The Muse
What is a Muse?
0505.2024
A fire burning too bright
before smoldering into ash—
a hunger without a body.
I’ve grown wary of muses.
Wary of their perfumed voices,
and sugar-spun illusions—
but most of all,
the careless gesture
that unravels the spell.
What is a Muse?
A moment’s infatuation,
a gasp held a second too long,
a silhouette mistaken for a soul.
It is projection—
not presence.
A borrowed pulse.
A mask draped over the ache
of your own unmet becoming.
It is the ghost of a self
you almost dared to believe in,
the corner of an ideal
you touched—
afraid to let go
in case it was entirely real.
A muse is a liar.
But not at first.
At first, they are a promise.
They raise you in soft light,
then drop you
from a greater height.
And when the echo fades,
you are left with your own voice—
sharper, lonelier,
and finally true.
I’ve had a handful.
None stayed.
They never do.
Like love, they vanish.
Like fog,
they resist the grasp—
and in trying to hold them,
you learn to roar.
In the end,
they are a beautiful betrayal.
More trouble than worth.
Less than myth—
and no offering
for the woman who rose
from the silence they left her in.
— m.c.f.
Futility
Ghost Wings
0426.2025
The sun sings me awake
with its voice of salt and gold—
it folds sorrow into the sea,
drowning it beneath the oldest bones.
I’ve unstitched every thread,
its pride wearing me
like rusted armor—
its cruelty coming
in too many kind voices.
It’s killed my desire for breath,
to taste life’s honey,
to try, and…
I’ve released the thread—
the thread of a ghost-winged dove
sent soundlessly
through the hush of my tears.
I recall the spell hope can cast.
I watch the shape of its leaving.
I hear the wind moan behind its face.
They say breaking apart of things,
was all mine—
but the fracture,
like the blade,
was always in their hands.
m.c.f.
AI-generated conceptual visual ⊹ Edited in Photoshop ⊹ Created to accompany the poem ⊹ Not for sale
On Emptiness
The Gate, The Vine, The Exit
A triptych for the unread
0425.2025
⸻
I. The Ghost Garden
✿❧✿
I have wandered through the garden of this world
with my hands full of unopened letters.
Not from lovers,
but from ghosts—
those who looked at me like a star they could name,
and then vanished
before the name was spoken.
They called it love.
They said care.
I called it weather—
storms that smelled of honey
but left salt in the soil,
destruction in their wake.
✿❧✿
⸻
II. The Vine and the Gate
❦❁❦
I have learned that, for me,
love arrives with a key—
only to lock the door behind me
when I travel.
And there’s a vine that holds my ribs,
promising my fear its blossoms,
then withering
the moment they bloom.
No one stays. Not really.
They gather petals,
sip the nectar,
then drift away
before they can touch the root.
Now the garden is still.
The fountains dry.
The statues haunted.
❦❁❦
⸻
III. The Final Flower
•❦❁❦•
I no longer wait beside the gate.
The air has grown too still.
My hands are stained
with the ink of unsent letters,
and the keys I was given
have led to empty rooms.
Let no one say
this was about a single man.
Let no one say
this was about family.
Let no one say
this was about friends.
This is about the ache
beneath all my thresholds—
the promise made in childhood
that someone would come,
and stay.
No one did.
And so I will leave with grace.
I will dissolve like perfume into night.
I will press one final flower
between the pages of this story—
not for them to remember me,
but so that I can forget
the ache of being unread.
•❦❁❦•
m.c.f.
AI generated conceptual image
❦❁❦
for the poetry
What It Means to Love
There is a mirror each of us must eventually face, not to critique, but to see. To see what shame has hidden, what fear has silenced, and what love—when it is real—can forgive. Only when we walk through the brambles of our own vulnerability can we ever truly hold another. Not out of need. Not out of guilt. But out of presence.
This is the kind of love that asks nothing in return. It simply says: “I see you. And I’m still here.”
Many never reach that place. It is easier to avoid, to distract, to pretend. But to look inward, to tell the truth, to feel it all and still choose love—this is courage. This is life. And some will miss it entirely.
But for those who choose it—even just once—it changes everything.
Because placing the people you love ahead of your guilt, your shame, your story… that, too, is love. That, too, is integrity. And that, too, is the beginning of becoming whole.
—with love,
Marni Fraser
ꕥ⪻ ✿ ⪼ꕥ
On Overcoming
The Single Point Of Love
0423.2025
We are all children,
moving alone through rivers—
breathing doubt as we swim,
drifting downward
when what we crave
is flight.
We seek warmth—
a single hand,
a slow caress,
an embrace
that folds around us
like shelter.
Always,
we stand at a threshold,
dressed in the blood
of our becoming,
leaving behind
each lesson
like small red gems
on the road.
Time turns.
We endure—
carrying our shadows,
chasing their vanishing shade,
asking why
through the sad exits
of our mouths.
Because—
we were made to bear it:
to find one point of love
and make it bigger,
louder,
bright enough
to eclipse the ache it rose from.
A love so vast
it follows us into descent,
only to lift us—
until we have no choice
but to swallow its sun
and drown
in its light.
— m.c.f.
The Sun
Easter Sunday
0418.2025
In the quiet of Sunday morning,
a soft light sings of beginning,
and then there’s the scent of wild tulips—
somewhere in the world,
a child finds its prize in an egg,
and this wonder fits their small hand.
I love the human hand—
lifting another from the dust,
offering safety to the damned,
the forgotten,
the afraid.
What is a god?
Perhaps a hush that moves between us all—
a voice in the blood
that whispers:
“love one another—
and mean it.”
If Christ ever walked,
let him be a man who fed the hungry
with bread and time,
who wept without display,
and spoke not to be praised—
but to remind us
we are not alone,
how we are loved
and love.
I do not need a rising of the sun
to know what it is to begin again.
But for those who do—
may this morning
open like a soft gate.
For the children—
may their laughter be real,
their baskets bright,
their eggs warm in their hands,
their fear vanished.
And for the rest of us—
the wanderers, the watchers,
the ones who love in quiet ways—
may the hush of this day
bring a small peace,
and the gentlest permission
to keep going in love’s light.
m.c.f.
Friendship
I’ve had many friendships in this life, but never imagined one of the most profound ties would come from a culture long portrayed as distant from my own. It’s remarkable how deeply propaganda—both political and spiritual—can shape our fears and close our hearts.
This friendship has quietly transformed me. It’s given me a reservoir of symbolism, emotion, and lived experience to draw from. I know, without doubt, this connection was meant to find me.
These poems are a tribute to that culture’s New Year—a celebration I once saw only in images, yet somehow felt deeply in my soul. I will never forget the beauty I witnessed, nor the quiet love that marked it. I am changed.
____________________________
❖
In the Shadow of Cypress and Stone
(For A.N.)
0325.2025
Somewhere in Persia’s quiet hills,
the earth begins to wake—
brushed with thyme and honeyed light,
stone warming under the weight
of memory and feet.
He walks among the almond trees,
their blossoms like shy confessions
to the sky.
His breath folds into the wind,
into the hush that gathers
between pine and prayer.
The new year rises not just
from the Haft-Seen’s sacred table,
but from the stubborn green
pushing through cold soil,
from rivers swollen
with what winter could not keep.
The mountains do not speak—
they listen.
They cradle the songs
of women long vanished,
and the dust of grandfathers
settling into root.
If I were there,
I’d carry silence like a lantern,
let the cypress trees
translate what I cannot say.
And maybe then he’d sense it—
not just the path beneath his feet,
but someone walking just behind,
quiet as breath,
and just as full of love.
m.c.f.
______________
The Gifts
(For A.N. & His Family)
0325.2025
And I,
gatherer of signs,
read his omissions like scripture—
do not need to be named
to be known.
I do not need to be touched
to feel him unfolding
in the space between the truth
and the one he’s not ready to speak.
He gave me his mother’s quiet gaze,
his father’s timeworn pride,
his nieces hands—
Glass-colored, aching with vision.
He gave me laughter in his smile,
and the dust of old men
gathered like roots in the center of the room.
He sent me the new season—
the soft riot of a New Year offerings—
pomegranate seeds and sweet wine.
The table was set with silence and grace,
amber glasses circling like moons,
around the weight of his lineage.
And he gave me himself,
not in words,
but in the shape of what he left untouched.
m.c.f.
❖
✵ Outside, the cypress trees swayed in slow confession, offering quiet comfort in place of questions.
❖
✦ AI-generated conceptual artwork
✦ Created to accompany poetry
✦ Not for commercial use or sale
Synchronicity
Dàimh
0427.2025
Have you ever glimpsed
the first breath —
and the final silence —
of a soul you were sworn to?
Then felt the instant
you vanished
into the knowing in their gaze,
as if the stars themselves
had charted the voyage
long before your name was spoken.
And the sum of it:
It was always written.
Soul to soul,
one eye,
one flame.
— m.c.f.
AI-generated conceptual visual ⊹ Edited in Photoshop ⊹ Created to accompany the poem ⊹ Not for sale
Evanescence
Dissolve
0415.2024
I’ve become something smooth
unraveling underwater—
a mourning fog,
a shadow folded
into another shadow.
I once held so much feeling
it spilled into the quiet,
lit the unmoving air,
and said, “I am.”
Now I watch the fog,
and agree with my life:
it is better to die
than go on kneeling
in shadows.
m.c.f.
AI-generated conceptual visual | Edited in Photoshop | Created to accompany the poem | Not for sale
Starborn
The Distance
0413.3025
“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.” — Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)
Who was I to the stars?
Was I once another poet, in another time?
A mouth of flame, a scribe of truth?
My being is pulled—this way, then that—
summoned by the pomegranate’s promise,
its madness, its ache, its unbearable desire.
How can I feel this one thing
as if I were the fruit itself,
pressed in someone’s trembling hand—
as if another soul has tasted mine,
and recalls the honey,
the meaning of me…
my breath.
Drawn to the depth of eyes,
as though they hold a memory—
a trace of a life once lived,
an echo of something once known,
a peace that speaks my name,
who was I?
The poets I venerate—
I carry their words like prayers,
as if they were spun from the same silk
that weaves my breath
and moves my hands.
And now my heart feels left behind—
not lost, but waiting,
hidden in the folds of some forgotten time.
Let my mouth open like light,
let my hands serve love,
and only love.
And still—
with sorrow stilled,
my breath silent into the dusk—
I ask:
Who was I to the stars?
❦
m.c.f.
Chromatic Divide
Color Theory
0411.2025
There are kinds of color.
Some go quietly—
sink in water,
drown in the painter’s grief,
brushed on to summon
love or shame or longing.
But others—
others are fugitives.
They vault the borderlines,
bleed through the page,
burn to get out.
Some mingle.
Fuse.
Grow gorgeous in rebellion—
despite the purists,
who hiss that mixing
is filth.
Contamination.
Some crust over—
unusable.
Others are branded:
too loud, too dark,
too melancholic to frame.
Not fit
(for what?)
the purists murmur—
to the others,
to the makers,
to themselves—
trying to stay clean.
But I keep stirring.
Even when they blister.
Even when the canvas recoils.
Because the color that runs
is the only one
that breathes.
m.c.f.
Fire to Frost
Poma dat Autumnus: A Triptych
0312.2013
❦
I. The Slow Burn
Autumn sets a slow fire to the land—
Carlina’s meadow burning into vine,
nightshade crawling up the arms
of trees that no longer beg the sun.
Stone and timber wear their habits—
honeysuckle, rust—
purple wood curling at the feet
of earth turned to hardened brioche
then cracked open by time,
eggless, and bare of bloom.
The wind forgets its voice.
A spider strings the hush—
the quiet silver pulled taut
from dusk until its dawn.
Flame comes like blades,
orange and yellow petals falling
from the hands of the dying.
II. The Shadows
Autumn favors shadowed places.
It runs fast-footed into sorrow,
steals the color from Rose and Cardinals—
and melts them into copper,
bronze,
the alloys of dusk.
It lends its metal light
to its red-rebellion
marching toward winter.
Its rivers are plum-dark.
Its waterfalls, lilac and frost.
The fruit of its womb—
Drunk.
Bruised.
Made to warm the teeth of bone.
Spice floats through corridors
of stone,
through chimneys that exhale
clove, ghost, and memory
into forgotten kitchens.
Where once a flower curled in bloom,
a sea of crystal prepares to sleep.
⸻
III. The Liturgy of Dusk
I watch nature turn her key.
A crow calls into sky’s quiet ruin.
A raven drags its soft black cloak
toward a blackberry crown.
The sparrow mourns—
sings light back through shadow.
Rain touches my window
with long, tired fingers.
It hums something almost-kind,
almost-remorseful:
“Autumn,
you glorious thing.
You brave and crumbling thing.
How precious your time is—
Ambrosial.
Vanishing.
Born to die.”
m.c.f.
Twice-Bound
The Man In Black
1229.2009
The man came to me
on a black horse,
his flask full
of black water.
He rode along
a deep black lake,
his ride cavorting
with its reflection.
He wore a black suit
that made his fingers
bone-bright,
and pulled his hat down low—
it smelled like bad meat,
like a million roads
heading nowhere far.
“You must be Earth’s daughter,”
he said.
I told him I was.
“How’s life
walking along her spine?”
“It’s like striking a match
on gasoline,” I said—
“beautiful bravo,
bitter blight.”
The man in black nodded.
“So I hear,”
he said,
spitting into the dirt,
grinning like a gentleman
carved from bad omens.
He stepped off his horse
to walk beside me.
There were banjos
in his eyes.
The grass between us
was waist-deep,
and the wind
sighed like a tired woman.
The sun
was a coal-speck
burning in my eye.
“I tell you, girl,”
he muttered,
“livin’ ain’t easy.
You got people’s pain
stacked against ya.”
Then he turned solemn:
“You got to reckon next time, now.”
We stopped
where a dirt road
vanished
into a hole of wire-twisted trees.
A dog barked,
somewhere far.
“Maybe from the Janus plantation,”
he said.
Then,
he took out his flask.
“Want some?”
I stared at it
a good while.
All these years
I’d been thirsty.
And I thought—
why not?
I was learning
to leave trails
with no scent.
I drank the black water.
There was nothing else.
m.c.f.
Life’s Winter
Crone (Winter’s Knowing)
0111.2013
She wears the almanac of her face,
keeping records—
maps of familiarity,
delicate roads
where disappointment and joy
ride together,
ending at the shore of her heart,
which has raced
a matron’s marathon.
There is a protracted shortening—
of spine,
of endurance—
a frame slowly collapsing,
no longer able to hold
all the wisdom,
the words,
the purpose
she once laid out
like careful plans.
But time knows.
She is bursting with sleep
and quiet quartets.
Age doesn’t rebel or beg.
It won’t implore another’s time—
not even its own—
nor question
any journey.
It accepts,
without reservation,
the course
of that voyage.
m.c.f.
AI-generated conceptual visual ⁘ Edited in Photoshop ⁘ Inspired by my ongoing exploration of symbolic duality in traditional oil and mythic narrative ⁘ Created to accompany the poem ⁘ Not for sale
The Soul & The Storm
“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”
— Marcus Aurelius
I.
Take a look at your contribution to the issue. Is expressing the frustrated emotion of violence—toward self or others—ever worth it? I sometimes sense how difficult it is to feel sorry for those whose frustration consumes them, but more often than not, I don’t. I feel sorrow.
II.
Someone once taught me that Neptune frustrated Odysseus for a reason. Neptune persecuted him so he would be forced to think, to evolve, in order to achieve his teleology—which was Telemachus. If Odysseus had not experienced those trials before returning to Ithaca, the suitors may have outwitted him, and he may have failed in achieving his task.
III.
I agree. And it’s not an easy thing. But this single issue is the cornerstone of Western civilization—and older than the Bible, older than most spiritual texts themselves: frustration spurs growth. How you proceed is entirely your responsibility. Nobility is about taking the suffering and consciously not adding to it with a reactionary mindset.
I love you.
m.c.f.
❦
On Coincidence and Voice
My work—written and visual—is not reactive. It is not borrowed. It does not arise from imitation. It comes from lived experience, from discipline, and from an interior language that can’t be manufactured or reverse-engineered.
Creation, for me, is not about echoing trends or circling others’ expressions. It’s about responding to life in real time—honestly, and without pretense.
This isn’t a defense. It’s a declaration. A timestamp. A quiet assertion that truth in art doesn’t need to shout—it just endures.
I don’t create to compete. I create to witness and stay in rhythm with something real.
m.c.f.
Photo, 2025, Marni Fraser
Feminine Familiar
Grimalkin
0626.2013
There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.
Albert Schweitzer
_______
When I was young, I crept—
silver and sinuous beneath the sun,
my backbone curving softly
in a meandering sway,
swinging to and fro without concern.
My mother taught me:
survival is a shifting thing—
a dance of swift arrangements
that play across the feet
like toccata and fugue.
And time, she said, is a virtue.
The trees would gather me in their hands,
lifting me to their green embrace,
where I would drape,
lazy in their arms—
then sleep,
and the day would vanish,
sunlight dusting my pelt,
warming my quickly aging skeleton.
I made friends with sparrows and doves,
studied their strategy and society
until they grew familiar—
comfortable in my presence.
And when I had to finish one (regretfully),
I gave thanks for their life,
careful not to desecrate
the delicate wings and breast—
burnishing their bones ivory
beneath my tongue.
Now I bask, wearier, dreaming—
of balled silk in a basket
on my mistress’s rocking chair,
of buttermilk in autumn light,
of human hands that fussed
over my coat
which thickens at the scent of snow.
(And I could speak of my fur—
its purpose and promise,
its calm, its serenity,
its gentle withdrawal from need—
and of the machine in my throat,
its contented hum
as fingers dance upon it.)
I remember the handsome Tom
who sat upon my windowsill,
and my six children
fastened to my belly,
their paws kneading
the milk into motion.
I remember
the hurried hunt—
a mouse, a lizard—
tokens of affection,
placed with reverence
at my mistress’s feet.
Now, these days—
some fire in my gilded eyes
dims, day by day.
My stance trembles.
I fall,
left or right—
a towel laid gently
to soften the landing
of bones tired and frail.
There is a temperate quietness.
And shameless, with indignant grace,
I nearly breathe my last—
until my eyes spark
just one more time.
And though humanized,
I am not human—
(as if I wish to be).
In all sincerity:
a cat.
m.c.f.
Originally written 06.26.13, posted April 11, 2025 at 9:36am PST
Photo 2011 · “Sienna” · Marni Fraser
Liminal Set
How To Love Words
0720.2010
Wait for the note—
then the hiatus between each syllable.
And when they wander,
go tenderly after—
When they return,
let them rest
within the question.
(And if they never return,
love the silence
they leave behind.)
m.c.f.
(Love the words of others tenderly,
because sometimes they are greatly bruised.)
❦
Convergence
How To Explain Peace
1125.2012
And there goes my sense of self,
a jester turned escapee,
carrying my unrest like a crown.
It found me
not in silence,
but in the moment
of a door opening.
m.c.f.
❦
Concept rendering • AI-assisted + digital post-processing • inspired by my ongoing exploration of symbolic duality in traditional oil and lens.