately enough to trust it.
Dark that knows light intimately enough to make it visible.

My old band name waiting patiently in the archive, waiting years, waiting lifetimes, waiting quietly for its cue, for this exact collision to cash the paycheck between metaphor and matter, between symbol and bone.
Because this was neither abstraction nor reflection, this was introduction.

The aura did not mirror me.

It found me.
Like a photographer stepping out from behind his own camera for once, stepping out from the safe side of observation and into the dangerous territory of being seen, stepping into the frame without rehearsal, without control, without the familiar protective glass between observer and observed.

Caught.
Not chasing.

And I, who had spent so long naming reflections, framing fractures, trusting surfaces, trusting lenses, trusting glass more than gravity itself because glass never lies and gravity never negotiates
was suddenly, impossibly, beautifully, absurdly,
there.

Not theory.
Not metaphor.
Not memory.
Me.
Still breathing in the quiet conspiracy between body and air.
Still seeing in the flicker between disappearance and return.
Still somehow; being, stubbornly, irreverently, magnificently being.

----

I zigged.
The pole did not zag.
It kept its ancient contract with stillness, its vertical loyalty to gravity, its refusal to participate in my improvisation.
The fence did not zig.
The fence did not zag.

Six wires  drawn tight between expectation and outcome, between intention and interruption, between the story I was telling myself and the story that was already being written without my consent.

Each barb a small, mechanical mouth, each sharp point whispering in the language of consequence:
Are you finished?

Are you finished being the version of yourself that believed motion guaranteed mercy?

Are you finished believing that every zig is entitled to its answering zag?

And I, outlined in red, like a saint or a warning label or a cheap neon OPEN sign flickering in exhausted insistence at the edge of some forgotten highway, felt something inside me not courage, not heroism, not defiance but something far more honest.

Something human.
Something that smiled, quietly, stubbornly, without asking whether it had permission.

Because even then
even there
even balanced at the fragile intersection between disappearance and continuation 
some irreverent, essential, utterly unreasonable part of me refused the exit.

Refused the erase.
Refused to become past tense.
Refused to be anything less than outlined.
Less than present.
Less than alive.

-----

And for one impossible pause one elastic, eternal, microscopic eternity stretched between heartbeats and decisions and the simple stubborn fact of still being here 
everything waited.
Not for the crash.
Not for the explanation.
Not for the apology or the accounting or the orderly filing of what had just occurred into the permanent record of what cannot be undone.

But for me
to decide, or not decide, or simply continue without deciding
to step forward, slowly at first, then suddenly, then inevitably,
out of the fire that did not burn me
out of the outline that did not contain me
out of the fracture that did not break me
and into myself.

----

I ZIG
And I ZAG.
—————

Listen to ZIG, ZAG in its original spoken word below ..