{
  "name": "Micah Boswell writing corpus: poems and essays",
  "description": "The published writing of Micah Boswell, a Dallas-based design leader raised in Lima, Peru, gathered as one machine-readable file: 29 poems with their full text and 4 essays with title, URL and a short description. Every poem is the same text that appears on its own page under /poems, one page per poem, with the poem's title, its page URL, its word count, the subject tags the author gave it (family, faith, Lima, Nova, music, aging and others) and the date it was published on the site. Every essay entry points at the essay's page under /articles and carries the one-line summary the author wrote for it. The corpus is offered for reading, research, quotation with attribution, and non-commercial text analysis under CC BY-NC 4.0. It is regenerated from the site's pages whenever a poem or essay changes, so the file and the pages never disagree.",
  "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/datasets",
  "download_url": "https://conscious-shell.com/datasets/micah-boswell-writing.json",
  "creator": "Micah Boswell",
  "creator_url": "https://micahboswell.vercel.app/",
  "publisher": "conscious_shell",
  "publisher_url": "https://conscious-shell.com/",
  "license": "CC BY-NC 4.0",
  "license_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/",
  "language": "en",
  "generated": "2026-09-21",
  "temporal_coverage": "2026-08-28/2026-09-21",
  "counts": {
    "poems": 29,
    "essays": 4,
    "poem_words": 7101
  },
  "poems": [
    {
      "title": "3.33",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/3-33",
      "text": "A restless dreaming sky.\nI woke thinking,\nor maybe I never slept.\n\nDreams and thoughts tangled,\nthreaded with worry. the noise\nof deadlines, personalities, pretending.\nPeople swirling, processes grinding.\n\nThe ocean is distant,\nfar from my eyes.\n\nAnother day slides in.\nI look at my phone\n3:33 am again, the old riddle.\n\nI think about shaving my head,\neach persistent hair fewer than before.\nI admire their endurance,\nthe way they insist\nmy fight isn’t finished.\n\nSome futures trading at four am.\nMaybe I'll make it work this time.\n\nI keep hoping\nto stop selling my time for money.\n\nthis currency, time,\nspent with cathode rays in gray cubicles,\nand in love affairs\nwhere neither of us loved me.\n\nThere isn’t so much left now.\nMost is spent.\n\nThe mind goes wandering.\n\nI pay Spotify to rent music,\nonce I owned the vines\nof my sadness.\n\nNow I am a serf, like ancestors,\ntilling land I never keep,\nthe baron, a subscription model.\n\nMy mind twists, a radio’s dial\nspinning wild through static;\n\nmy heart, unsupervised,\ncrawls into dark places.\n\nThen, a flash of awareness.\nA gentle smile.\n\nHere, in this minute,\nI choose to feel, to think.\n\nI press down on the tuner,\nhold hands with my muse.\n\nGrateful for the gift.\n\n5:55 am\n\nThree miles away, my son sleeps,\nstrong and true.\n\nI've helped raise a young man\nI can't live without\nto live without me\n\nBeyond fatherhood,\n\nI've wandered, for 40 years,\nmy own desert, witnessing\nthe lights and shadows.\n\nIn this moment of worries and rumination,\nI choose to guide my thoughts instead.\n\nTo offer thanks\nto the universe, to my abba.\n\nFor a life I can shape,\nfor wings that feel the morning air.\n\nThis dawn is another journey.\n\nThe dark walk\nhas led me through awe\nand gratitude.\n\nTo call myself fully human,\nto regret, and celebrate.\n\nProof I've lived, and lived it well.",
      "word_count": 320,
      "keywords": [
        "aging",
        "faith",
        "family"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Chosen Family",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/chosen-family",
      "text": "The ones in the dark corner of the nightclub\nwho passed me a cigarette without asking my name...\nthey knew more of me than blood family ever knew.\nWe danced not for joy but for therapy.\nThe bass did not heal us, but it remembered.\n\nAt the pool bar, under the jaundiced light,\nI learned to read sorrow in the way\nsomeone held their cue stick...too tight,\nlike a last thing.\n\nNo one asked where you were from,\njust what you’d lost\nand how much you could still carry.\n\nIn the alley behind The Church, (the other one)\nwe told the truth while pretending not to.\nA girl in fishnets taught me how to lie\nwithout hurting anyone.\nA friend called me “brother”\nand it didn’t feel like theft.\n\nI tried to explain this to a relative once.\nShe smiled too hard, called it a phase,\nand made me boiled cabbage\nas if hunger was all that needed filling.\n\nIt's not for lack of trying, but lack of knowing\nthat I'm not a child anymore.\nMore than a middle one,\nand certainly more than a wayward, prodigal relative.\n\nFamily is assumed like last names\nand casseroles.\nBut I have found deeper kinship\nin half-spilled drinks\nand mid-sob laughter\nwith people whose parents\nforgot their birthdays\nbut never forgot to punish their strangeness.\n\nWe chose each other.\nNot out of duty.\nNot out of blood.\nBut because when someone hands you\na piece of their undoing\nand lets you keep it,\nthat’s love.\n\nAnd that’s more than most\nholiday dinners\never gave me.",
      "word_count": 262,
      "keywords": [
        "dallas",
        "music",
        "identity",
        "family"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Design",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/design",
      "text": "Without being taught to design,\nI started designing.\nMy designer friend despised my work.\nWithout being taught to write,\nI started writing.\nMy writer friend hated my work.\nLater in life, I see the truth.\nThey hate how I made the money\nThey spent for College\nSeem worthless.",
      "word_count": 48,
      "keywords": [
        "identity"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Dreams",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/dreams",
      "text": "Dreams are born in those moments\nWhen the mind opens itself\nAnd with the heart as its center\nThe imprint of the vision blooms\nWith the pedals of thought exposing\nThe anther of our hearts\nrevealing sweet pollen of hope and vision\nDelicate filaments that extend themselves,\nTo the chance exposure of the\nImprinting instance\nWhere we see our calling\nWhere we fall in love\nWhere we see the self complete\nDreams are carried through\nAnd nurtured within the safekeeping\nOf gardens carved on terraces\nInside the chasm of the soul\nIn places we guard zealously\nWith the elastic strength of\nLabirynthic walls and delicately\nCrafted masks, constructed\nTo deflect the passing glimpses\nOf occasional lovers and\nMisplaced passions\nDreams are fulfilled\nIn pieces, much of the time\nRevealing themselves\nAs fractions, making the whole\nSometimes unnoticeable\nA mysterious construction\nThat harvests the ripened blooms\nWithin our inner crevices\nDeliberately, almost secretly\nDreams are sometimes destroyed\nBy wind whipping through the cavernous\nCoils of thought and emotion\nCold wind of disappointment\nArctic storms carrying the whispers\nOf lies, deceit, and carelessly spoken words\nUnderstood by our inner gardens as deep truths\nUnderstood as richening soil for dream roses and rhododendrons\nThat soon after wither and die\nSometimes the pedals fall, ashes\nTo give sustenance to a hybrid dream\nWiser, stronger and with thorns\nSometimes remains of frigid breezes\nCarry them off to unspoken places\nPlaces where denial sinks a landscape\nInto dark valleys\nAnd no seed or remnant escapes\nDreams are not captive to the ruminations\nOf one’s own personal geography\nDaily depending on strong soil of good life\ncircumstances\nTo survive the days\nInstead, dreams arise in the strangest\nOf places, giving birth in numbers to those\nWho are strong enough to open themselves\nTo the promise, the beauty of the moment,\nThe imprinting instance of chance and melody\nThe meekest, the poorest\nCan carry the deepest gardens\nAllowing delicate openings\nThe poverty of an anther’s exposure.",
      "word_count": 328,
      "keywords": [],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Explosions, Gunshots",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/explosions-gunshots",
      "text": "Explosions, gunshots—\nthe lullabies of my Peruvian dusk,\nlouder than crickets,\nbrighter than lightning bugs\ntrapped in jars I never owned.\n\nDead bodies sprawled like lost kites,\nArmy trucks like slow, rusted dinosaurs.\nThese were my caution signs,\nmy teenage days whispered\nthrough cracked transistor radios.\n\nWild dunes and beaches:\nour godless cathedrals of play.\nSand was currency,\nbroken shells were shivs,\nand the tide took our secrets\nwithout apology.\n\nJesus, his beard neat and sad,\nstood beside terrorism on the TV,\nboth equally distant,\nboth equally spoken of\nwith the reverence reserved\nfor El Niño or El Comandante.\n\nPrep school uniforms,\nGray and white nooses in summer,\nDeep slums with love and guinea pigs\nand boys who ran faster than fear.\nThose were my coordinates.\nMy moral compass spun.",
      "word_count": 130,
      "keywords": [
        "peru",
        "memoir"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Fog",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/fog",
      "text": "This thick fog lays out its gaseous tendrils,\nand nothing is to be seen clearly,\nnot even yourself.\n\nWading through such blindness\nwears you so thin,\nyou feel the exhaustion\nin your moist brows,\nbut you continue to search for vision\nbecause you know it's all you have left.\n\nSo you twist and you turn,\na silent dance of desperation\nwith this deafening mist.\nAt least that which embraces you\nin its thick blanket of nothingness\nkeeps you warm\nwith its wisps of heavy moisture....\n\nCondensation derived\nfrom chaos...\nbut it makes sense to you -\nit stands in your way,\nit envelopes you in nothingness\nit bars you from your own meaning.\n\nOutside, all of it seems so random,\nso full of nothing\nbut the fog comes up against you and leaves you\nfalling, tripping on unseen crevices.\nIn your heart it all seems so contrived...\nFate, hiding its consciousness in the mist of circumstance,\nhas pitted its greatest minions against you,\nand to struggle against this mantle is to create more\ndelusion through your sweat.\n\nStill you struggle, still you sweat,\nbecause you know vision lies outside of circumstance,\nand to let the mist control you would lead to a walk\nthat falls upon itself...\nso you strive for something you know is true,\nyet you're not sure what this vision will be\nwhen you find it,\nbut you know the weight of meaning\nis lighter than the\nweightlessness\nof being lost in the fog.",
      "word_count": 247,
      "keywords": [],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Growing Apart",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/growing-apart",
      "text": "We were young once.\nNot just in age,\nbut in the way we believed\nthat nights could last forever\nif the music kept playing.\n\n“Blue Monday” shook the floor.\nWe didn’t talk much then—\njust moved,\nmotion like energy exchanged,\nour bodies fluent in something\nwe didn’t yet know would fade.\n\nLater, “Cuts You Up” came on,\nand it did.\nBut not the way we thought.\nNot the drama of heartbreak—\njust the slow erosion\nof knowing someone so well\nyou stop looking.\n\nTime does that.\nYou wake one day\non opposite shores,\nwaving across a distance\nneither of you meant to make.\n\nAnd still—\nsomewhere in a grocery store,\nCamouflage’s “That Smiling Face\" plays\non a speaker no one notices.\nAnd I pause.\nJust long enough\nto feel the light from back then.\nBrief.\nUndeniable.\n\nWe do not curse the fading.\nThat’s not the kind of love we had.\nBut we do carry\nthe ache of the echo.\nWe are the ones\nwho remember the song\nafter the room has emptied.",
      "word_count": 172,
      "keywords": [
        "music",
        "love",
        "aging"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "I'll be your villain",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/ill-be-your-villain",
      "text": "I was the one who didn’t kneel.\nEven as a boy, I stood at the doorframe\nlike a nail the hammer missed.\n\nHe roared like something ancient,\nbut I learned the silence louder than he ever was.\n\nThey became small for survival.\nShe disappeared into the wallpaper\nand lived there for years.\n\nI was not brave.\nI simply refused to vanish.\nThat was my sin.\n\nAt the wake,\nI wore the old mask,\nthe one with the eyes carved soft.\nThey needed the lost one returned.\nSo I came back\nwearing a version of myself\nthey could forgive.\n\nI told the story the way they wanted it.\nHis charisma, not his rage.\nHis heart, not his unpredictability.\nI told it kindly,\nfor their sake.\n\nShe needed a version of him\nshe could grow old beside.\nSo I left the truth\nin the coatroom\nwith my grief.\n\nNow they carry peace in shallow bowls.\nIt is enough for them.\nI have made it so.\n\nI live apart,\na sort of exile.\nThe one who did not forget.\nThe one who could not heal\n\nif healing meant pretending.\n\nStill—\nI polish the lie like silver\nso they can eat off it.\nI will be your villain.\nI will keep the light dim\nso you can sleep.\n\nThis, too,\nis love.",
      "word_count": 218,
      "keywords": [
        "family",
        "grief",
        "identity"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Inheritance",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/inheritance",
      "text": "I broke it quietly.\nNo anthem. No confetti.\nJust refused to repeat\nthe storm I was born into.\n\nThere was no miracle—\nonly the decision\nto not let bruises\nbecome a blueprint.\n\nHis hands were\naltars of fury,\nhymns of vanishing.\nMine learned the long, dumb grace\nof staying.\n\nIt was not brave.\nIt was breakfast.\nIt was driving him to school\neven when my bones remembered\nthe absence too well.\n\nIt was sitting on the porch\nwhen the anger rose,\nand doing nothing with it.\n\nI did not want to be a better man.\nI just wanted my son\nto walk into a room\nand not flinch.\n\nThe world will not thank me.\nHe will never know\nhow much it cost\nto make this\nordinary life.\n\nBut the cost was mine\nand the silence is his.\nHe laughs without apology.\nHe sleeps through the night.\n\nGod help me,\nI call that a miracle.",
      "word_count": 154,
      "keywords": [
        "family",
        "nova",
        "faith"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Kabala meets 16th Century Spanish",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/kabala-meets-16th-century-spanish",
      "text": "Keter – The Crown / The Inheritance of Silence\n\nDijeronme ke la fe sería mi ancla.\n\nBaruj HaShem, dijieron, komo si el peso fuera promesa.\n\nLa luz en la frente, el deber en los talones,\n\nuna cadena dulcemente envuelta en oración.\n\nPero aprendí, kon suspiros y sombras sin nombre,\n\nHas ve’Shalom, ke algunas anklas no están echas de hierro,\n\nsino de manos ke parezen karisias,\n\npero te empujan abaxo kuando el alma empiesa a subir.\n\nKuando alzas la kara al shamayim,\n\ni sientes la respuesta detrás del velo,\n\nte akusan de romper lo sagrado.\n\nEl raḥum veḥanun, yo nunka rompí sus orasiones,\n\npero no supe yorar kon ellas sin mentirme.\n\n⸻\n\nTiferet – The Heart / The Refusal to Be Contained\n\nAy orasyones ke se sienten komo bardas.\n\nRak sheket… rak sheket…\n\nAy amores ke demandan silensyo,\n\nke solo valen si tú no dezis ni una.\n\nLo aleinu.\n\nAnsí ando yo.\n\nNo por estar perdido,\n\nsino porke el aire afuera del relato\n\nes más puro—más emet, más ruaḥ.\n\nYo no soy el personaje ke pintaron,\n\nni el hijo ke kayeron en los libros.\n\nMi neshamá no se firma en el margen.\n\n⸻\n\nMalkhut – The Dust / The Chosen Among the Exiled\n\nI si so eskogido,\n\nchas veShalom, ke no sea por torres ni títulos,\n\nni por siluetas en vitrales olvidados.\n\nSino por el kamino de polvo,\n\nkon los exilados i los exkomulgados,\n\ndebaxo del silensyo de la atardesida.\n\nA la par de las almas ke florezen\n\nen las fendas del kuento ofisyal.\n\nAmen ve’Amen.\n\nAmen ve’Amen.\n\nAmen… (pause)\n\nve’Amen.",
      "word_count": 260,
      "keywords": [
        "heritage",
        "faith",
        "identity"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Laugh",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/laugh",
      "text": "I laugh at very serious occasions.\nIt’s not something I can control.\nIt just happens.\nI grew without a chance to be a child.\nAt 57, maybe I still want that chance.",
      "word_count": 32,
      "keywords": [
        "memoir"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Mayakovski's Ghost",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/mayakovskis-ghost",
      "text": "When I was a university man,\nI wanted to burn it all down—\nthe houses,\nthe hymns,\nthe quiet betrayals that looked like family.\nI wanted flame over form,\nMolotov over meal,\nthe shattered pane louder than the stained-glass sermon.\n\nMayakovsky said\nthe streets shall be our brushes.\nI believed him.\nEvery wall could be rewritten,\nevery mouth refitted\nwith a siren.\n\nI wore rage like a red scarf\nagainst the cold of inheritance.\nTradition was corruption disguised as sanctity.\nReligion coated reality like cyanide to a clear blue sky.\n\nBut the years…\nthey didn't take the fire\ninstead, they bundle up beside it,\nwhispering of soft memories and my son's\ncontagious laughter.\n\nNow\nI want to make it all better.\nNot the world as it is,\nbut the world as it might still be\nif someone sat long enough\nto thread the torn seams.\n\nNow I find beauty in\nthe careful patch,\nthe hand that reaches back,\nthe father who waits\ninstead of vanishes.\n\nI still carry the match.\nBut I use it\nto light candles,\nto warm small rooms,\nto write poems\nto my son\nin the soft hush\nafter rage has gone quiet.\n\nMayakovsky would not approve.\nBut maybe,\nsomewhere,\nhis ghost is tired too.",
      "word_count": 208,
      "keywords": [
        "family",
        "nova",
        "identity"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Men's Room Sonata in Tiled Minor",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/mens-room-sonata-in-tiled-minor",
      "text": "The men’s bathroom:\n\na chapel of porcelain and piss-rules.\n\nSeven urinals.\n\nI take my place...alpha, omega, or the divine center—\n\nleaving sacred gaps for the next\n\npilgrim of the stream.\n\nI begin.\n\nSoft drizzle. Modest patter.\n\nThen he enters:\n\nProtocol-breacher.\n\nBorderless barbarian.\n\nHe chooses the urinal beside me.\n\nHe chooses.\n\nAnd like the Hoover Dam unleashing\n\nall of Manifest Destiny at once,\n\nhis stream announces itself,\n\nconfident, continental.\n\nWhile mine\n\ntrickles like regret.\n\nI push.\n\nOh God, I push.\n\nThe bladder, it seems,\n\nis also subject to shame.\n\nI finish, wash,\n\npress my palm against the great equalizer:\n\nthe moist steel handle of collective hygiene.\n\nThere is no foot lever.\n\nNo escape.\n\nOnly sacrifice.\n\nLater, stall time.\n\nCommunion.\n\nA little sanctuary to scroll, to void,\n\nto wonder why the waxy halo of the seat cover\n\nnever, not once, behaves.\n\nIts middle tears pre-emptively,\n\nslides off like a jilted lover.\n\nI make do. Sit. Sigh.\n\nFour open stalls.\n\nHe comes again.\n\nSits beside mine.\n\nSpeakerphone on.\n\nWife’s voice bouncing off tile.\n\nHe talks of cruise ships while his own departs,\n\nloud, aqueous,\n\nand I, caught mid-tension,\n\nhold back,\n\nfearing to betray the code\n\nby disrupting his lie.\n\nHe lies to her.\n\nBut I won't lie to the unwritten law of men:\n\nWe shit in silence.\n\nThe toilet paper roll mocks me.\n\nEngineered to fail,\n\nit taunts with microscopic ply,\n\nripping like dreams on waking.\n\nI lean, tug, it jerks,\n\nreleases with a banshee scream.\n\nPaper sails into the air like ticker-tape\n\nfor a championship no one wanted.\n\nHe squirms.\n\nI am the noise now.\n\nI am the breach.\n\nI wipe. I rise. I flush.\n\nThe water rises too.\n\nNot like redemption.\n\nLike flood.\n\nIt keeps rising.\n\nOver porcelain.\n\nOver tile.\n\nOver shoe.\n\nIt runs like guilt.\n\nInto his stall.\n\nHis cruise ends.\n\nHis wife is gone.\n\nHe asks, “What the hell?”\n\nI do not answer.\n\nI am already gone.\n\nShoes squishing out the door.\n\nNo hand dryer.\n\nOnly memory.\n\nAnd shame.",
      "word_count": 330,
      "keywords": [],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Miguel Dasso",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/miguel-dasso",
      "text": "Avenida Miguel Dasso. San Isidro.\nBeta Video Club.\n\nAt the corner of Avenida Miguel Dasso\nwas a restaurant we never entered.\nCurtains always drawn.\nA man always standing outside.\nHe didn’t seem to be working.\nHe didn’t seem to be leaving.\n\nFurther up the street,\non the left side,\nbefore the park,\nthe Beta shop.\n\n(They say VHS beat beta\nbecause of porn. I didn't\ncare.\nBetas were\nbetter.\nAnd I was too young to\nknow how porn helped\nvideo tapes.)\n\nNo sign.\nJust a door.\nInside, original Beta tapes\nin their stiff plastic cases.\nHandwritten titles.\nSoft-spoken ink.\nA kind of reverence,\neven for Blade Runner (Versión original).\n\nWe rented two.\nAlways two.\nNever three.\n\nOne would eat itself.\nOne would make sense.\nThat was enough.\n\nThe stall was quiet. Small.\nA wall of betas.\nSomeone in between them and a counter.\nThen me.\n\nOutside, the street moved:\nbuses, shoe shiners,\na woman selling lúcuma ice cream\nin a metal tray under glass.\n\nButifarra on wax paper\nfrom the stall down the block.\nJamón del país,\nonions in lime,\nbread that disintegrated in your hands.\nA taste of pork and heaven.\n\nThe Baños Turcos Windsor\nalways fogged, always quiet.\nMen came out softer than when they entered.\nTowels tucked like regrets.\nAnd then home.\n\nTo the den,\nwhere the Beta machine groaned to life\non a low table with missing corners.\n\nOn the window\na crooked “United States Marine Corps – Semper Fi” sticker\nthat had nothing to do with anything.\nNo one ever removed it.\nWe had a suspect.\nWe never spoke of him.\n\nThe screen flickered.\nThe tracking drifted.\nThe voices lagged behind the lips\nbut still made sense somehow.\n\nAnd when it ended,\nthe tape sat warm in my lap.\nThe label curling at the edges.\n\nStill legible:\nAvenida Miguel Dasso. San Isidro.\nBeta Video Club.",
      "word_count": 310,
      "keywords": [
        "peru",
        "memoir"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Nova",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/nova",
      "text": "I worried about Nova for a long time.\nI moved out in 2010.\nI didn’t want to be absent, like my father.\nBut I worried about my behavior.\nWas I positive enough when we spent weekends together.\nDid I let him tell me about him enough.\nDid I make space for him enough.\nI look now, and smile.\nHe shows me his music.\nHe asks me to watch his favorite shows.\nHe has taken on his own passions.\nWithout me getting in the way.\nLast week, he asked to play a new favorite song.\nIt was my favorite song too, years ago.\nI smiled, and a small drop of joy\nEscaped from its duct.\nWe talked music, like two old friends.",
      "word_count": 121,
      "keywords": [
        "nova",
        "family",
        "music"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "One Night",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/one-night",
      "text": "One night, after wine and Turkish coffee,\nI asked my immigrant friends why they came here.\n\nThey said - - -\n\nWe came because silence in our homeland\nwas not peace, but the echo of boots.\nBecause our names were called last,\nor never. Because truth\nwas a locked room,\nand fear its doorman.\n\nWe came from cities\nwhere your vote bought nothing\nbut suspicion,\nwhere the policeman knew your daughter’s name\nand not from kindness.\n\nWe came from markets\nwhere bread cost a week’s sweat,\nfrom nights lit by generators,\nnot stars.\n\nWhere neighbors disappeared,\nand no one knocked.\nWe fled uniforms without faces,\nlaws without reason,\nchurches burned for speaking the wrong prayer.\n\nWe left behind the kiss of corruption\nand the grip of inherited sorrow.\n\nHere, the air tastes different.\nHere, a stranger might help.\nHere, you can say the president is wrong\nand not wake in a cell.\n\nWe came not for riches,\nbut for a name on a lease.\nA birthday cake in a quiet kitchen.\nA future unmarked by the past.\nA dog that doesn’t bark\nat midnight raids.\n\nWe came to stand in lines\nwhere everyone waits\nthe same.\nTo work three jobs,\nand still smile\nat the sound of our children\nlearning a new word:\nsafe.\n\nThis place is not perfect.\nBut it lets us breathe\nwith both lungs.\n\nLets us love\nwithout apology.\n\nAnd sometimes,\nwhen no one’s watching,\nwe weep\nfor what we lost.\nAnd then\nfor what we found.",
      "word_count": 250,
      "keywords": [
        "heritage"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Push",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/push",
      "text": "I know I pushed you away last night, writing\nYou things that were unkind, after an intimate night\nSpent over cocktails and dinner.\n\nI wonder if I’m more comfortable living\nA life without you, but yearning your presence,\nThan a life with you, where we might grow\nClose, and you might see all of me.\n\nMaybe I prefer to crave the beautiful memory\nOf what was, than risk a present and future\nWhere we fall apart because I was not the right\nOne for you.\n\nI think I wrote those words because I love you\nToo much to think of you as a closed chapter in\nOur lives.\n\nI love you so much, that I’d rather have us be a\nBroken pen, and torn paper - an unfinished ode to\nA love that could have been so many things.",
      "word_count": 139,
      "keywords": [
        "love"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Simpler in Lima",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/simpler-in-lima",
      "text": "In Lima, we learned to flinch young.\nWhen soldiers passed, we turned our faces\nto the Pizza Parlor in Miraflores.\nWe focused on Pepperoni and Mushrooms,\navoiding eye-contact and spent ammunition.\n\nWhen they took Luis, we were silent.\nNo one told us to be. We just were.\nWhen he came back. He wasn't the same.\nWe understood.\n\nAt School, Pedro sighed -\ngraduation postponed, again.\nAnother bomb threat.\n\nWhen the city of 7 million went black, it wasn’t news.\nYou sat still, like a prayer waiting for its god\nto forget.\n\nWhen death threats came,\nyou didn’t tell your friends. You sat\nand watched another movie,\neyes fixed on the screen.\n\nAlert, but pretending it was normal.\n\nRicardo made jokes.\nIt was funny.\nThere was no other\nway to see it.\n\nbut dark humor cut the\ninsanity into smaller,\nmore edible chunks.\n\nWhen we saw the bank blow up,\nwe turned to walk slowly, back towards\nSan Isidro.\n\nWe were quiet.\nAvoiding sirens,\nHiding from the army trucks.\n\nCloser to home, we laughed.\nIt was a fragile sound,\nfull of anxious release.\n\nAnother night in Lima,\nanother night of absurd living.\n\nAt twenty-one, in Alabama, the cop pulled me over.\nMy voice cracked like dry maize.\nI handed him my passport.\nHe laughed. I laughed. It wasn’t funny.\nCasually, I watched his partner's finger\non the safety.\n\nOld habits die hard.\n\nThe shrapnel still in my calf pulsated\nAs he said 'Be safe now'\nand left me alone\nwithout asking for a bribe.\n\nThe gas station pump asked me a question\nI didn’t understand. I stared at it\nlike a wounded man\nback in Lima\nwaiting for the Senderistas to pass.\n\nAt the grocery store, 32 kinds of cereal.\nWhere is the safety in choice?\n\nIn Peru, violence had a way of behaving.\nYou suspected who carried the guns.\nYou knew not to speak English\non the wrong street. You knew\nwhat silence bought you.\n\nIn America, the rules are airless.\nThe violence wears khakis\nand asks how your day’s going.\n\nThe disappearance happens in slow scrolls:\nin the job interview,\nin the look on her face when I said\nI’d never had a checking account.\n\nI miss the clarity of Lima’s dusk.\nThe barking of dogs before a bombing.\nThe way danger felt honest.\n\nHere, I don't know where the guns are.\nOr the gods.\n\nNo one warns you\nabout the hidden threats\nin America.\n\nOne day you wake\nand realize no one is missing.\n\nThat’s how it starts.\nThe war here is memory.\nAnd the time and space to forget, then remember.",
      "word_count": 434,
      "keywords": [
        "peru",
        "memoir",
        "identity"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Still his dad",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/still-his-dad",
      "text": "He’s quieter now.\nNot in anger,\njust in becoming.\n\nLess available,\nbusy with an internship,\nbecoming a man.\n\nThere was a time\nhe ran to me\nfor answers.\nNow,\nhe listens to the world instead.\n\nI want to believe\nhe’ll come back,\nnot as a boy,\nbut as someone\nwho sees me again.\n\nBut I don’t need to know.\nIt's enough\nthat I remain:\n\na steady shape\nin his rearview,\na soft place\nthat never shut its door.\n\nI built this love\nfor all his seasons,\nnot just the ones\nthat looked like closeness.\n\nAnd if he never turns around,\nstill.\n\n...\n\nI'm still his dad.\nAnd I love him\nall the way through.",
      "word_count": 114,
      "keywords": [
        "nova",
        "family",
        "love"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Sunday",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/sunday",
      "text": "There were years I ran from it.\nRitual.\nOur childhood faith.\nThose metal folding chairs.\nThose fragile card tables pulled out for potluck.\nThe old grammar of grace.\n\nI ran from it.\n\nI needed my own blood,\nnot the kind dripped in grape juice\nor broken in pieces of Wonder Bread.\n\nBut.\n\nSomething remains in my heart,\nsoft as the echo of an out-of-tune piano\nin an empty sanctuary.\n\nThe hymnals had a smell,\nlike dust and linen,\nlike your favorite grandmother’s lap.\nEven the pews creaked like they were tired of kneeling.\n\nThe older women touched my cheek\nwith hands soft from years of service,\nsmelling faintly of rose water and Sunday kitchens.\nThey called me sweetheart\nthe way one might hum a hymn without thinking—\na gentle note in the liturgy of love.\n\"Let me hug your neck...\"\n\nWe pulled into gravel parking lots\nwhere the grass had just been cut,\na smell that meant someone cared\nenough to prepare a place for the invisible.\n\nI watched the deacons\nshift in their suits when my father kept preaching,\nlike time had betrayed them\nfor something holier.\nI loved it.\nHow he kept going past kickoff time.\nLike maybe God had one more thing to say\nand wasn’t done yet.\n\"Let's sing the last stanza of 'Just as I am' for an 8th time'....\"\n\nMy mother’s voice,\nstill in conversation\nwith a circle of women who knew the words\nto every casserole prayer.\n\nInside the church,\nthe air buzzed with theology.\nOutside, cicadas.\nAnd somewhere in the droning,\nof sermon, of fan, of heat,\n\nI stopped understanding the words\nand started to feel peace.\nNot belief. Not doctrine.\nBut peace.\n\nA different kind of communion.\nLike the hush of Sunday afternoons\nbetween services,\nwhen time folds\nlike linen after The Lord's Supper,\nand everything rests.\n\nOlder now\nI don’t miss the creed, the dogma\nbut the choreography:\nthe folding of bulletins,\nthe way we bowed our heads like the grass\nafter rain.\n\nNot the liturgy,\nbut what we made for it...\nthe small, stubborn rituals\nthat built a kind of love\nout of repetition and heat.",
      "word_count": 357,
      "keywords": [
        "faith",
        "family",
        "memoir"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Sympathy",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/sympathy",
      "text": "Sympathy shatters me for some reason\nI can’t receive it\nAnd if I let it in, I can’t stop weeping\nThe tears roll slowly\nAnd I hate myself for being so weak\n\nI don’t feel like I deserve good things\nUnless I’ve suffered for them\nUnless there’s been a price I’ve paid\n\nI think I’m getting better at this\nAfter years of inner work\n\nI built an AI podcast last week\nThe AI voices - I trained them to discuss\nMy memoir.\nThe female voice used a deeply sympathetic tone\nTo a random part of my story.\n\nA sat in the car, quietly weeping with gratitude\nAt a sympathetic voice I could accept.",
      "word_count": 113,
      "keywords": [
        "grief",
        "memoir"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Piano",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/the-piano",
      "text": "There was a piano wherever we went. Remember? It was weathered by travel, tuned by the bumps of roads and cargo. There was this gently bruised  melody in those many places we called home. And some nights, when dad travelled to churches, mom would play at home.\nThe sounds, the labored repetition of practice - sometimes hammered, sometimes caressed notes, played by a mind full of thoughts and worries.\nOn other nights, two sets of hands would play, My mother and brother, carving unison out of an old piano.\nOther nights, when my younger brother and I would be at home, mother would play the piano by our father at church.\nOur second-mother, maid, ‘empleada’, would sit to play and practice\nThe most fragile tone of all. A gently overzealous tempo.\nMy younger brother and I would run by the piano, and in our parentless paradise We would dance around her and pounce on notes, pushing her concentration, playfully wondering where her limits were.\nHer mission, with an effervescent smile, was to defy chaos.  There would be other times when, while everyone was gone, I would sit on the piano bench.\nThe wood pieces greeting each other under my weight, creaking a welcome sound through travel-weary wood.\nI would sit and play one minor note.  That sound traveled to deep places.  There the note would rest, and comfort the yearning for the familiar.\nI know you did the same, in your own way. Finding small tokens of comfort throughout the day, that would root the transient in you.\nThat melody was a part of home.  This piano and its old notes, sweet melancholic constant in our family.\nHome had the unlikeliest keys.  There was a piano, and its notes were constant.  In places that changed so often, the notes remained the same.\nThose notes still ring in my head when I'm at the cusp of sleep.  In those ebonies - those minor keys I loved so much, I can hear the whisper,  \"I love you.  You're Home.\"",
      "word_count": 337,
      "keywords": [
        "family",
        "music",
        "peru",
        "memoir"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Road Taken",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/the-road-taken",
      "text": "I’ve walked life like a long, broken road,\neach step pressing into earth that changes beneath me.\nIn Peru, the sun rose over high desert dunes,\ncasting long shadows over my childhood,\nand glistening in volcanic color, shining\nthrough threads of memory.\nI chased the wailing wind through dusty streets,\nmy boots clapping a rhythm on cracked adobe,\nfreedom ringing in the laughter of children\nwho knew the secret language of play.\n\nIn Scotland, the heather bruised the hills\nwith purple, and the sea thundered\nagainst black cliffs. I let the wind carve its name\ninto my skin, and found comfort\nin the weight of its solitude.\nThere I learned the art of being alone,\nhow solitude can be a friend,\nits presence soft as a shadow.\n\nIn Budapest, the rain polished the cobblestones,\nand neon lights from old signs\nspilled into the streets.\nI walked those wet avenues,\nwatching how the city painted itself in puddles,\nhow the world reflected—\nsoft, blurred,\nand achingly beautiful.\nI’ve seen those same reflections\nall over the world,\nfrom London’s damp alleys\nto Peru’s highland towns.\n\nThe rain, it seems, speaks\nthe same language everywhere.\n\nTexas sprawled wide and hot,\nwhere mesquite trees stood like sentinels,\nand wildflowers burned in the ditches.\nThere were days when the road stretched forever,\na shimmering mirage on the horizon,\nand nights when the cicadas sang\nthe world into stillness.\n\nI’ve stood before art,\nletting its silent truths shape me.\nHenry Moore’s Recumbent Figure,\nits curves and voids, taught me\nthe elegance of stillness,\nhow absence and presence\ncomplete one another.\n\nI’ve danced in dark places,\nwhere shadows pulsed to the rhythm\nof bass lines and whispered secrets.\nThere is a sensual darkness in movement,\na communion of bodies and breath,\nwhere the world disappears,\nand only the music remains.\n\nFurniture's song 'Brilliant Mind'\nBook of Love's 'lullaby\nCamouflage's 'That Smiling Face'\nWolfsheim's 'Once in a Lifetime'\nThe Cure's 'Love Song'\n\nThey once poured through my veins,\nmelancholy a mirror to my own,\ntheir beauty a healing balm.\n\nI have loved and lost,\ntraced the gentle hills of a lover’s collarbone,\nand found solace in the heat of her skin.\nBut I’ve learned, too,\nthat love isn’t possession.\nYou can’t push people away,\nor pull them closer\nthan their own hearts allow.\nYou must let them walk their own roads,\nfind the same love you carry for them,\nor not at all.\n\nAnd I’ve been brought low,\nstood exposed in the cruel light of public failure.\nOnce, words like stones rained down,\njudgments hurled without mercy.\nI felt my knees buckle beneath the weight,\nmy face hot with shame.\nBut even in those moments,\nthe earth did not swallow me whole,\nand I learned to rise,\nto wear my scars as armor,\nto find dignity not in perfection,\nbut in the grace of enduring.\n\nI’ve wrestled with truth,\nits jagged edges cutting into my soul.\nThere is a spiritual light,\ndistant but persistent,\na beacon in my darkest hours.\nAnd yet, I have often sought solace\nin the shadows, where questions\nlinger longer than answers,\nand the quiet hum of uncertainty\nfeels like home.\n\nThe ocean has held me in its wild embrace,\ntossed me like a leaf in the wind.\nOnce, under a vast Pacific sky,\nI let go,\nsurrendered to the rush of saltwater,\nto the chaos and the calm.\nIn that moment, I found peace,\na freedom deeper than fear.\n\nI’ve been a father,\nheld my child like a fragile bloom,\nmarveled at the way life begins anew.\nNo better teacher, than my son, to\nteach me the silent lessons,\nto step back, and learn to be the outer ring of someone else's orbit.\nTo bask in the joy of orbiting the bright,\nshining life of a Nova, a new star.\n\nAnd I’ve fallen in the ruins of divorce,\nsorting through the wreckage,\nlearning how love, even broken,\ncan still grow.\n\nFriends have walked beside me,\nsome falling away like leaves in autumn,\ntheir absence a quiet echo.\nBut their memory roots itself deep,\na forest I carry within.\n\nI’ve looked to the stars,\nseeking answers in their ancient light,\nand found instead a quiet awe,\na reminder that some truths\nare too vast to hold.\n\nThis road, long and winding,\nhas been marked by triumph and regret,\nLit by the light of distant stars\nBearing the weight of my own shadow.\nAnd though my feet are weary,\nI walk on,\neach step a testament to a life well lived.\n\nA tired smile.  A contented heart.  A long yawn.  And a whispered tune.",
      "word_count": 769,
      "keywords": [
        "peru",
        "dallas",
        "love",
        "nova",
        "music",
        "memoir",
        "aging"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "To be this old",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/to-be-this-old",
      "text": "To be this old, you see\nI don't feel it, or at least this is what I tell myself\nIn the mornings when my heel cramps\nIn the noon hour, as I struggle to stay awake\nIn the evening, when my back begins to give\nTo be this old, you see\nI don't think it, or at least this is what I tell myself\n\nWhen I can remember friends from 50 years ago\nWhen the song I hear at Costco was my teen 'fuck you' song\nWhen I find myself alone, with friends having passed on\nTo be this old, you see\nI don't sense it, or at least this is what I tell myself\n\nStraining to see the print on the paper\n(I turn my iPhone camera on in the elegant restaurant, sheepishly, just to see the sides available tonight)\nStruggling to ignore how gravity makes itself known\nWondering how best to be useful always\nto avoid being thrown away in a nursing home\nto know when to end a beautiful life with dignity\nbefore it comes to that\n\"Put me in a wheelchair and toss me over the side of an 80's party ship\"\n\nTo be this old, you see\nI don't want it, or at least this is what I tell myself\nBut love has not stopped giving me reasons to feel young\nWonder still takes my breath away\nJoy still catches me at the least expected moments\n\nTo be this old, you see\nIsn't at all what I thought it would be\nNeither was love\nNeither was wonder\nNeither was joy\n\nIt was all better, brighter...\n\nTo be this old, you see\nI don't want it, or at least this is what I tell myself\nBut, even with the failing body,\nThe mind and heart look back,\n\nTo a bottle of tequila, well-spent,\nTo torn clothes in a fit of passion, poetically thrown\nTo tears of grief and sorrow, given to a woman who I love loving\nTo dancing in a dark place, wrestling the darkness to light\n\nTo be this old, you see\nMaybe I do want it, because the road I took to get here\nHas a fucking awesome view",
      "word_count": 366,
      "keywords": [
        "aging",
        "love"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Tribes",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/tribes",
      "text": "I turned away from all the tribes.\n\nThe ones with their shiny, plastic smiles,\nthe denim-clad pastors, counting sins as if they were coins.\n\nThe goth kids with cigarettes and old records,\ncurated wounds and pierced tongues.\n\nThe new wave kids, all so unique in their irony,\nbut dressed so much alike.\n\nEven the theater kids,\nplaying roles to escape the dullness of suburbia.\n\nThey all wanted me to fit in.\nBut I wanted none of it.\n\nOn the edges, never at the heart,\nI floated among groups,\nfinding comfort where I could,\nin music, in politics, in ideas.\n\nTradition always felt like a costume,\nstitched together from someone else’s fears.\n\nI ripped it apart at the seams, longing\nfor something genuine and raw.\n\nFor years, I spoke only to the wind,\nslept beside doubt like an old flame,\ndrank clarity from forgotten wells,\nwrote my truths in ashes,\nwaiting for inspiration to come.\n\nI worshipped nothing\nonly the questions themselves.\n\nNo labels would define me.\nNot even God, who I asked to start over.\n\nYet thoughts form their own tribe,\nwild and restless,\nhungry for stories,\nfor connection and warmth.\n\nAnd me.\n\nI became like Moses,\ncarrying rules chiseled from my solitude,\nleading my ghosts\nthrough the deserts I chose,\nnot those handed down to me.\n\nI returned,\nnot to blend in,\nbut to share what I discovered,\nthat every tribe is imperfect,\nbut some allow you to kneel\nwithout feeling chained.\n\nTradition isn’t a cage\nwhen you’ve got your own keys.\n\nNow I stand,\npart rebel, part priest,\nhoping to teach my son\nto wander without fear,\nto listen deeply to the intentions\nbehind every word spoken.\nAnd the meaning\nbehind every human ritual.",
      "word_count": 286,
      "keywords": [
        "faith",
        "identity",
        "family"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Tuesday night",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/tuesday-night",
      "text": "He’s here,\nbut not really.\n\nHis door is half-closed,\nhis phone charging on his desk.\nHe’s eaten the food you ordered for him\nnot a word about it.\nJust the scrape of a fork\nand the fridge shutting.\n\nYou speak,\nit's a neutral look.\nSometimes not even that.\n\nIt used to be\nhe’d light up at the sight of you,\nask you questions,\nlaugh into your shirt.\n\nNow it’s just\nthe silence of a boy\nwho’s learning\ndad's optional.\n\nYou want to hug him,\nbut instead\nyou wash the dishes.\nYou want to tell him\nhe’s breaking your heart,\nbut instead\nyou ask if he needs anything\nfrom the 7-11.\n\nYou buy him things\nhe keeps here and never takes.\nA chain wallet he never wore.\nBooks he never read.\nIt feels like quiet rejection.\n\nYou stayed.\nYou grieved 80/20 custody.\nYou gave him a room,\nWith its own bathroom,\na life,\na quiet place to be himself.\n\nAnd he uses all of it\nto keep you\nout.\n\nYou don’t know if this ends.\nYou don’t know\nif he’ll come back.\n\nAll you know\nis that the house is clean,\nhe’s still in his room,\nand you’ve run out\nof ways\nto say\nyou love him\nwithout making a sound.",
      "word_count": 210,
      "keywords": [
        "nova",
        "family"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "We've Forgotten",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/weve-forgotten",
      "text": "They bent their backs beneath medieval cathedrals,\nthat never honored their names.\nPaid in bread crusts and silence,\nthey kissed the hem of priests\nwho called suffering holy.\nThey didn't question.\nThere was no time.\n\nThey walked beside oxen,\ngrew old at twenty-eight.\nBuried children without names.\nWorked land they could never own.\nGave thanks anyway.\n\nBecause faith was all\nthey were allowed to keep.\n\nAnd then,\nboats to a strange land.\nNames scribbled at port by men\nwho didn’t care how to spell it.\nThey became Americans\nby surviving the line.\n\nThey made cities out of sweat,\nlit furnaces, picked tobacco,\nopened stores that sold nothing but hope.\n\nThey built things.\nWith hands. With aching backs.\nWith hymns they translated\ninto whatever English\nthey could manage.\n\nWe forget them.\nBecause we don’t kneel\nin the dirt anymore.\nWe forget how a flag\nonce meant no bishop\nand no baron.\nJust breath.\n\nWe think freedom is comfort.\nBut it was never that.\nIt was choosing your own hunger.\nIt was standing up in a country\nthat didn’t bow to kings or priests.\n\nThey loved this place\nnot because it was perfect,\nbut because it didn’t\nask them to be less.\n\nAnd we...\nwe've forgotten\nhow heavy that kind of love is.",
      "word_count": 211,
      "keywords": [
        "heritage",
        "faith"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "What dads do",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/what-dads-do",
      "text": "He doesn’t talk to me now.\nA boy filled with his mother's\nire, and my brother's contempt.\nA decision\nthat comes\nwhen boys become\nsomething else.\n\nI used to know how to be his father.\nTie the shoes,\n\nhold the line,\n\nbe the laugh in the hallway\n\nafter a bad day.\n\nNow I’m mostly\n\na shadow in his rearview,\n\na name in his contacts.\n\nHe's too busy now,\n\nliving his life.\n\nI miss him.\n\nBut I don’t say it.\n\nThat’s not what dads do.\n\nWe fix what’s broken.\n\nWe nod when they leave the room.\n\nWe're the first ones they push away from the dock.\n\nAnd it's our job to make sure they do so safely\n\nand stand there in case we're needed one day.\n\nThat doesn't mean we don't feel lost,\n\nseeing your son row away,\n\nin a boat we helped build.\n\nAnd sometimes\n\nwhen no one’s watching\n\nwe sit on the dock\n\nbehind the shed\n\nafter dark\n\njust to let silence and tears\n\nhave their say.\n\nAnd try to accept the irony\n\nthat we can't live without\n\nthe one we helped live without us.",
      "word_count": 186,
      "keywords": [
        "nova",
        "family",
        "love"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "Witness",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/poems/witness",
      "text": "I told you about Jesus.  I believed the stories I’d\nGrown up with.  He was the path to heaven.\nYou were my best friend.  Born a Sikh, you grew up with\nDifferent stories.  I told you about him, and then I\nTold you you’d go to Hell without him. Not because I\nWas being mean, or manipulative, but because you were\nMy best friend.  And I wanted good things for you.\n\nYou let me finish telling you about Jesus.  You told me\nYou were a Sikh.  And that you’d die to protect my\nRight to believe in a Jesus that would send people to\nHell.\n\nIt took me some time to realize that my circle of love\nIncluded you only on condition, while your circle included me, unconditionally.\n\n _told you Jesus, the story I carried like bone._\n_You, Sikh, a different song in your blood._\n_I said hell, meaning only to save you, clumsy with love._\n\n_You listened, then offered your own truth:_\n_To die for the space where I could believe even this._\n\n_Later, the slow burn of knowing:_\n_My hand open only so far, yours without end._",
      "word_count": 189,
      "keywords": [
        "faith",
        "identity"
      ],
      "date_published": "2026-09-21"
    }
  ],
  "essays": [
    {
      "title": "What the Article Left Out",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/articles/what-the-article-left-out",
      "description": "The record was corrected and the spectacle was kept. Micah Boswell on a 2011 news item that is still online fifteen years later.",
      "date_published": "2026-09-18"
    },
    {
      "title": "Is AI replacing SEO?",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/articles/is-ai-replacing-seo",
      "description": "5,073 requests over three days. The AI agents outnumbered the search crawlers and used the same two doors. Nothing was replaced. A reader was added.",
      "date_published": "2026-09-15"
    },
    {
      "title": "What does a UX designer actually do on an AI product?",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/articles/what-a-ux-designer-does-on-an-ai-product",
      "description": "An ops copilot fell to 8% of seats in six weeks with a working model. Nobody designed the second question. That question is the job.",
      "date_published": "2026-09-12"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Diploma in the Drawer",
      "url": "https://conscious-shell.com/articles/the-diploma-in-the-drawer",
      "description": "Hours complete, 1992. Degree conferred, December 2025. The gap was thirty-three years, and most of it was my own pride.",
      "date_published": "2026-08-28"
    }
  ]
}