(.86aperion:ontos.14 a.l.FIA:f.n.BG&E//v1.1:f) (2026/spring)

Weathered sun-faded fiberglass automobile top on a GM van from the 1980s
The same sun-rays of sight sightseeing back into me
Reaching deep into the mystic depths of memory
This very peculiar, explicitly specific phenomenon
Invoking an equally specific sense of nostalgia
There’s a smell to it
Plastic he-man action figures
G.I. Joe with a missing hand (broken rubber band)
A giant garden spider guarding the tomatoes
Knocking down paper wasp nests with a branch-sword and getting stung behind the ear
Hot soil on the secret path (for ninjas only) behind the neighborhood
And then the sound
Of BMX bicycle spoke adornments
Dumpster diving behind the grocery store on a real life treasure hunt
The absolute seriousness
of a child at play
Remembering rings out with a clap
“They don’t all have this”
The voice whispers to me from within
“Don’t forget them”

//

Suddenly shot through the heart, feeling this unholy hole
Half a world away
So many similar memories
Spilling out
Like milk in the dirt
Trampled by the brown boots of black hearts
I see
Now forming
Little burns through the fabric, all around
Down the street, in my own house
The urge to drown out the sound of this
Lost love, innocence
Violence

Ubiquitous iniquity
(sun/son-damage)
sins of our fathers
Solar Deities
Hell is hot, not underground but
Too close to the light
The law
My life. My luck.
My god,

Please.
let me be good. let me do good.

I can’t transmit this faded feel of curious days, I’m sure
But we can walk the path of equanimity
in our inability
we can be quiet

we can be good

✿❀✿❀

(.27aperion:ontos.73 s.p.M:g.d.LJDBE//v1:f) (2026/05/07)

The old world is dying. A new one yet struggles to be born.

Moonrise beyond the rubble,

Paradise of soft light

Beautiful silver mother
Rising behind our monstrosities
Shedding her tears

Mushrooms push up from under the weight of the ashes. (so heavy)

Non-violent upheaval
We are creeping
Toward freedom

The old world is up for scrap

What if we simply walk away
With the pieces and
Start the world anew?

Will the starving old ones come by day
In attempt to devour us

Rabid modernity
We exit
This madness invoking
Nightmare structure

Mind Prison

The all-consuming entity follows

Forces our hands to blood in defense
Love and sanctity. Make it so our call is pure
We do
The real work of building a better future
Together

Abandon hope, all ye who enter

By night, we inherit the Earth
Without even trying

We go ahead peacefully, tired of conquest.
No more fatherland, no more colonies.

Love without self-justification.
Embrace the attractive power of the other.
Set them free inside the shadows.

By mother's darkness, we inherit the Earth.
Reenchant the world. Let her back in the door.

May 27th, 2026

✿❀✿❀

(.98aperion:ontos.02 w.s.b.SM//v.1.1:f) (2026/05/09)

Othosomnia

Can’t sleep (Again)

There it goes again
Going again
Again

Soft machine
Wilting dreams amigo
There we go again
Go again
Again

When was it again?
Where are we?
There we were
Without a clue

Spewing nonsense shit pretending to be
Well educated
Or something
Coming across as pedantic
or something
“Don’t be esoteric”
The high school English teacher wrote in the margins of long dissolved acid paper
Ms. Williams
Hey babe
Best babe teacher a baby boy ever had when being bullshit
Believing in a weird pedantic esoteric teenage angst
Writing weird nonsense shit pretending to be well educated or something
Angry at people’s passive boredom
Passively bored because of it
Lack of care
(I don't care either)
No desire to learn
No desire to live
Give up, give it up, give up the ghost
(I love you) where did you go?
Again

What was he saying?
Something
Something about me not listing
I don’t know Johnny
No one pays attention
We’re too broke
Wounded Animals
In the Gom Jabbar
I’m the Gom Jabbar
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
Said the head honcho
“Go to bed” (it’s her head)

What the fuck is my neighbor doing up at 2:30 am?
Car alarm blasting randomly
There goes the neighborhood
Again

Animals

Why was I mad
I was already an insomniac
Just want someone to blame it on
Old folks ought to be asleep at this hour
Go to bed gramps
Or lay awake in silence (like me)
SHUSH!!

Wishing
Washing
Wanting
Wanton
Crab Rangoon
Big Boom
Big Bang Theory
Blinded by the lights

Dementia inteligencia
Crushed under the weight
Mis under stood
Should Notta Stood There
Be ware - be aware brother bear
Off with his head
Off with his hood
There goes the hood neighbor

Slumped over the back of the side gate
Shorts dissolved into—acid paper

“TURN THE KNOB ON THE HASP OF THE LATCH!” she said.

Let me go
“Go on GIT!”
Got ‘em
Got ‘em coach
ENCROACHMENT!

Is this gimmicky?
Self consciousness got the best of me
Again (fuck it)

Forget about it
JUST DO IT!
Let IT flow off the tip of the tetas tip top tapas totopos for the chilaquiles for breakfast tomorrow

Just need something look forward to
There we goad again
We are Going again
Again

Softer machine, ice cream, smoothies
Wilting dreams amigo
There we go again
Go again
Again

✿❀✿❀

(.9aperion:ontos.1 e.e.HILY//v.1:f) (2026/06/17)

Humanity i love you too

because you’re too stubborn to know when to quit
and can endure the unimaginable 
and you’re always applauding others who rose above adversity and narrowly escaped the jaws of the beast but you’ll never admit when you’re in there

Humanity i love you because when times are hard you put on a song or go to dinner and
the next day lock in to get the job done or do whatever you need to do to survive and usually not jump off a bridge

Humanity i love you because you’re accustomed to making things far too simple by reducing everything down to binaries or formulas and constraining the world into your tiny containers and exclaiming that you’ve discovered the meaning of

of life 
and you are always singing beautiful songs about the beautiful world
you constantly ruin Humanity

i hate you

✿❀✿❀

(.77aperion:ontos.23 tjrf//v.1:f) (2026/06/17)

Looking through fabric

Toward the Sun
See the halos
Little circles of light shine through the hole
Bulging with the slightest movements

Remember being a child
Fascinated by this
Simplicity
Elegance all around
Letting curiosity take you(me)
Into tiny little worlds
Of awe and magic

In every moment
Endless infinities
Everywhere you(we) look
The ineffable
When you have the love to see what I present (us)
Even now you relax
And lend me your voice
What I say cannot be said in words
Here in this blissful surrender, you finally feel at home
You are free, with me

Go gather your pebbles
Come back to the sea
Show me what you’ve found
Return to me (we)

"The romantic personality is pervaded with a subtle mistrust of intellectualism, and this fact is often conducive to that immoral action called daydreaming.

Contrary to belief, daydreaming is not an intellectual process but rather an escape from intellectualism."

—Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a mask.

Historically, Romanticism in Victorian England arose a…

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I appreciate the gesture, but I don’t know what to say, exactly, how to respond to this.

What did I do?

Aside from:

Too much time away from my kids. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally.

Too much energy spent on “hurry up an wait.” tail-chasing, for no good reason other than some asshole who couldn’t tell his asshole from a hole in the ground said so.

Respecting authority.

Feeling exhausted.

Great experiences. Good friends. Good talks over bad coffee at 2 am on the bridge wing.

Trauma-bonding makes the team work, makes the dream…

We didn’t know we were a family at the time. Commiserating over Seniors’ bipolar temperament and the second coming of Captain Queeg. We knew what was up.

Very young men, running drunk through neon streets that may as well have been paved with gold, not knowing we were having the time of our lives.

Remember that time when…

A very young girl worked for me. A very young man recently saw his way out of this business early, on his own terms. They said it was from a toxic relationship. They were right. But they were wrong about with whom. Or what.

Now I’m sending up a report. Risk factor identified. She’s having relationship problems. Route it up.

Prying eyes lead to more prying. Now she’s pregnant. Suspicions arise.

They talk about integrity and truly believe they have a monopoly on it. Preaching from the pulpit. A single parent could never. Figure it out. Suck it up. Call a brother out for not shaving—good order and discipline depend on it. Call a brother out for being a predator. It couldn’t be. A struggling single parent could never. Be trusted with such an accusation. He can’t even do his job. Didn’t he need to take his kid to the Dr. last week? During a critical "hurry up and wait” evolution?

Very serious. Very, very disappointing.

Catastrophize the minimal. Minimize the catastrophic.

“Your brother killed himself because you weren’t there for him when he needed you—and that’s the kind of leader we can expect you to be. You won’t be there for us when we need you.”

And other proverbs. Wisdom from the Senior Enlisted. Bravo Zulu.

What did I do? What good did I do? What did I do to protect you?

I couldn’t even protect myself.

I appreciate that you appreciate me. The symbolic. The belief in some better thing than the real.

Veteran of what?

I think about Gary. Closed under the hatch, trying to save all the kids. What a hero. I think about Jeff. Who, in his Court Martial, said something to the effect of, “I should have put my foot down. I shouldn’t have taken ‘no’ for an answer. And they would still be alive.” (What a hero).

If I had just stuck my neck out, I could have saved lives if I had just done the right thing instead of going with the flow. Suppose I would have just spoken truth to power. If I would have just stuck my neck out…

I did. And it got the axe.

I hope I saved you. Sheltered you. Let you live to fight another day and not end up like so many of us.

Living dead. Dead inside. Adrift at sea. No one sees. Don’t want them to. They’d think even less of me.

Veteran of what?

Of that, I guess…

Lost a few good friends to the unseen.

I think of my friend D.C., whose poor mother found him in the garage after a week. Unrecognizable. Thank you for your service.

I think about Steve, who drowned in alcohol for years until numbing the pain completely. The friendliest and most generous guy I ever met. Thank you for your service.

So many more, connected in some way. 22 a day, they say. Do some pushups to raise awareness.

But the solution was always buried there, in those tribes—we caught its scent out there in the wind: camaraderie, looking out for each other, being a team. Not being an isolated cog in the war-machine. Or, less impressively, a cog in the mundane xerox-machine sales machine.

What we have to do to save each other and this world is simple, yet so far beyond feasible that we can only offer band-aids on the major bleed.

Hopes and prayers.

We are not weak. We don’t mind adversity—hell, we signed up for it; we even thrive on it in the right conditions. What we cannot face is feeling like we don’t matter. And if there’s one thing this zeitgeist is good at, it’s making people feel unnecessary.

What we need is our Tribe. What we need is community.

We live in a world where most people work far from home, both parents working all the time, kids are raised and taught by strangers, and families founder alone, cut off (if you can’t figure it out, just go under—everyone look away. You don’t want to see this). Personal success overshadows any sense of collective good. Even for those of us lucky enough to have and be close to our families, it’s not the same as belonging to a deeply bonded group of humans that shares EVERYTHING, that lives through things together, side by side, as we did in our origins. Yeah, we’ve got tech that would seem like magic to someone 100 years ago, but what good is it? Why are we so isolated? Why does existing in this liminal hospital of society feel like a slow poison to the soul?

The fundamental worldview changes necessary are an even slower antidote. And it’s easier for us to say, “respect for going through it,” or do some pushups on TikTok than to have these conversations.

These are the conversations that made me a black sheep.

But even if no one is listening. Even if this can’t change, I will stand here and say it.

And I hope, for that, one day you’ll say

“thank you.”

Do you want to run the gauntlet, kids? Free college. Health insurance. Pension. Travel. Danger. Intrigue. Some of the best friends and absolutely worst, most incompetent bosses you’ll ever have in your life (and maybe a few good ones if you’re lucky). BONUS: Learn to deflect emotion with dark humor and communicate affection through insults.

Let Sgt. Elias and Sgt. Barnes battle for your eternal soul inside a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare structure. It’s sure to be a hell of a memorable experience. Builds Character!

You’ve got to be a little bit mentally unstable to do this job, which means you probably ought not to be doing it. However, if you ever start to realize your humanity through all the trauma (perhaps combat-related or the certainty of non-combat-related FUBAR experiences you’ll have), or question the dehumanizing nature of the system, this means you’re totally sane and perfect for it. “The Service NEEDS People like you!” (and other proverbs). Plus, you can always use that free healthcare to “fix yourself so you can do your job” (and other proverbs). I heard they’re hiring more counselors soon.

Plus, there is a free meal at Chili’s once a year.

Thank you for your service.

A charge from the led

In the US NAVY, it’s customary for Chiefs to give a charge to those joining the ranks of the Senior Enlisted. Most talk about some common themes: take care of your Sailors, ask for help from the mess when needed, etc. Usually, this is written from ‘me’ the Chief, to you, the recipient. Mine is a bit different. Inspired by a poem I saw only once and can’t do it justice by crediting the author, as some of their words resonated so deeply, I included them here in my own modified version. This is written from the perspective of those who are led.

Your subordinates, peers, and seniors, all those who witness you, hope for you to be the epitome, the ideal, to embody to soul of a Chief Petty Officer — simply because of the position you hold and the symbol you wear. As it symbolizes you, you shape it and give it continued life. As you symbolize it, it gives you power. With this power, you have great opportunity. You can provide what is needed. You can forge strong characters, you can cultivate outward mindsets, you can be the architect of teams that transcend barriers, that feel like families, and that realize possibilities. You can be a beacon, a lamp, a lifeboat, or a ladder. You can touch souls, open doors, light up eyes, and form fellowships. We endow you with this.

And in the end, we follow, not because of what we might gain or lose, not because of the things you’ve accomplished, not even because of your visions and dreams, but simply because of who you are. The Chief. The Leader — standing up ahead, like a rock to break the waves, handing out faith and confidence like life jackets, feeling all the currents, holding all the doubts, imaging the delights and terrors of every landfall: Captain, pirate, and parent by turns, the bearer of our countless hopes and expectations. We give you our trust. We give you our effort. All we we ask in return — is that you stay true.

We demand your commitment. We demand your bravery. We demand your integrity.

We charge you with this. Carry the fire; light the way.

—James Foster (Si Fractus, Fortis // If Broken, Strong) Know yourself. Nothing in excess. Sureity brings ruin.

To my fellow veterans who genuinely wish to be endowed with virtue: Here’s to you for all you’ve given, endured, and carried with you. For the sacrifices that don’t show and the battles no one sees. Thank you for your strength and your spirit.

I salute you.

May we find our way to peace, purpose, and connection beyond the uniform. My most profound respect and gratitude to each of you—thank you, truly, for all you’ve done and endured.

Thank you for your service.

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