Dog Years

2025

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Listen Here - Author Read - Podcast Style

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Photo by J.Millard

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Into the fire. Another year. Another round. Highs and lows. Joy and sorrow. Smiles. Tears. Screams. Broken whispers. Too much to write. Too much to keep inside. The human condition. Forged link by link. We are children of the mud. The ash. We will continually be brought back down to earth.

Change always gets the last word. Reflection depends on our mirror.
What are human years? Are we living soul years or flesh years?
Do each count the same? Time adds layers and time takes them away.
What is gone? What remains? Are we all just a character in our own fictions?
The holy and the vain. What is yet to come?

Some years bring growth. Some subtraction. Maybe both are the same thing? Expansion. Shadow and Light.

Dog Years.

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Dog Years

A dull blade shaves the skin of time.
Out of sight.
Out of mind.
A year shivers. Throws off its blanket.
Puts it back on again.
Last time I was here
the snow was departing.
Now it’s just arriving.
In between something came and went.
What remains?
I can no longer distinguish lessons
from perception. Perspective
from expectation.
Words dissolve to brine on my lips.
The ones I spoke.
The ones that failed me. 
The ones I never said.
Breaking bread
into a photograph 
of just another memory.
It moves faster now.
Change. Always gets the last word.
She often doesn’t give us a chance
to speak. There is no debate.
What gives rise to all change
yet itself - is changeless?

Nothing lost. Nothing gained.
Yet something wants to claim.
Who I Am.
Discovering what I am not.
Life unfolds as it will.
Spilling the salt.
Pissing into the wind of knowing.
Chaos peels off the shiny red shoes
tongue tied
in the alveolar trill
of a rolling R.
Language tries to go beyond itself.
The pitch falls gradually towards the end
of a sentence.
Something else is carried along 
with the words.
Breathing into an intonation
of questions.
Rising up all over again.
Another round. Another ring.
Another wrinkle.
Some years count for more.
Seven to the flesh. One to the soul.
Out of mind.
Out of sight.
A blink becomes a decade.
A pause becomes a life.

© Jamie Millard

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Thanks for Being - Here!

We drain words from our blood.

Consummating desire in the fires of language. We are the ink. We are the vessel. In flesh. In being. In becoming. We are the poetry of burnt ash and soul.

We write on. Into the fire. Out on the edges of words - we call on ghosts to question the future. To let go of the past. To attend to the present.

“Ash on the old man’s sleeve” ~ T.S. Eliot

We come to share words. In the hope of being understood. To connect.
To leave room for her. The unknowing. The maybe. The magical. The mystical. The rivers of moods. The synchronicities. The waves of sensations that rise blood in tides and swells to find their way inside.

More than with anything else, we connect - through the door of language. Sometimes we enter in forwards. Sometimes backwards. In trying to get to the other side of language we are forced as metaphor to meet in the middle. As James Hillman writes, “Materialization of psyche and the psychization of matter”.
We meet in the middle. Individually and collectively.

“Metaphor is an exchange of energy between two things.”~ Mary Ruefle.

Thank you all for this beautiful exchange of energy!
Happy Holidays if you are celebrating.
Happy New Year and all the best for 2026!

Lots of Love,

Jamie

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Photo by J.Millard

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