Shamanfox

Aka Nicole Dyer. Esoteric Poetry, Art & Photography As created through an illusionary character created by consciousness. https://www.createspace.com/4474719 https://www.createspace.com/4284612

[shamanfox]

✦ Field Notes from the Illusion ✦

Entry No. 023 – Friday, Between Breath and Memory

Location: Somewhere slightly left of sanity, with a pencil behind the ear

12:03 A.M.

Folded grief into a paper crane.

It refused to fly.

Said it liked the weight of me.

12:47 A.M.

The soul whispered a verse.

The ego interrupted with a megaphone.

I gave them both a pen and said, “Share the page.”

1:22 A.M.

Hope showed up overdressed.

Said she’s always prepared

for disappointment or tea.

2:04 A.M.

I heard eternity tapping on the glass.

But I was too busy labeling the shadow

to answer the light.

2:59 A.M.

Named a flower I couldn’t define.

It shrugged and said,

“I was already perfect before your metaphor.”

Conclusion:

Even Emily Dickinson would’ve laughed

at how divine comedy blooms

in the cracks of insomnia and identity.

[shamanfox]

The sky never becomes the storm.

[shamanfox]

Amber dawn stirs her ancient drum,

fur brushed by whispers of cedar smoke,

turquoise talismans thrum with hum—

a soul-song rising where spirits woke.

“Rise, oh fire, within my chest,

bless this day with sacred play.

May joy come dressed in eagle’s crest,

and dance with me this Friday.”

Bones of wisdom crown her brow,

feathers fan the breath of sky—

she chants, not softly, but here and now,

where laughter meets the why.

So beat the drum, and fox will sing,

a song of light through shadow’s ring.

“Walk wise, walk free, in all you do—

the world wakes gently when you’re true.”

[shamanfox]

Tiramisu mochi arrives like a small moon dusted in cocoa, its surface velvety and dark, carrying the scent of roasted coffee beans and bittersweet chocolate. The powder clings to fingertips in a soft, smoky veil, leaving traces of espresso-colored fingerprints behind.

The first bite yields with gentle resistance. The mochi skin stretches and sighs before giving way, impossibly tender and elastic, like silk woven from cream and cloud. Beneath that delicate chew waits a luxurious center, rich with mascarpone sweetness. It spills across the tongue in cool waves, smooth and decadent, carrying notes of vanilla, sweet cream, and the faint tang that makes tiramisu so irresistible.

Then comes the coffee.

Deep, aromatic espresso blooms through the sweetness, dark and complex. It tastes of midnight cafés and rain-slick cobblestones, of freshly ground beans crushed beneath a barista’s hand. The bitterness arrives like a velvet shadow, balancing the creamy filling and sharpening every flavor into vivid focus.

The cocoa lingers longest. It settles over the palate in earthy layers, warm and fragrant, mingling with mascarpone and coffee until the three become inseparable. Each chew releases another pulse of flavor, another ribbon of cream, another whisper of chocolate.

The texture is a contradiction made edible. The exterior is springy and resilient, the center meltingly soft. One moment the mochi stretches between teeth like satin taffy; the next, the filling dissolves into a cool, luxurious flood. It is the architecture of tiramisu rebuilt inside a living pearl of rice dough.

For a moment, everything narrows to sensation: cocoa dust floating in the air, espresso lingering at the back of the throat, mascarpone coating the tongue with creamy opulence. A single piece feels less like a dessert and more like a tiny edible eclipse, where coffee, cream, and chocolate slide across one another in perfect alignment.

[shamanfox]

a love poem to all poets

i love you

you who keep a pen like a splint

for the break called living.

i love you for listening

when the world speaks in static,

for leaning closer to silence

until it confesses.

i love you for ruining dinners

with sudden metaphors,

for stopping mid-sentence

because a better word just arrived

and demanded custody.

i love you for bleeding carefully,

for turning ache into syntax,

for knowing the difference

between pain that needs a wound

and pain that needs a line break.

i love you for failing beautifully,

for drafts no one will ever see,

for the brave stupidity

of believing language

can hold what it never quite can.

i love you for writing anyway.

for staying up too late,

for writing on receipts and skin,

for trusting the page

more than certainty.

i love you for not asking permission,

for not being cured of wonder,

for knowing that meaning

often arrives disguised

as a mess.

you are not efficient.

you are not practical.

you are necessary.

you are the ones

who keep the human pulse

audible.

and if no one ever told you—

if your work vanished into drawers

and quiet hard drives and forgotten tabs—

know this:

i felt you.

we felt you.

every time the world almost broke

and didn’t.

this is my love letter to you—

ink-stained, unfinished,

and written in the faith

that somewhere

another poet is awake,

still listening.

[shamanfox]

The dandelion began as a wound in the lawn, a small gold insistence pushing through the clipped obedience of grass. Neighbors called it weed, nuisance, invader. Yet beneath the soil it was busy unraveling stone, threading darkness with pale roots that drank from places sunlight had never touched.

By noon it burned like a tiny sun fallen to earth. By evening it loosened itself from gold and entered prophecy. The yellow face withered. The white globe emerged. A thousand fragile breaths waiting for a single wind.

Then came the great surrender.

Not death. Dispersion.

The seeds lifted into the invisible, each one carrying the memory of root, rain, worm, cloud and star. The flower disappeared only to discover itself scattered across fields it had never seen. What seemed an ending was merely the dandelion becoming larger than its own stem.

And deep below, where the roots had fed in the black loam among beetle bones and forgotten seasons, there remained no border between decay and blossoming. The darkness was not the opposite of the flower. The darkness was the flower dreaming itself into form.

So it is with the soul.

We spend our days believing we are the yellow crown trembling above the earth, when all along we are also the buried root, the blind soil, the passing wind and the empty sky receiving us. The dandelion knows this secret. It blooms from the abyss and returns to it gladly, carrying the whole field inside its small green heart.

[shamanfox]

Joy is not happiness wearing a bright shirt. Joy is the sunken city beneath happiness, the cathedral of coral growing in darkness long before any light reaches it. It rises through the ribs like a flock of golden birds escaping a cage that was never locked. It is the universe remembering itself through a single nervous system, a secret fire hidden in the marrow, burning without consuming. Mountains know it when snow melts into rivers. Stars know it when they collapse into elements that will someday become blood, breath, and hands.

Joy arrives when the mind loosens its grip on ownership and the boundaries of self become thin as dragonfly wings. The stone, the wind, the stranger, the grief, the galaxies spinning in their black velvet oceans all reveal themselves as faces of the same impossible mirror. In that moment existence ceases to feel accidental. Every atom glows like a lantern lit from within. Every heartbeat becomes a temple bell swinging through eternity. The soul, if it can be called a soul, unfolds like an opal beneath desert rain, revealing colors that were always there but hidden from ordinary sight.

And perhaps joy is the oldest thing in the cosmos. Older than language. Older than gods. A silent current moving beneath creation itself, carrying worlds like leaves upon an endless river. We do not create it. We stumble into it. We remember it. For one trembling instant the separate self dissolves into luminous dust, and the universe, through our eyes, gazes upon its own boundless face and smiles.

[shamanfox]

They met where the horizon folds itself into a silver blade and slips beneath the sea. One carried fire in her ribs, a small sun stitched into mortal flesh. The other carried moonlight in her bones, tides whispering through her veins. When they touched hands, entire constellations altered their ancient routes. Stars abandoned old loyalties. Comets bent their necks like swans. Somewhere beyond the reach of telescopes, galaxies opened like luminous flowers.

Their love was not delicate. It was tectonic. Mountains rose from sleeping oceans beneath the pressure of their devotion. Forests learned new shades of green. Rivers carved cathedrals through stone in an effort to imitate the shape of their longing. They kissed beneath thunderstorms, and lightning wandered the clouds for hours afterward, trying to remember the language their bodies had spoken. Kingdoms appeared and vanished like sparks from a forge, yet they remained, two women standing at the center of time’s turning wheel, holding one another as empires crumbled into dust around their feet.

When grief came, as it always does, it arrived armored in winter. It froze lakes and blackened gardens. Yet together they became a hearth no season could extinguish. They fed each other pieces of courage. They wrapped wounds in tenderness. The cold pressed against them like an invading army and found no weakness in their walls. Even sorrow, exhausted by its own hunger, eventually knelt before their steadfastness.

Years passed. Their hair gathered silver. Their faces became maps of laughter and survival. Still they walked side by side beneath the revolving heavens. The stars that had altered course on the night they met now burned brighter than before, as though grateful for the correction. And when at last the universe reaches its final twilight, when suns dim and galaxies drift apart like forgotten ships, their love will remain. Not as memory. Not as legend. But as the hidden gravity holding everything together, the invisible force beneath existence itself, the reason the cosmos never completely falls apart.

[shamanfox]

A Book

It waited upon the Shelf

With the Patience of a Winter Orchard

Its Cover held a Silence

Too ancient for the Room

I opened but a little Door

And entered many Lives

A Sparrow made of Paragraphs

Flew softly through the Mind

The Pages were pale Continents

Where Sorrows gathered Moss

Where Joy sat sewing Sunlight

Into the Hem of Dust

When finally it was finished

The Book remained behind

Yet something small and nameless

Had closed the Cover on Me

[shamanfox]

Every thought arrived carrying a tiny flag that read “I am you.” The witness watched them pass, smiling at their confidence.

[shamanfox]

Abyssal Transcendentalism

[shamanfox]

The mirror spent its life reflecting a thousand faces and never once noticed its own emptiness was its greatest gift.

[shamanfox]

Happy Pride Month

Before pride was a parade, it was a pulse kept secret.

A heart learning to beat quietly beneath borrowed clothing.

A name buried under the name the world preferred.

A love rehearsed in silence, then swallowed before anyone could hear it breathing.

There were rooms where people disappeared inside themselves.

Church rooms.

School rooms.

Family rooms.

Bedrooms where the mirror became both witness and wound.

There were hands that wanted to reach for other hands and did not.

Mouths that wanted to say the truth and closed.

Bodies that learned the cruel mathematics of safety.

Be less.

Speak less.

Want less.

Become less visible.

And still, beneath all that pressure, the soul kept making light.

Not polite light.

Not permission-seeking light.

Not the thin little candle of acceptability.

A furious, holy, human light.

The kind that says I was never the shame you handed me.

The kind that says my love is not a wound.

The kind that says my body is not a courtroom.

The kind that says my life is not an apology.

Happy Pride Month to the ones who crawled through years of silence and still became music.

To the ones who made family from strangers.

To the ones who survived being misunderstood.

To the ones who buried friends and kept marching.

To the ones who came out laughing, crying, shaking, blazing.

To the ones who never got the chance.

I am proud of this community.

Proud of its glitter and grief.

Proud of its tenderness with teeth.

Proud of its chosen names.

Proud of its old scars and new songs.

Proud of every person who turned loneliness into a doorway and found others waiting there.

Pride is not asking the world to tolerate us.

Pride is remembering that we were whole before anyone approved.

It is the ancient, unruly truth of the self rising from the cellar.

It is breath returning to the body.

It is color flooding back into a life once taught to live in gray.

So let this month be more than rainbow windows and softened slogans.

Let it be remembrance.

Let it be witness.

Let it be a hand placed over the heart with the solemn knowledge that we are still here.

Still loving.

Still becoming.

Still refusing to vanish.

Happy Pride Month.

May every hidden part of you come home.

May every fear that named you wrong lose its throne.

May your joy become loud enough to wake the dead.

May your love stand unashamed in the center of its own bright life.

[shamanfox]

“Unstable Grace”

the ego cracked last night.

not loud—

just a hairline fracture

in the mask i wore to be loved.

it happened mid-breath,

when no one was looking,

in the hush between

a triggered thought

and the choice not to follow.

the world didn’t end—

but something did.

something tight.

something loud.

something that always needed

to explain itself.

i did not scream.

i watched.

i stayed.

and the watcher grew wings

where my name used to be.

the more i stayed awake,

the more the lie lost its gravity.

i saw the mind—a spinning top.

i saw the self—a cloud of echoes.

and underneath it all,

a pulsing silence

that kept calling me home.

this is not ruin.

this is not madness.

this is

unstable grace.

a rewilding of the soul.

a shaking off of names.

a remembering

before the forgetting began.

[shamanfox]

Mildred, Montana

[shamanfox]

She stood at the edge of a battlefield no map had ever drawn, where every sword was forged from a wound and every wound still whispered the name of the hand that made it. The earth beneath her feet was crowded with forgotten angers, rusting helmets full of rainwater, old flags unraveling into threads the sparrows stole for nests. She bent and touched the soil. It trembled with centuries.

Then she did the most dangerous thing imaginable.

She listened.

Not to the victors carving themselves into stone, not to the drums demanding another march, not to the merchants weighing grief by the pound, but to the small trembling heartbeat hidden beneath all the noise, the frightened child sleeping inside every enemy.

The rivers paused their silver gossip.

The mountains leaned closer.

Even history, that tireless machine of blood and repetition, faltered for a moment and forgot to turn.

For she had discovered a secret older than kingdoms:

that hatred is a door forever locked from the inside,

that vengeance is a cup whose thirst survives the drinking,

that every wall, no matter how high, is merely loneliness learning architecture.

And one by one the soldiers laid down their names for each other.

The borders softened.

The guns filled with wildflowers.

The widows opened their hands and found seeds where their sorrow had been.

Night arrived, but it was no longer dark.

Millions of hearts glowed beneath it, lanterns carried through the long corridors of existence, each flame recognizing itself in every other flame.

And the stars, watching from their unimaginable distances, finally relaxed their ancient burning, for the universe had spent billions of years becoming conscious enough to learn one simple thing:

that peace is not the absence of war.

Peace is the moment the ocean remembers that every wave, however fierce, however broken, however alone it seemed beneath the storm, has always belonged to the same water.

[shamanfox]