Thoughts Have Hands

Darkness obscures sunlight,

as clouds shade doleful eyes, 

cast an impenetrable veil, 

between then and now.

Anguish slithers up my neck,

Wraps my brain’s fiery resistance

In a rawhide grip 

Destroys my peace.

Now sorrow dawns every morning,

as the sun crawls over thickening clouds,

Rains grief

outside my screen door.

Loss arrives uninvited. 

Unpacked its bags,

Grabbed my heart like a new slave owner

Declared itself master.

Says hello with a grizzly grin,

Walks right in,

playing the part of an old friend,

teaches hard lessons in the art of farewell.

Cracks the whip,

Leaves me begging for tenderness.

Finding none,

a lifetime of mourning loss may pass

before I shed my tears and find release.

THH

4/28/25

Revised 7/10/25

Revised 7/16/25

The enemy has no face

But plenty of time to invent many.

Full of techniques to manufacture dreams 

Ready to dazzle with newly branded identities, 

Then sell the difference.

Why buy the marketing?

The power to switch on

The person you are

Originates within.

Sit in stillness 

Look at yourself

Add no spice or seasoning. 

Be a mirror for your deepest feelings,

Mix your personal dust with fresh living water,

Shape for yourself an original face.

THH

7/14/24

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

Roar with anger

Scream at the absurd 

Yell at the ridiculous

Damn the disease.

Turn your head into a basketball 

Bang it against the living room wall 

Bruise balled fists on the dining table 

Slam the door

Cry for the unfairness of her loss.

Fuck the pain

Hate justifications

And proverbial bullshit.

She lived by her heart

And gave herself to teach her art.

When cancer attacked

She fought back with vigor, 

did everything right.

Her death a judgement on the eternal 

When love gives her heart. 

To be hospitable, loving and careful, then

Nothing tried helps her get any better.

She bowed to forces of Mother Nature. 

For those who will miss her,

Knew her, and loved her,

She lived the adventure with loyal intention.

Her nature a gift to all creation.

THH

5/5/25

Pictures on the wall covered in dust.

Faces framed to impress rare guests,

Dressed to invite conversation.

My grandmother young, poised and demure,

wears her best off shoulder gown.

Her husband composed in a stiff collar projects

a dignified vision and solemn manner. 

Enshrined by the late owner as a sign of respect, hang precariously from yellowed plaster.

Her house a tattered dress

worn by more than a few generations,

full of good will and solid intentions.

Rooms furnished in early seventies chic,

adorned with the occasional antique,

threadbare and in need of much attention.

Shades of unmet expectations

mock her fate from nooks and crannies.

Nicknacks of imagined value, saved for posterity.

Degrees from higher educational institutions displayed with pride,

useless now.

Wall posters advertise her artful designs.

Work done and awards won

rest idle on shelves and end tables.

An uncurated museum

of ancient generations carefully researched,

no longer holds a living interest.

Stores of unrealized ambitions and incomplete projects stacked around for an eventual archaeological excavation.

Photos on a flash drive

flip past my eyes;

one old family photo after another. 

Memories recorded and no longer relevant.

Attempts by the late owner to catch and hold

that fleeting instant, long ago,

The fair haired child

smiled on by family,

as she played the guitar,

and performed her ice skating routines, 

The leap, the fall, but now the dance is over,

Frozen in death past giving 

As mountain snow dissolves in spring rain.

Walking the hall

Checking her bedroom,

Looking for necessities for those still living 

No thing speaks. 

Silence crowns tomb-like space and

Every item carries dead weight. 

Nostalgia noses its way into my mind,

Creates distraction,

Raises questions of different ends:

What should be saved,

what would it mean, 

What value remains after her loss

in mementos of the lost

And a beautiful life left in dust,

never mine.

THH

5/23/25

Image

And her holding onto old parts of her life

Storage bend

My bedside manner on display,

Quiet and unassuming, 

I wait for an unprescribed end.

Play hide and seek. No hope to win.

Forbidden deviations by the soon to be departed, 

I review instructions meant to keep faith with dying wishes.

Hospital utility flashes technology,

sounds warning bells,

blinks lights of recognition,

signals hope, offers rafts of data to the living.  But

Silence hangs over her bed,

Save the intake of an occasional deep breath,

our world turned simple and pointedly small.

Hospice curtains swing in air conditioning,

A chaplain drops in.

A welcome respite, 

heavy with realization, and

Restrained importance,

Tired of explaining, 

Tired of dealing with this  ‘oh so’ common human drama, unable to explain founding facts by analysis or reason. 

Reduced by her disease to iron resignation,

She dies a bit angry and disappointed.  Wistful of the stingy nature of time, she drifts into night, resolute in spirit and full of courage.

While her worldly friends sit and fret,

Watch for signs,

A miracle, 

A rewind, 

A reboot, 

Willing to beg for indications of new directions.

The clock ticks unfathomed depths of emptiness, slowly closes once open doors.

Time’s middle finger stiffens the back. 

A raw meat moment stirred by her irregular exhale, born of morphine,

Regret pasted on, we look with curious attention into her pale, placid face once animated by an eager smile.

Remember a rendezvous and fun times of engagement,

Memories of Scotland, sundry debates, hours of skating and hundreds of students, leaping and twirling, soaring high on Zephyr smooth ice.

With each indignant exhale from her late healthy body,

gray with betrayal;

the human predicament looms opaque as dust.

I sit with the drip of drug induced snores,

Peer into her mouth, gaping wide at still living,

No longer interested in conversation,

Open to release from competition,

Unimpressed by argument,

Overwhelmed by days of unrest,

She lives inside a self induced trance.

I practice smiles for her public; I watch the mystery of human performance and consider what matters: People come touch her skin, shed a tear, sad for their loss; People come timid and brave, say goodbye, sense her absence.

Weighed down by distress, I contemplate her willing leap into silence. Observe her sleep from a distance.

I begin to wonder, has death taken a vacation?

Imagine him entering the rink, take off across the ice, circle her to perform a routine, skating black ice,

Needing a great performance to entice her interest,

To tempt her with a swizzle, a lunge and a double axel,

Offer his hand to spin her around, invite her to perform a long death spiral with graceful posture,

Practiced at judging a skater routine wisely, she is weary and a bit wary, always the teacher.

His leaps and spins, catches her attention,

Beckons her to regale him with tales of teaching numerous ice skaters,

She describes well done pirouettes, gliding movement, and special routines,

He reels her into his eternal spin, out of life’s spiral.

And finally letting go, she lands her dream of a triple axle, takes a bow,

kisses the ice,

And waves goodbye to the love of her life.

THH

5/1/25