The Raptor And The Gargoyle

The Raptor And The Gargoyle: Promise

“I’m very good at hunting for survival,” she chirped, admitting in quiet confidence.

“And one thing I’ve gotten very good at seeking and finding is the rarest kind of love. The kind where the heart beats deep with passion.

“I can still sense a trace of it near here, somewhere…” and she carefully inched up his arm onto his shoulder to settle against his warm rock neck, feathers gently fluffing.

The Raptor And The Gargoyle

The Raptor And The Gargoyle: Dear To Me

“Do you like that I return to you and alight like a bird upon your sleeve?” she asked the gargoyle.

“In truth, it comforts me to see your bright ways return to contrast against the gray of my world’s city. But I worry for you…”

“Why?” she asked him. “There is a sense of home here for me. Can not this make you happy that I return to thee?”

“Because I will never change my ways for you,” he grumbled. “I will never allow your colors, nor your sunlight, to transform me.”

Male Bonding

The Dating Scene

“I’m pissed because it seems I have a type that is attracted to me: young or old, kindly loving and nurturing one moment – then ever distant.

Talk about “daddy issues!”

All shapes and sizes, masked and chameleonizing, to reveal that same dead end I keep bumping up against.

I don’t know how to change this.

THAT’S what makes me bitter.

THAT’S what gets me down.

Men who are capable of the deepest, most profound loving, killing it – and allowing it to be dead and buried, underground.

You want to know what keeps propagating evil?

Men not standing up proudly for love’s light and fighting for the right to have it.

THIS is why our world is spiraling down.”

Altered States

To Her

“I don’t know what to do to save my situation.

All I know is to Just Start Working.

Maybe, just like you would have.

Funny, for all of our differences, how perhaps so much we were alike in belief’s core foundations.

Help me.

I need your guidance – like at the graveyard where needed truth was revealed, thus enlightening.

Am I missing something important, here?

Or am I “on the right track” and “doing the right things” toward my own next levels of “greatness.”

I cannot tell and do not trust easily.

I feel disoriented and clumsy

You know why.

You’ve seen what’s happened to me.

Yet, I must shake out this shroud of jaded memories so that it smooths down gently around me.

I must become something more – yet again – than I was before.

Perhaps for you, too, it was never easy.”

Altered States

Beloved Matriarch

She had earned my love and respect because she had grown.

She’d evolved.

She’d pushed aside her biases, regrets, and grievances, and had looked for essential core values by which to strengthen the family.

She would have never needed to choose sides – or rather, she would have chosen both “sides” and pushed back those who wished to keep us separated.

She would have opened her large, warm home to all of us, kept us all safe and “off of the streets” – and maybe even would have advocated for couples counseling.

The point is, she would have given us all a buffer, a neutral ground, a place to recallibrate and regain bearings after the fall and hits we had all taken.

But she was gone.

Our family had been the last one standing since, with all of the weight of bitter prior generations haunting and pressing upon it to crack and shatter.

And no matter how innovative I was – how determined, how full of love, hope, belief, and far-seeing persevering perspective – it needed the command of our elder’s respect that she’d weilded to help save our fragile marriage.

But she was gone.

And the house along the sea ledge once so full of the triumph of love overcoming all still sat vacant, silent, and weathering away by ensuing neglect –

A testament to the greed and avarice of an inheriting daughter-in-law’s need for revenge upon her father’s memory –

With our matriarch’s memory unable to hold further sway beyond the symbolism provided in loss left holding the ashes of her mortality.