not just a pawn (a poem)

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Meaning is thicker than water and I am submerged in it, breathing syllables like atmosphere, the tickle comes first, that myth feather brushing the sternum before the ache speaks, and the ache knows before language does—knows this is sponsored, line-itemed, renewed, that shame and derision are not accidents but tools, that chaos is intention wearing a grin.

Mid-January light in north Georgia, thin and honest, ambient music holding the room at low voltage, a chessboard I paid too much for peeling at the edges, layers confessing what permanence costs, endgame fixed, every move expensive, a bishop chewed, a crown scarred, a queen collapsed, domestic damage, teeth-tested symbols, all for the king—not dominion, but continuance, the rule that says something must remain or the game ends early.

To my left a puppy curled into trust, a small furnace of now with no future debt, to my right an old beagle wheezing, each inefficient breath a holy refusal of efficiency, and between us the board waits, patient as wood that has learned time. Minneapolis enters the room, and every other same place—not geography but echo, a tax dollar travels, a baton travels, grief arrives later, the ache is the arrival notice and I sign for it with my body.

They say pawn because they need motion without questions, but pawns cross, pawns learn the ground by foot, pawns change form, and I am here, father of four—three sons and a daughter— their aspirations breathing inside a world not ruined but contested, watching how I stand when the board thins.

Single sky: the same atmosphere touches sirens and cereal bowls, delaminating wood and distant fires, no elsewhere, no exemption, and still no lie required. I won’t thrash the water, won’t metabolize their tone, I’ll move at the speed my ethics can breathe—small, local, precise— keeping a square habitable while larger systems convulse.

This is faith without spectacle: heat staying on, dogs breathing, children dreaming, pieces bearing the marks of living, ache as signal, ache as witness, ache as proof that something still matters. I am not a pawn. I am a crossing under one sky, playing correctly, letting the sonic burst be this—continuance, bright enough to trust in the hand that holds it.