awakening day moon lingering behind clouds sun not quite awake © 2025 Bruno Talerico Stafford challenge 257/365.
Desert Dweller
-thoughts on life, death and gardening.
Random thoughts, poetry and pictures
A taste of my skewed view of the world
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Early Riser
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Dancing Toward Oblivion
life is an exotic dance
that we can’t understand
until we do it
©2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 256/365. -
Ask Alice
Don’t be afraid to take a weird idea
down the rabbit hole.
Let it play in the mud for a while.
Give it permission to indulge, to spin a cocoon.
Explore what happens when it goes off in some
bizarre direction,
or crosses over into the realm of the improbable.
Don’t be afraid to ask, what if?
Let it get silly and childish.
Give it freedom to explore, to experiment,
to test boundaries and create new ones.
This is the land of oz, colorful as the rainbow.
The land of bonsai.
The land of the surreal.
The land of fantasy and dreams.
No goals, quotas, or objectives.
Don’t be afraid to take a weird idea
down the rabbit hole,
you’ll see that it eventually emerges
transformed.
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 255/365. -
Victory Or Fulfillment
When there is no finish line,
life becomes infinite.
The sign at the crossroad has two arrows
pointing in opposite directions.
One arrow aims at “victory,”
the other leads toward “fulfillment.”
On the road to victory,
others, mostly strangers,
will wave and cheer,
congratulate you if you win,
then wave goodbye and leave for home.
Having reached the goal, the game is over.
Follow the path of fulfillment,
and many others will join you,
becoming friends and lovers
as you travel together.
And when your life is over—
they will mourn their loss
but keep going without you
while inspiring others to join them.
When you reach the crossroad,
will you choose
victory or fulfillment?
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 254/365.
Inspired by writings of James P. Carse. -
The Inquiry
In an apocalyptic landscape, on the fringes
of a dying metropolis, there is a bar.
The camera over the door is probably dead.
Doesn’t matter.
Afternoon gives way to evening,
wind howling like a coyote, hollow whirling sounds
as it sweeps against shuttered windows,
like in an old Western movie,
necessarily threatening.
Inside the bar were a few people,
stable in their positions,
carefully cultivating
the art of ignoring one another.
Speaking on and off,
the stranger spoke mostly to himself,
sometimes to no one, sometimes to everyone.
His speech was sporadic, alternating
between quiet whispers, mumbling murmurs,
flares of rage, bursts of hysteria.
Spouting libidinous fantasies
woven with extremes of morbidity,
obscene expressions scattered through poor verses.
He was engaging in a strange way,
his native English knotted;
sentences snagging on details then
spinning off into rumor,
particular and general at once, vague and precise,
casual but urgent, attentive to detail,
but absorbed by the whole.
To engage in conversation with him
was never ordinary.
He spoke of underworlds and afterlives,
love and loss, happiness and sorrow.
If there was any ostentation,
it was in his insistence
on establishing genuine dialogue.
When he addressed you,
it was sudden, like a predator
too close, staring into the depths of your soul.
It was as if he wanted the ledger of your accounts—
what you spent, what you’d stolen,
when you first stopped caring.
He always asked the same thing,
a question that caused space to contract,
the entire bar distorted like a room
in Alice’s Wonderland.
When you were the target,
the other patrons folded into the background—
students hoping not to be called on.
You could hear, almost hear,
doors closing, shades coming down,
FOR SALE signs going up.
His question behaved like an awkwardness,
improper in mixed company.
There was a shuffling of feet,
a stifled cough, eyes downshifting
as if the answer might be contagious.
Perhaps different phrasing would help.
An alternate question could be a way out,
a way in, or better yet, a way through.
It’s a fair sort of question,
no right or wrong answer—
just opinion.
He never wavered.
He looked you square in the eye and asked—
Do you believe in god?
Between gusts of wind the silence is absolute.
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 253/365. -
Where do the years go?
Into sloth
and occasional melancholy,
into vices
of romantic realities—
earning a living,
raising children,
loves found—
and lost.
Where do the years go?
Into travel and play,
music and drink,
talk, laughter and saving the world.
Where do the years go?
Into watching cloud formations
float across planetary skies,
but also into sloth and melancholy.
I don’t regret a moment of it.
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 252/365.
Picture is my visa to Brasil, 2010. -
Forest Time
A visitor in the cathedral of forest
A tourist walking among trees
that have offered sanctuary to dozens
of human generations.
I exist only for one fragment
of a moment in the life of the universe,
rooted in this world
for a minuscule bit of history,
a lifetime far shorter than that of
the chanting sycamore,
the dancing oak,
the swaying willow.
A tourist on brief vacation,
I claim nothing for my self
for nothing is really mine.
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 251/365. -
Cloak And Dagger
Muffled in misty fog,
Gaia’s emerald world
glistens with dewdrops.
Odin’s mountain,
cloaked in grey.
Clouds soft as eiderdown.
Neptune assaults.
First with hailstones,
then drowning the landscape
with drenching torrents.
Sky suddenly torn
by gleaming daggers,
bolts of lightning, soon followed
by peals of Thor’s thundering laughter.
Autumn gods at play.
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 250/365.
Image from the internet. -
Endings And Beginnings
It is not an accident
that you are reading this.
Words come into our lives
when we’re
prepared to understand.
Whoever enters our path
is the right person.
Every interaction
is meant to teach us.
Whatever happens
is the only thing
that could have happened.
Every situation is perfect,
even when mind and ego resist.
Whenever it happens,
it is the right time.
When we are ready
for a new experience,
it will begin.
It is not by chance
you are reading this.
Like falling leaves in Autumn
that prepare the ground for Spring,
Endings are not failures—
they are evolution—
We leave, we move on,
enriched by the experience.
When it is time for closure
the door closes—
and another appears.
The door to this poem
is now closed.
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 249/365. -
Phone Photog
When mother nature
paints the sky
I grab my iPhone and
snap a picture.
Does that make me an artist
or a journalist
When words pop into my head,
I grab my pen and write them down.
Does that make me a poet
or a secretary?
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 248/365.
Desert Dweller 