Thoughts Have Hands

Wounds can go deeper than any black hole, a bottomless pit where no light escapes.

The wounded cross event horizons full of envy, absent contentment.

Starved for love, feeling no one understands, 

then settle for crumbs of personal attention, bask in the glitter of faintest praise and 

shine like a cherub with every sign of recognition. 

Desperate empty hearts chase mythic dragons of hope through neurons of mental space. 

Fire breathing dragons of uncontrolled desires, gorge on nods of attention and smiles in their direction.

Unable to quench growing anxiety, they fail to notice the event horizon; their marrow sucked from now charred bones, shredded in time.

So many galaxies of pent up emotion 

whirl through interior space 

to die in entropy, 

unable to trust order in swirling chaos 

or the presence of empathy.

THH

6/25/25

Child of five stands outside

His first grade class.

His mother leaves him at the door,

full on frustration,

She marches to her car,

drives on her way. 

Eyes stormy with tears

stare after —

Stomach hollow,

Heart skips a beat in disbelief,

Suddenly a shriek

of monstrous exclamation.

Left on his own to face education,

by strange sharp faces;

Sentenced to the power of year twenty five,

dispensed with no sign of maternal compassion;

the harsh pain of separation multiplied

by a terrified child’s active imagination. 

THH

6/10/25

Clouds hide blue skies from earth’s crust.

A red-tail hawk flaps wings in desperate retreat from angry sparrows.

Passion rules pretense, size makes no difference.

THH

7/17/25 revised

A moment of joy

Lifts a solemn spirit, 

A moment of pain

Gashes the skin,

Wholly gratuitous.

A period of boredom 

Begins to feel normal, then

Rare pleasures disrupt your routine with a new witness.

Another brief maybe  

Arrangements of dominoes in perfect order, planned to fall as imagined.

Causes with no demerit to explain a story. 

One follows after another,

a toss of a coin, or roll of the dice.

Results unpredictable.

Happy and sad, 

Glad and mad come as they may;

Throwing seven comes eleven or

Snake eyes for an unhappy groan. 

Odds and evens, 

day after day christen misfortune, 

Bear-boned baptism by raw emotion 

Cause misunderstanding of what’s happening.

Out of the depths

Life surprises;

Abruptly awakened,

A newborn gasps for air and

Begs for more; a sudden dependence becomes so urgent,

A rant addressed to nature

Needs attention to keep on living.

When learning to walk, legs turn first to rubber, then muscle to maintain balance, as you pretend independence. 

Experience crawls out of the darkness blinded by sunlight,

Uncertainty stunts intention.

In the wiles of nature, 

Expectations grow too tall, and fall over. 

Habits worn easily reduced by fate to a yesterday.

Love sings a siren song,

Strings you along, 

Fills your sails with warm summer breezes,

Propels your boat by her mysterious wind, but once out to sea leaves you in doldrums.

Children raised through fearful days with shouts of rage, or chants of praise head out the door to find their own ways.

Rarely follow cherished calculations.

Standing at the door watching them go, excited for adventures, you think – what’s next?  Contemplate highs, reasons for caring and mull the lows, hope for smooth sailing but know better.

 Joyful anticipation smothered by strains of obligations suddenly take control by the harshest of laws, as you look for a handle to open the door. 

Mixed emotions wash red eyes, sad for endings, the lost and broken;

Cleansed in the present you may 

See new directions,

Engage attention, 

Ignite a passion.

Another chance, another maybe

Wistful for time to celebrate best of intentions you find : 

Nothing is necessary, only apparent. 

Nothing is certain, just poorly remembered, or badly written:

All narrative an effort to preserve sacred order in whims of the mind.

A glass half empty is never full

A glass half full never empty, 

The difference a geometry of appreciation 

Hidden in space 

contained in maybe.

No one knows what comes next.

Every moment is all that’s granted.

To ride the roller coaster be ready for surprises and heavy breathing. 

For all lives are nothing but a gratuitous maybe. 

THH

5/31/25

On a rainy evening last Tuesday I left an early supper with good friends to return home.  After a long day handling dry legalities imposed by the recent death of my sister, I was tired.  The sun was setting, yellow gray light warned of rain and drops pelted my shirt as I walked down the steep hill to the parking garage.

Near the bottom of the hill I noticed people ahead of me abruptly cross from my side of the street to the other.  I followed suite.  But as I continued my descent I became painfully aware of the reason for the change of course.  A man in his wheelchair blocked passage as he held onto a light post.  He struggled to keep his chair under him and not roll back.  He was making no progress.  In an act of self justification, I called to him asking the obvious. ‘Do you need help?’ He responded with a yes that reminded of a groan.  So committed, I crossed over. 

The guy had pushed himself one-third of the way up the incline.  It was a valiant effort. I was amazed he had made it so far on his own.  Exhausted by his efforts he held onto the street lamp.  A bag of possessions slipped from his shoulder, his shirt torn and dirty. A tall thin dude, he sprawled across the sidewalk; he juggled for leverage but made no progress.  He spoke, but I couldn’t catch his meaning between my poor hearing and his slurred speech.  His lower lip seemed unhinged from his mouth as he talked.  

The only way to get him up the hill was to turn his rolling chair around and pull it up.  He kept showering words at me by way of explanation or thank you, as I tugged at the handle and he shuffled his feet.  Too tall for the chair and unable to stand or walk, he sat and I backed our way awkwardly up to the corner of Gay Street. 

The guy had a half broken umbrella but couldn’t use it and push himself up at the same time. He faced away from me as I inched my way up the hill. 

I caught only the side of his face. I noticed his malformed lip. It looked like his lower lip was separated from his mouth, but I saw no sign of bleeding.  I asked if he was ok and he pointed to the other corner so I wheeled him over to a flat surface on the sidewalk at the prescribed corner.  Then wished him well and proceeded quickly down to the garage.  

The rain kept threatening to unload and I had no umbrella. I wanted to get home.  I realized on my drive home I was a bit self satisfied for going out of my way. But I had failed to ask his name. I didn’t look him in the eye. I made no attempt to know him.  He was a good deed half done.

I wonder what I would have seen if I taken a moment to look at him and meet his eyes.  What would his visage reveal ? What might I have learned if I had leaned into his impoverished humanity, if I had taken a minute longer to greet him person to person.

Performing good deeds is a fine way to celebrate humanity.  But the performance can be only an act, a cold obligation to satisfy an ego.

It takes face to face encounters to make human connection. Unfortunately I missed a chance.  In my hurry I failed to acknowledge him as a person.  I left him alone only a little safer than I found him.  Sadly, life moves too fast and we reduce interactions to transactions.  We lose the sense of wonder in making connections, make little time to meet, and hold no space to be present with another human face.

What did I see between me and the person I didn’t see.  I had power.  I had control.  He had little to done.

‘ Hello to the lenses (of power) through which I peer, seeing more of my self than I do of my subject’  Padraig O’Tauma points to our idea of others carried in our minds eye filtering our understanding of the people we chance to meet.

THH

5/16/25