Ship of You

you wake
already shedding —
cells in the sheets,
hair in the comb,
yesterday loosening
its grip on the name.

your teeth drift.
your face is revised
by light, by grief, by years.
shirts take your shape
for a little while
then forget it.

that room you loved —
someone else stands there now
with a cup in hand,
morning opening
at your old window.

so it goes.
plank by plank.
breath by breath.
loss by loss.

and still
we call it you.

not because anything stays.
not because some hidden core
sits untouched
behind the change.
but because the pattern
keeps arriving —
a cadence of bone and hunger,
memory and weather,
touch and trembling,
meeting for a moment
in one visible sum.

not one thing.
not many.
not the pieces,
not apart from them.

just this way
the body gathers —
from blood, from bread,
from voices, from love,
from all it cannot be
without.

a ship by courtesy.
a self by habit.
a song the throat
borrows from silence.

and when the song breaks,
when the parts
no longer answer
one another’s call,
nothing flies out.
nothing has been stolen.

there is only
this:
the pattern no longer forming,
the lantern unlit,
the wake folding back
into water.

still, for a while,
how beautifully it held —
this cargo of starlight and salt,
this brief agreement
between dust and breath,
this ship of you
sailed by what it depended on.

changism blues

The clock keeps books
but never finds the night.

Rain darkens the step,
then leaves it darker.
A hand on the table
becomes an older hand
without moving.

The room is never the room.
Blue gathers in the glass,
wood learns its ache,
smoke climbs
and cannot keep its shape.

What stays
is only a way of changing.
What passes
leaves its print in passing.

So when the mirror
fails to keep your face,
do not blame the mirror.

Something is always arriving
as something else.
That is the song.
That is the singer.

time isn’t the river.

never was.

time is the little cuts
you carved into the oar
so you could tell yourself
you were getting somewhere.

time isn’t the wind either.
it’s the scraps of cloth
you tied to a fence
so when the air got restless
you could argue
about how much.

the Way doesn’t wear a watch.
the Way doesn’t count.

time shows up later,
after you’ve already stood there
watching things move
without asking permission.
it’s the math you do
once the miracle
has finished happening.

and change —
don’t get that wrong.

change isn’t an event
that drops into the world
from the outside.
change is the world
stretching its limbs,
breaking into ten thousand faces,
rising, turning,
coming back crooked,
leaving fingerprints
on everything it touches.

nothing waits.
nothing freezes.
nothing needs your approval.

so stop chasing time
like it owes you an answer.
you’ll only catch
your own shadow.

stand still enough
to feel what’s moving.
meet it
with open hands.

that’s it.

no clock.
no sermon.
just the world
doing what it’s always done;
and you, finally,
not standing in the way.

no ghost

a river doesn’t need
another river
to push it along.
flow isn’t extra.
flow is the river
doing what it does
when nobody’s watching.

same with the world.
it doesn’t hire a ghost
named Time
to keep things moving.
change is the job.
change is the body.

a bruise tells a story
without using words.
a teapot, gone cold,
confesses it once burned your hand.
a child getting taller
doesn’t prove “months” —
it proves the sun
kept showing up
while growth was busy.

before and after
aren’t invisible ropes
dragging things forward.
they’re footprints.
scars.
limits set by what already happened
on what’s allowed next.

we throw a measuring-cord
over the mess,
stretch it tight,
call it order.

but don’t fool yourself —
we didn’t find that cord
underneath the world.

we laid it down
so we wouldn’t get lost
watching change
do exactly
what it’s been doing
since before anyone thought
to ask
who was carrying it.

Middle-Man Blues (for the Present)

I’m hunched at the bar of now —
neon drip, ashtray galaxies,
listening to glasses trade their shapes with the air.

The jukebox coughs up Heraclitus,
a river riff sliding through nickel static:
you’ll never drink the same shot twice, kid,
and the bartender nods like a monk
who’s tasted the horizon melting in his rye.

Outside, traffic tattoos impermanence
on the pavement’s cracked knuckles.
Each headlight is a prophet,
each brake-squeal a sutra,
but nobody’s buying scripture after midnight.

So I tip back the moment, raw —
feel it bruise the throat,
feel it already disown the tongue that names it.

The heart keeps doing its cheap card trick:
now you see it, now you don’t,
palming the red queen called me
before the mind can shout “hold still!”

Even the smoke knows better;
it climbs, unbuttoning form from formless,
a thin sermon of getaway.

And the moon?
Just another drifter,
pawning yesterday’s face to finance tomorrow’s glow.

Listen —
there’s no landlord of this instant,
only a key that turns itself:
door becoming room becoming door again.

So drink up, stranger.
Toast the middle-man that keeps the bargains moving:
this flicker between exhale and inhale,
this skinny-fisted sliver of yes —
the present, selling itself to buy
one more round of change.

Clink.
The glass shatters into ordinary stars.

We pay the bill in silence
and walk out carrying nothing
but the echo of footsteps
already spending themselves on the street.

Measure of Change

Time isn’t a river.
it’s the receipt.

the world doesn’t move through anything —
it just keeps doing
and we keep score
because we’re the kind of animal
that can’t stand uncounted miracles.

a clock is a small honest racket:
one change volunteering to be the yardstick
for all the other changes —
a pendulum with a drinking problem,
a quartz throat clearing itself,
cesium flashing the same private grin
over and over
until we call it law.

a second isn’t a slice of god’s loaf.
it’s a deal we make in a bright room:
this many of that
under these rules —
so we can compare breath to train-schedules,
grief to harvest,
kiss to ignition,
without inventing a cosmic hallway.

when good clocks disagree
it’s not that “time” got tired and bent —
it’s that the world treated them differently:
height, heat, speed, gravity, noise —
each little condition
leaning on the mechanism
like a hand on a shoulder
changing the tune.

the past is not a museum behind the eyes.
it’s what’s still here
holding together —
tree-rings, scar tissue, cratered stone,
a photo that hasn’t faded yet,
servers humming in a locked building,
your body remembering a doorway
it hasn’t walked through in years.

the future is not a film canister.
it’s a loaded spring,
a hungry pattern,
an unstable nucleus practicing its fall —
the set of ways the next page can be written
given the ink you’ve actually got.

and “now”?
what we call now
isn’t a shining needle on the world’s record —
it’s the contact point:
where things meet,
where something gets registered,
where the field marks itself
with another bruise of fact
before it hardens into record
or loosens into possibility again.

your mind sells you a thin now
because it has to —
a stitched horizon
made from retention and prediction,
a working model
so you don’t step in front of the bus
while you’re busy being holy.

but outside the skull
there’s no spotlight,
no moving edge,
no secret syrup called Time
dripping through the universe.

there is only change —
patterned, uneven, everywhere —
and our ledgers, our little vows,
our receipts fluttering in our hands
saying:
this happened,
and it holds,
and something else is about to.

The “Present” Is Just the Middle Man of Change

the present
isn’t a chair you sit on
it’s the spliff being passed
between two strangers
who don’t plan to stay

everyone keeps telling me
be here now
like now is a motel
with clean sheets and no exit
but I’ve been here long enough
to notice
the walls are moving

the moment arrives
already leaving
like a lover who kisses you
while reaching for their coat

I watched my breath this morning —
came in like it meant something
left like it never promised
a damn thing

that’s when it hit me:
the present isn’t home
it’s a transaction
a handshake between
what’s dissolving
and what hasn’t learned its name yet

Heraclitus was right
but he didn’t go far enough
it’s not that you can’t step
in the same river twice
it’s that there is no river
only water
pretending to agree with itself

we call it now
because we’re afraid to say
movement
or worse —
no one is driving

the monks figured it out
staring at walls
counting breaths
until the counter vanished
and only counting remained

the desert knew it first
nothing to hold on to
so everything was allowed

even God,
if there is such a thing,
doesn’t sit still long enough
to be worshipped —
He’s too busy
being born again
in the split second
you stop trying to keep Him

I used to think peace
was freezing the frame
turning life into a photograph
I could finally understand

turns out peace
is trusting the blur

change doesn’t visit you
it is you
having a temporary conversation
with a mirror

the present is just the middle man —
no loyalty
no memory
no future plans

it hands you off
and disappears
like a good dealer

and if you’re smart
you don’t cling to him
you take what’s offered
and let it burn through you

because the secret
(before I wrote it out loud)
is this:

nothing is passing
everything is happening
and what you are
is the ongoing patterning
it keeps making
while changing

Ledger

Not the clock,
but the leaning of light
across the same chair
becoming another chair.

Not the road,
but the dust
learning the shape of a foot.

We say things pass.
What we mean is:
they leave a mark.

We say things stay.
What we mean is:
they change together
slowly enough
to bear a name.