Desert Dweller

I can’t imagine
the pain you are feeling.

You can scream, shout,
or cry on my shoulder.

I’ll just sit here a while
and be.

© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 324/365.

Smiling evenly at the stars,
Luna glows, a placid witness
to ancient rock long ravaged
by volcanic convulsions.
The pale eastern horizon,
pink calmly fading to orange
then blazing, blinding sunlight
washes away the chill of night.

© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 323/365.

Taken—beside the sacred fire,
sleeping virgin violated
by the unicorn’s horn.

Fertile Gaia, now fertilized,
gives tortured claw-torn birth
to gryphon and pegasus.

Renamed, diminished Demeter,
she suckles Romulus and Remus,
rears Gilgamesh and Thor,
mothers Athena and Guinevere.

Eaten by age, crone goddess,
grieves them as they turn to ash
or wander underworlds, 
mourning most of all
her maiden’s long-forgotten name.

© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 320/365.
Image created with AI.

Preachers, imams and wizards, 
all sleep, wake,
love, hate.

Witches, clerics and shamans
all eat, drink,
shit, piss.

Curanderas, priests and rabbis,
all live
and all die.

Gurus, healers, sinners,
all gain their power
from the same source.

© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 322/365.

days fly past like dreams
dreams float by 
like days on the riverbank 

© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 321/365.

Every journey begins somewhere.
In the shadows of the forest canopy,
eggs fry, splattering bacon fat.
Coffee percolates.

Where trees have fallen
mushrooms will grow.
I don’t know how this ends,
but I think I’m ready.

Campfire tales say Sasquatch
walks beside the vulnerable
following closely in the shadows.

Dancing in moonlight,
walking naked in the breeze.
She breathes cedar and pine—at ease
more peaceful than those who surround her.

She’s dying, as we all are.
But her trajectory is faster, more precise.
Like a lead foot on the accelerator.
Cancer will do that.

After she’s fallen,
what will grow in her shadow?

I emerge from the darkness of the forest.
A stranger asks “where did you start?”
I reflexively answer, “at the beginning”.
After all, searchers and dreamers always begin there.

© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 319/365.

I begin each day
before dawn,
receptive and willing to fail.

During twilight hours,
guidance is available
to those undistracted by other things.

I begin with
what seems important in this moment,
then adapt accordingly.

Authenticity exists in the dotted lines
that connect now to the future.

© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 318/365.

Poets extend the language.

They domesticate, examine
and describe our terror while teaching it
new tricks that allow it to entertain and amuse.

Poets remind us that we are alive in this world
of hardship and pain, friendship and love,
this place of occasional joy and celebration.

Poets point out
that we live in a universe
deserving of honor and gratitude.

© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 317/365.

Matter and energy
never disappear; they transform.
Reorganizing, merging, 
morphing into new forms.

Plants and animals die,
decompose into nutrients
for the oak, the mushroom, the fawn.

Stars and planets collapse
into holes so dense light cannot escape.
Some say the abyss blossoms
into new universes.

Life and awareness are intertwined.
What I call “me”
is only on loan until death.

Awareness is a mortgage, a death pledge,
signed with the infant’s first breath,
title conveyed to the cosmos 
with the final payment.

A spark ignites awareness
when life brushes against death.
Once born, we are obliged—
to dance with death.

Near death our sight is sharper,
awareness deepened,
ready to be returned,
enriched, to the lender.

We are aware only within
our small field of energy. 
Shiny fragments
in a vast unknown.

We are tiny islands afloat
in a shoreless sea of unknown power.
We are matter,
surfing waves of energy,
constantly merging and morphing
within eternal cycles of birth,
life, death, and rebirth,
unstoppable. 

© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 316/365.

In youth, time is still ahead.
It seems ample;
enough for hundreds of indecisions,
multitudes of visions and revisions.

The first card drawn requires a decision:
keep it and reject the next,
or discard the first
and keep the second.

Sooner than expected,
the deck plays out.
Decisions made in a moment
have shaped our lives forever.

© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 315/365.