To Concede
Becoming Elation
0402.2025
(a four-part meditation on love and transcendence)
I
My last love ripened,
then withered on an unrequited vine,
and it was the fruit of that vine—
filling the cup of love’s want—
that left me drunk on its final flame.
I carry its want—still alive with its need—
pressing hard on fragile conviction,
threaded with memory and history,
leaving my longing loud and alive,
buried beneath the ache of this heart.
⸻
II
Who knows what love is?
Perhaps to know
is to feel it, first—
unimagined and strong—
the one pull toward a life worth living.
Perhaps it’s to touch the sun
and die by its fire-beam and heat—
to fall to the wound of its golden arrow.
Or maybe it’s the long, exhausted sigh
while held in the arms of night,
then letting the moon’s kiss
set you free from yourself.
Perhaps it is death’s own moment,
when your soul is mirrored—
or losing time, entangled in atoms,
suspended among the stars.
⸻
III
Never knowing love,
I’ll become a honeybee—
carrying life from flower to flower,
especially the dying and loveless
beneath dry soil and fading fields.
The ones reaching, barely breathing,
pressed beneath the weight of stone—
oh, cruel journey of life!
to let their lives begin in shadow
while being beautiful,
but unseen and ignored.
⸻
IV
Let me be the bee
that finds the beauty in flowers
during their time of dying—
so my elation survives
in another form of love—
a kind worth carrying
in the grace of surrender
and purpose.
m.c.f.
❦
On Emptiness
Receding
(For The Dead Inside)
0402.2025
You are receding—
falling into the horizon
like dusk devouring light.
I struggle saving you—
but even your shadow vanished.
When our thread tore,
it took the scent of spring—
the flowers had just begun
to color my smile
with the lie of joy.
Then came the light—
unforgiving,
unblinking—
dragging the dead
from my heart
into their graves,
and beneath time’s silence,
which keeps them
as captives.
They are like you:
a goodness,
a fragile fire,
burning out
and falling
into a lesson
inside a thousand
lessons.
I must be thankful somehow—
but the gratitude burns.
My eyes have turned to deserts.
The sun devours me.
The night drinks my life.
What goes unnamed
because you lied?
What am I to think,
now that I see—
the joke is me?
I will think:
Turn me into a bird,
so my wings break
from my hiding heart
and carry its sorrow
from night
into half-light.
At least.
I will think:
Turn me into dust,
so I forget
what I have learned
ten thousand times.
I will think:
Let spring
cover me.
Let summer
end this cold.
Let something bloom
in the ruin
of my garden.
m.c.f.
Photo, 2024, m.c.f.
Love Without Ego
I Still Do
(for no one, and you)
I love with a silence blooming in bones—
My love asks for nothing,
but still lights a lamp in the dark
in case you want to come home.
I love you like a prayer
when nobody is listening—
even when you vanish,
and the leaving is drowned in your absence.
I love you when your words turn to shadow,
or are lost on the air,
and your care stops calling my name.
You don’t have to earn it.
I never meant to give it.
It arrives like sun in the spring—
slow, warm, and impossible to refuse.
There are still pieces of you in my life—
the tone of your voice
curled around a word,
the way you linger
at the edge of your own heart.
You may never hold my heart in your hands again.
You may never say my name out loud.
I may never hear you.
But I hope,
when the noise grows quiet
and people around you forget to listen—
you remember how once,
you were deeply seen
and entirely loved
by a rose who asked for nothing.
I loved you.
Not to possess.
Not to be chosen.
But because some loves
arrive like stars—
brilliant, distant,
and mean to be carried,
not kept.
And I still do.
m.c.f.
Photo, 2024, m.c.f.
One Morning…
Aubade
0331.2025
A poem for the dawn that never softened.
For those who enter the light only to find the dark.
This morning’s heart awoke to death—
not a glorious flower
stretching its neck
to its own dawn,
but something gray,
unfinished—
a breath that never quite
found its warmth or reason.
No fragment of beauty,
no hint of song or
well-meaning hour
could lift the heaviness.
Even the air moves
like apology—
but not around me.
Everything is darker
in the light of day.
The voices wear tones
like weapons,
gentle only with each other.
I walk into their fire
and they lay the bullets.
They name me
before I speak—
a blur, a burden,
a failed warmth.
Not one of them asks
if I am broken
or just quiet.
(They assume I am
what they would be
if they were I)
And the cruelest part—
the mirror they mistake me for.
m.c.f.
Image 2024, m.c.f.
On Broken Thread
March 29, 2025
(The quiet severing.)
0330.2025
I let go with no spectacle,
no stage.
Just a whisper sent through wire
to say:
I saw what you could not give,
and I release you
to the wilderness
you chose.
m.c.f.
On Quiet Surrender
Night’s Mercy
0328.2025
The night’s splendor
pours through the window—
its silver secret sends me off
upon a sleepy sea of sorrow…
and I surrender gently,
like petals drifting,
learning to float
where I’d drown.
— m.c.f.
A Study In Goodbye
Soft Exit Tactic
0328.2025
You don’t vanish—
you drift.
A pause lengthens,
warmth thins,
messages arrive late—
their meaning lost.
You choose silence
like chiffon—
folded neatly,
placed just so.
The silent cut,
of unsaid words.
You ask to meet
knowing I can’t,
as though forgetting
is easier
than refusing.
(Maybe for you, true.)
I’ve read the script—
at first,
the slow retreat,
the soft descent,
the affection turns static
without a storm.
You’d rather fade
than fall,
slip the tether
without warning
or respect.
No reckoning,
nor flame—
Just distance
disguised as time.
But I feel you
exiting the room
while you smile.
I know
how goodbye sounds
when it tries
not to be heard.
m.c.f.