I search for sentiment in the maze-like ripples of water, a rain-fueled ennui tickling consciousness... or is it, heart? Water, a traveler, a storyteller, carries its mysteries in the palms of its aqueous hands — holding them out, as if imploring for my soul to partake, like a thirsty wanderer, to satiate my very self. I listen to it sing, in its downpour timbre. I listen and decide each note it exudes is sentiment all in itself, not a labyrinth to wade through, but solace dripping.

© Anna S. 2025

Rain. Again. A subtle note of petrichor and erudite splattering preceeding the rush of a long since pent-up howl —

crystalline, pristine almost, yet a staccato swell;

I hear bird clamor just out of reach, out of sight, a passing instant,like we pass each other and not realize.

Rain puddles ripple, trying to show in watery mirrors, wavering and askew,

what we miss...

© Anna S. 2025

Your hands... eloquent, they could tell me yarns and sagas of ancient mariners and unruly kraken, all in the canvas of skin — this shelter that served me all these years. Humanity... humility... a sense unsensed through fidgeting aura of time while breath

is kept sancrosanct.

We are more than husks, we burn embers of something amorphous and metamorphosing in layers of being — something called love.

I journey. You journey. We wade across essence, this extant something called life, and this strange infinity leaves me pondering

what your hands could tell me.

© Anna S. 2025

a schooner

atop a mantelpiece —

so many tides

within a renegade heart, adventure

ebbs and flows,

sails of a dream

spread wide.

© Anna S. 2025

Solitude is inconsolable sometimes in its solace, adrift in the passing time like a lone ship;

a soul in a desolation of clockwork deserts tick-tocking in penance — for what? Daring

to feel? Love? Dream that you are walking towards me through the beingness? A wanton notion that we are

soluble in each other's wanting heart, arms — becoming beacons

pulsing an answer — not alone, not anymore, we reach and the currents only bear us closer.

© Anna S. 2025

draped in eveningflow, she gazes

o'er the hearts of these travelers

that we are, pondering

what it's like to feel,

what it's like to love...

her wonder lingers in the air

sifting through consciousness, and our hearts

vibrate gently

like strummed guitar strings.

© Anna S. 2025

Will you be my hero in the sanctity of this being?

                                I wonder...

the wind, boisterous, unrestrained, flagellates the silence...

                a waxing moon and a dusk thought, a pendular existence...

                                waves rise and fall          like solace

and like breath.

© Anna S. 2025

Love is like an amber flame, flickering in the unknown, it licks at the chilled evening hours depicted in an empty pillow beside me

and I reach for the sage thought of it, for the certainty of its sacred existence and path it weaves toward me, around me,

and I mellow the fallow fields of solitude with thought seeds and senses that shift shape

into being,

seen or not, still being as is meant,

and I let go and let the current bear me in its welcome arms

where needed, where meant,

where love flickers.

© Anna S. 2025 // Of Love and Such Things

Flow into your wild, honey amber and softly smoldering

like whispering campfire embers,

flow into your legend-song, aglow and gossamer,

as the trees murmur in wind's lovemaking.

© Anna S. 2025

Love can be so

elemental

yet elements drench and burn, frost-bloom over the contours of its tender nature which likewise

can undulate in turbulence of river rapids

— they think in swells

that holler in the hollow waters and wring their aqueous hands.

And yet,

listen to love sing — a cosmic echo, a rise and ebb of tide and story

seraphic.

© Anna S. 2025

Tell me what a human heartbeat sounds like to a star, does it hum and resonate like wanton comet-song?

I care to dream, in soulscapes,

watching as eons rumble in utero of something unknown

and

wandering among caverns of breaths turned fulgurite by love's haunted touch,

my fingers draping along speleothems that bear runes of age-lost

closeness.

© Anna S. 2025

Candied dreams in the hazy solace of sleepy dawn... floating

through mist, mirrored faces in the lake surface, and

I stand in the flow of consciousness, before shelved

layers of thought. We haunt existence

like paintbrush a canvas, labyrinthine in self.

© Anna S. 2025

Somnambulant moon slips through veiling worlds, its fingers deftly glistening in a gliding touch over the rocky canyons,

and silence

haunts.

Bare stripped night lets your sigh cling to its desert skin

for a moment

'til it too quiets away into slumber,

your chest rising and falling next to me

under the stars.

© Anna S. 2025

Etheric scriptures, feathery, an owl lingers in space liminal, akin in flight

— one can't focus on contours, blurred reality, turns and shifts that wield a mighty hammer;

a log that tells tales: tell me what you saw?

Echoes waft as Mount Si watches in silence,

but the owls are not what we think them,

even the shoelaces loop as infinite questions in this wonderful strangeness,

and the wind creaks among the pines.

© Anna S. 2025

Sanctum

that falls like dusk over the murmuring sea, gentle hands swept over waiting shoulders, 

listening

to the echoes in each wave, each eternal minute patterned upon the surface…

if only we could remember the way our wings once whispered in the briny air, yet

the memories are draped in verdigris now, ribboned in kelp and murky depths

oxidizing away under all the layers

of thought. Oxidizing like Cthulhu in his saturnine slumber.

Old truths or new wonders, maybe hearts were written into being so we wouldn't turn driftwood in an infinite void and learn to breathe,

learn to see what the whales mean

when they sing.

© Anna S. 2025 / wrote this at tonight's local writers circle meeting

Eros

Softly, melancholy, you whisper, the night's echo in the crook of my elbow —

singing

singing

and I wake up, fringed by your phantom arrows

and the mellow hum of yellow chrysanthemums

in the morning. Astir,

like the ashes of midnight swirled into sunrise, hearts flutter

in the air.

© Anna S. 2025

The marshes echo in sway, turbulence evident in the gray heaviness and pallor of the sky,

it is the burden of time that flays the skin of memory,

scattering ashes

the ones we weave into breath itself — a howl of rising wind and something else, reverberating as revolution

this pendulum self wrapped around life, extant in motion

and the hum of ventricles beating as wings through the mist and the splash of weary tide against the hull of our souls

but can we let go of the moorings?

fading polaroids we hope to savor yet the flavor left is melancholia and we have become lost

in pareidolia.

© Anna S. 2025