Brrd Roots ~ The Pulse of Survival and Rhythms of Change
Independent. Sovereign.
Each being governs its own rhythm,
each force bends to its own nature.
Mother of winds—east, west, north, south—
but the winds no longer follow the patterns they once did.
Storms grow sharper,
the air swells with trapped heat,
uncertain currents shift across hemispheres.
Mushrooms rise, ancient witnesses,
absorbing what the soil remembers
as the earth tilts further into imbalance.
One eye sees, two faces emerge at dawn,
etched into a pole weathered by change.
Kappa spirits sculpt form from essence,
shaping survival from forgotten wisdom.
Make maka maka—
the darkest hour shrouded beneath a hood,
banishing all demons.
But some demons burn hotter
than the wildfires stretching across the land.
Mushrooms stand watch.
They bloom in the wreckage.
They thrive in the ruin.
I imagined something,
and in the imagining, I became.
Shroom-riding on the back of a pajama queen,
or a pajama king—
or maybe just a drift of heat rising
where forests once cast their shade.
Mushroom summertime.
But summer stretches longer now,
reaching past its threshold,
bleeding into autumn,
seizing parts of winter.
The balance falters.
Seasons collide.
Ik Tomi Tommy—
dandelion stem chain links,
each knot, each strand,
woven like a mother’s kiss.
But the air thickens,
the winds distort,
the weight of heat presses against time.
Non. Nan. Binary. Then airy.
No tautology,
only ontology shifting
with the last mushroom standing
against the rising tide.
One C, decorated,
woven into a native ceremony untouched by blood.
One, two, three beings—
does it matter how many,
when the ocean swallows what was once firm ground?
Showroom. Shrimp showroom.
Showroom shrim.
One Z, painted, glowing.
Bleached beach, wide eyes,
accepting coral reef,
accepting trust,
accepting change.
But coral does not accept.
Coral fades.
It fractures,
it breaks apart beneath the acid,
beneath the rising heat.
And acceptance is not enough.
Forests above water—
floating,
stretching toward what cannot be controlled.
Beneath the air, beneath the ocean,
predators still circle prey.
But the balance wavers.
The temperature rises.
Migration shifts.
Habitats shrink.
Species vanish.
Seaweed forests reach—
moss vibrant, mycelium alive,
kindred circles growing.
But even underwater forests must breathe,
and oxygen dwindles.
Cycles repeat,
but never in the way they should.
Just so—
a new member arrives.
Bird Bird X.
Their name is simply "Means."
Means listens to Plexus chakras during evening hours.
Means favors yellow foods.
But yellow fades.
Crops struggle.
Fields burn.
Rain arrives too late,
or not at all.
Wow, cool.
Skull face, big eyes.
Wow, cool.
Now, calm down.
Now, calm down.
Politically and otherwise,
the Twin Cities hold a long tradition—
law, order,
empathy,
care for the least fortunate.
But laws cannot cool the heat pressing against cities.
Orders cannot hold back swollen rivers,
tides creeping past their bounds.
What do you kneel for?
What does your moral compass read?
Twin Cities—
laws layered on Earth’s skin.
What do you stand for?
Rise up now,
or fall out.
Pollution hums in carbon dioxide.
The subject changes too quickly,
the shift comes without warning.
Just like the climate,
just like the world unraveling faster than it can be held together.
Not near the alley.
Not near the alley.
Not near the alley.
I met Katie K9.
She sat in a pickup with a topper,
chewing gum,
wearing a Castro-style cap.
She almost asked me about my dance miracle.
But then she drove off.
The Katie K9 sign shimmered—
on the topper,
on the pickup,
somewhere between real and imagined.
True or false?
Only K20 knows.
Why be a king or queen,
when you could be a guard?
Or better—
an adjuster.
Wild for the people.
Against unfair entitlements.
But fairness shifts,
land moves beneath cities,
water rises against settlements.
Pretty bomb.
Pretty horse bomb.
Pretty seahorse bomb.
You have come so far.
Now you live with colorful mushrooms on your shoulders.
But colors do not stay.
Your kayak holds balance,
your cape flows with ease,
Korean and Japanese silk brushing against continents.
But are those continents whole?
Or are their edges dissolving?
Are the shorelines shifting?
St. Malcolm, St. Baldwin.
Declare above—
you are on the correct path.
But humans still believe politicians will solve their problems.
More often than not,
the promise does not materialize.
Oh no.
Well, that’s disappointing.
Well, I’m not sure.
The ocean hums in low light.
Cargo ships cross deserts,
carrying movement across boundaries
that may no longer exist.
Little is known of Earth’s blue masses,
but they are the vacuum,
the unseen sweepers of carbon from the sky.
Yet their breath grows shallow.
Warming waters shift their rhythm.
Nothing that should be steady
remains steady.
When ocean life thrives,
greenhouse effects weaken.
But when ocean life collapses,
heat surges forward.
Balance teeters.
Cycles hesitate.
Light flickers—
hope bends toward sustainability,
or toward something harder to survive.
Life restores itself,
but never effortlessly.
Small actions build,
small deposits expand,
but is it enough?
Is it fast enough?
Is it stronger than what is unraveling?
When biodiversity thrives,
climate chaos recedes.
But when biodiversity weakens,
chaos does not wait for permission.
My spirit is alive.
The virus may reach me,
but until then—
I will keep moving.
I will keep meditating.
With passion.
With heart.
With soul.
Not competitive,
but full.
Full with Earth life.
Full with expression.
Full with the desire to help,
to partner,
to shape forward,
to hold onto something real.
Even when cycles repeat,
they never do so in the same way twice.
Even when the planet turns,
it does not spin exactly the way it once did.
A Window and a Bowl of Soup Walk Into a Paradox
The world does not judge.
The world does not see.
The world does not exist in the way you think it does.
It does not ask who you are.
It does not ask where you have been.
It does not ask if you deserve to stay.
It is an outline drawn in dust,
a reflection in glass that does not hold.
A door pretending to be a window.
A window pretending to be a door.
Potential risk. Potential revolution. Potential breakfast.
Three Three, a five B, a five C. Seventeen.
Digits mark existence before existence understands itself.
The numbers mean everything.
The numbers mean nothing.
You might be okay.
You might be doomed.
You might be dreaming in a language that does not translate.
Don’t dress like that.
Unless you must.
Unless you want to.
Unless clothing is a disguise.
Unless shelter is an idea.
Unless certainty is just myth.
You have a house.
You have a roof.
You have a ceiling pressing down like sky.
Or maybe you don’t.
Maybe the sky was never meant to be separated.
Maybe walls are just pauses in open space.
Credentials do not define.
Money does not weigh more than silence.
Wealth is measured in forgotten moments.
Possession is temporary.
Ownership is deception.
Deception is currency.
Spend wisely.
You are part of the tapestry.
But the tapestry is unraveling.
Threads twisting into discord,
colors folding into static.
History clings to itself like dust on glass.
Pull one thread—
watch the whole thing collapse.
Bent but soaring,
twisted but strong,
woven without symmetry,
held together by friction,
by defiance,
by refusal to dissolve.
Ring the bells backward.
Scatter the numbers before they form order.
Twenty-one, twenty, sixteen, eleven, eight, zero.
Rearrange. Delete.
Forget the sequence before it remembers itself.
Pull up the screen.
Erase the screen.
Watch it rebuild itself from pixels that never were.
Reincarnation is a game you cannot win.
You do not get to be right.
You do not get to be wrong.
You do not get to arrive—
because arrival was never the point.
Because becoming was always an illusion.
There is no frame.
There is no window.
There is only the absence of both.
You do not need to go anywhere.
Because nowhere is already here.
You are untamed. You are unwritten.
You are shifting, unstoppable,
absolutely human.
A limb lost is a limb gained.
A wound is a doorway.
Broken things do not break,
they redefine.
Octopus. Plant. Human.
You adapt.
But adaptation is not survival.
It is existence itself.
Mother Earth does not recycle.
She forgets.
She erases.
She reshapes.
She does not remember what was lost.
She does not mourn what is replaced.
She does not count the things burned, buried, and abandoned.
She does not grieve,
because she does not wait.
Thou shall steal.
Thou shall reclaim what was taken.
Thou shall erase what poisons.
Fabric tears.
Water dries.
Air clears.
Nothing is permanent.
Nothing stays.
Everything shifts.
And among the wreckage—
A wildfire sparks.
Not incense.
Not smoke.
Something large, something alive.
Not the delicate burn of memory,
but the roaring collapse of it.
Let it grow. Let it consume.
Let it turn to ash.
Music rises—
Unfamiliar, unfamiliar,
foreign even to its own creation.
Coffee beans unbrewed.
The thing that sustains
is the thing that must be undone.
Forget profundity, artists.
Forget truth.
Forget spirit.
You do not need to be anything.
You do not need to be seen.
You do not need to be remembered.
Forget the prophets.
Forget the messengers.
Forget the narratives.
Forget the stories that tell you to become.
Forget the lessons that taught you what to seek.
Forget the echoes whispering what you should be.
All things new
are simply old things broken differently.
Reject timelessness.
Reject poetry as truth—
truth does not exist.
Reject meaning as structure—
structure does not exist.
Reject the permanence of transformation—
transformation does not exist.
And somewhere, Julian sleeps.
Not dreaming.
Not worried.
Not restless.
The world turns.
Not forward,
but backward.
Not toward meaning,
but away from it.
Somewhere, something unravels.
Somewhere, a bird never learned how to fly.
Resonance of Existence
Memory, Movement, and the Spirit of Change
Static hums in the walls, a pulse waiting to break free.
Something tangled in silence, restless in repetition.
Brian sits with it, feeling the weight of stagnant air,
the electricity of thought forming but never quite landing.
A conversation begins, though no one is there to answer.
“Shake it loose,” he murmurs.
“Not like there isn’t enough poison already mixed with sweet chitter-chatter.”
The sound shifts—
a staggering static sailing across the Atlantic.
It carries something old, unrelenting,
dragging the weight of history behind it—
ancestral misery layered deep like sediment,
pressed into the skin of those who still remember.
White man.
Pain.
Pain buried in ligaments, twisted into muscles,
etched into the mind, shaping thought.
Pain multiplied, recycled, forgotten, then remembered.
“Open the discussion,” Brian whispers,
but the words splinter against silence.
Warning lights flash.
A fault in the system.
Something might explode.
Or maybe everything already has.
Outside, birds move.
They think, they make art,
send signals into sky and shadow,
messages unseen but understood.
Rock, paper, scissors.
Grounded, lifted, submerged.
Movements pressing forward,
metaphysics tangled in shifting currents,
resistance pushing back.
The mosaic grows despite it all.
In another time, another place,
teachers become students.
Activism becomes creation.
Aroma becomes meditation.
The simplest things become the cure for restless minds.
A memory surfaces—
strange trips, dream-laden,
PTSD stitched through landscapes of thought.
Animals, humans, echoes of things meant to be remembered.
Amber streams dissolve into picture shows—
a voice softens trauma,
a song reshapes pain,
gradual changes unfold in sound.
Brian sees the sand—
separate, shifting, unclaimed.
Grass is not grass.
Everything is not quite what it was before.
Humans—odd creatures, reckless,
polluting all they touch,
breaking what was whole before they arrived.
Brian watches a rodent take its place upon an imported board.
For a moment, it is adrift,
part of something larger.
Sea turtles move differently than birds.
Their eyes do not see the same way.
Frames widen, then narrow,
perspectives shifting and reshaping.
Urgency whispers.
Every adult human should,
by all means,
live like the creatures they forget to protect.
Waste piles up.
Species vanish.
Food turns scarce despite the fields.
The world is covered in crops.
Yet hunger grows deeper.
Why?
Consumerism.
A hunger that never learns how to be full.
Brian sees the colors—
washed-up reds, greens, yellows.
Life slideshows shouts into solitude.
Fly to Nigeria, help your fellow beings.
Listen to the ocean bear.
Listen to the bird calling its goal.
Listen to the pulse of the earth.
There is joy, still.
Simple joys—
aromas and art, music bending into interpretations,
random thought turning poetic,
stories pouring into frames.
The influences are hard to detect.
Sensory layers exist unseen.
What do we really know?
Alive and mortal,
drifting in between,
souls filled to the brim
with love and kindness.
Poetry is the sensory expression of the unseen.
Summits convene, ideas pulse,
imperfections shared, truths reflected,
words carried through space,
hosts of minds contributing,
dressed in suits, in feathers, in dust.
Planet-bound humanity,
spirituality tangled in art,
religion shaped like sculpture,
painted in movement,
worn like language.
And in the end, the static hums, waiting.
Somewhere, something shifts.
Somewhere, a bird takes flight.
Enduring Fire, Eternal Ice
The Balance of Transformation and Preservation
Some roots burn.
Some roots freeze.
Some clutch embers still glowing, refusing to fade,
while others lie buried in permafrost,
waiting for time to stir them awake.
Heat rises.
Cold buries.
One forces growth,
the other preserves what must not be lost.
Hot roots twist through volcanic soil—
glowing rivers of ancestry threading the depths,
breaking stone, forging passage where none existed before.
They do not ask permission to rise.
They do not hesitate.
They burn, they claim, they transform.
Fire is an architect of change.
It purges weakness, carving new landscapes from destruction.
Ash feeds the next season’s bloom.
Blackened earth makes way for forests reborn.
Yet too much fire blinds.
Too much urgency erases memory.
Too much movement forgets what must be carried forward.
Cold roots sleep beneath ice—
preserved in stillness, waiting in silence,
holding the weight of time,
guarding what fire would erase.
They whisper of old seasons,
of histories untouched by flame,
of wisdom stored in frost and quiet patience.
Frozen roots do not burn; they remember.
They stretch deep—
into forgotten landscapes,
into veins of extinct rivers,
into the bones of the past.
They do not force change.
They absorb it.
They hold the weight of stillness,
knowing when to move, when to pause.
Their survival is patience,
their wisdom is waiting.
The tension between them is the tension of existence—
the force of fire against the wisdom of ice,
the urgency to rise versus the strength to remain,
the need to transform versus the need to preserve.
Some are forged in flames,
hardened by urgency, shaped by motion.
Some are preserved in ice,
strengthened by waiting, defined by memory.
But then—there are the roots that have known both extremes.
The ones burned, then frozen.
The ones tested by heat and by cold.
The ones that do not belong fully to fire nor ice,
but carry both within them.
Roots that have felt fire and survived it.
Roots that have endured frost and emerged stronger.
These are the roots that live beyond destruction and stillness.
These are the ones that outlast time itself.
Standing between chaos and silence.
Between transformation and remembrance.
And in their survival, they carry the truth—
the deepest roots do not choose between burning and freezing.
They learn to endure both.
They learn to thrive in the balance.
Reverberations of the Unseen
The Pirates, The Poets, and The Ghosts of Time
A hum beneath the surface.
Frozen air, electric light—
shadows shift, voices fold into static.
Something unseen murmurs beneath the pulse,
the rhythm of exchange,
the silent movement of forgotten trade.
Wings ignite—orange bursting against the drone.
Mechanical insects scatter,
lemon-juice skies burn through the horizon,
hard white fades to tender black.
Somewhere, a child breathes,
held in the balance between histories,
wrapped in steam, pressed against memory.
Fireflies shimmer, dissolve—
the city swallows their glow.
An invisible hand turns the tide.
A queen watches,
an ocean forgets.
Welcome, farewell.
Pirates linger in places unseen—
silent, masked,
moving like ghosts between data streams.
There are no flags anymore.
No wooden ships slicing through moonlit waters.
Only signals—
broken encryptions, untraceable codes.
An empire lost, rewritten in flickering screens.
A ransom paid in quiet desperation.
But piracy is older than the stars.
It is etched into stone cities,
woven into the architecture of conquest.
Kingdoms rise upon stolen breath—
a blade hidden in the wealth of nations,
a hunger written into history’s veins.
Alcohol pools in the hall—volatile,
fermented, intoxicating, indifferent.
A haze of scent, a mosaic of textures,
something ancient pressing into something new.
Illness lingers.
A single slice of toast, weighted in the balance.
Crowds wrapped in quiet breath,
something shifting, something unseen.
The body remembers, even when the mind forgets.
Billions pulse.
Histories thread backward,
stories dissolve into poetry,
words folding upon themselves.
An accordion of memory stretches across the sky—
blue into tangerine, a race against light.
A whisper reaches beyond the surface,
half-real, half-forgotten.
Minds flicker.
Not always a thousand cornea stitched onto thought,
but something fluid, restless, burning.
Holy land butter.
Pirate ship jam.
Burnt toast spread beneath unseen stars.
Is there a saint in the wreckage?
A ghost pressed against the earth?
Or does darkness arrive in quieter forms—
a shadow slipping through circuits,
a whisper lost in the noise?
Not always. Not in all cases.
We drift.
We replay.
Memories blur into projections,
examined, rearranged, reshaped.
Some moments torment.
Some breathe, quiet.
Some unravel like restless half-sleep,
pillows pressed beneath searching bodies,
turning, rotating,
lost, found, lost again.
Another night arrives.
Another vision slips between.
Kendra Darling moves through spaces unseen—
lucid, mothered,
walking through echoes.
Art re-injects itself into motion,
wild, staying alive,
steering into the stream of thought.
The play button is pressed.
A memory stirs.
Puzzle pieces collide into mosaic,
the weight of everything carried forward,
spilling into the unknown.
