Jordan A. Leturgez

I stand at the crossroads with a pocket full of questions,
the map of my life folded into the crease of my palm.
Around me, voices bloom--soft, sharp, muffled--
each a lantern swaying in the night with its own small truth.

I ask the river for counsel; it answers in currents,
teaching me how to let go of stones that keep me anchored.
I ask the old tree for counsel; it answers in rings,
teaching me how patient grief can become a steady trunk.

Neighbors hand me phrases like smooth pebbles:
"Try this," "Don't," "Wait," "Leap."
Some glint like fortune, some bruise like warnings.
I hold them up to the light, trying to decide which will fit my pocket.

Advice smells of other people's forks in the road--
the taste of their victories, the ache of their regrets.
It is not a map but a mirror and a compass:
it will show the shape of a hand that has gripped a knife,
and it will point, faintly, toward a direction that once served.

I learn to ask with a soft mouth,
to invite the world's counsel without swallowing it whole.
To sift the gold from the gravel by touching it to my tongue;
to hear the thread in each story that vibrates true in my own bones.

Sometimes the clearest answer is a silence,
a pause where no one lays a stone on your path,
and that is advice too--permission to listen to the hollow
inside you that already remembers the way.

Advice is a lantern offered by a stranger,
a quilt stitched from many hands, a borrowed coat for cold nights.
It will warm you for a season, guide a step or two,
but the road asks you to walk, and your feet will learn the shape.

So I gather the lanterns, the rings, the river's soft lessons,
and fold them into the pockets of my coat.
I will carry others' light until my own ember glows enough,
until I can make my own map by burning midnight into dawn.

If you have something to say--speak it like bread handed across a table.
If you are the one who seeks--receive it like fire, with care.
Advice is love in fragments; choose what fits, and let the rest go.
The rest--like rain--will find another thirsty field to bless.

We meet in the small porch of a screen,
where sentences arrive like evening light --
soft, immediate, folding into the lap
of whatever day we carry home.

Your laugh is a kettle I can hear boiling
across the distance; my silence a warm shawl
you drape without asking. Names and weather
turn into meaning: a shared slice of sky.

There is no grand reveal, only the slow work
of two hands drafting a bridge from ordinary words.
We patch the loneliness with small kindnesses --
a recipe, a memory, a condolence sent like bread.

Sometimes the chat is a river: quick, bright,
skipping stones of gossip and dreams.
Sometimes it is a hearth, low and patient,
where we roast our fears until they're tender.

No prophecy here, only presence -- the steady light
that makes the margins of our days readable.
A friendly chat: a light left on in the window,
an invitation that says, Come as you are.

You close the door on yesterday's noise --
the clatter of shoulds, the static of doubt.
A small ritual: a kettle's breath, a pen's sharp tip,
the screen soft as a horizon. You breathe in the room
as if it were a living thing waiting to be spoken to.

At first the world crowds the edges -- emails, chores,
the future's impatient knocking. Then one sound thins:
the steadying of your own pulse, like a metronome
beneath a lighthouse. The margins shrink.
Attention becomes a lens and the lens grows hot.

Time pulls inward: minutes fold into one long seam.
Hands remember what the mind no longer needs
to remind them of. Errors fall away like loose stones;
only the path you are carving remains. Thought
isn't thought now but a river your will steps into.
You move with its current, not against it.

Outside, clocks count. Inside, sentences, stitches, beats
arrive as if delivered from another room.
There is a strange generosity to this place:
it trades loneliness for belonging, panic for craft.
Joy comes quiet, not triumphant but complete,
a small bell rung inside the ribs.

When you surface, light is different, familiar and new.
You hold something between your palms -- a sentence cured,
a chord that rings, a shape finally true. Your hands remember
the way home, and your heart keeps the map.
For a while you were both cartographer and sea,
and the ache afterward is only proof you went deep.

On the skin of a curve I lay a single silver thread,
not to trespass the arc, but to learn its breath.
I touch once--no more than that--and the world tilts,
a precise, soft geometry: the slope of wanting.

It fits the moment like a whispered definition,
a straightness that understands the curve's secret bend.
We are maps in motion--one line that leans, one line that leans away--
a punctuation of contact where infinity feels finite.

This is not ownership but recognition:
to meet and mirror the tangent's angle for an instant,
to read the derivative of a life and know the direction
without swallowing its compass of possibility.

The curve keeps its becoming; the line keeps its clarity.
Between them, a tiny miracle: a single shared point,
a language of touch so exact it could be called faith.
Here, approximation becomes intimacy.

How tender to be allowed such a perfect glimpse--
to count the slope and carry it like a secret home.
For lovers, for moments, for truths that refuse to loop,
we are always learning to be that straight, that brief, that true.

The tangent leaves as it came: straight, honest, inevitable.
But the touch--oh, the touch--bends us toward new horizons.

They are the quiet pillars beneath a trembling sky,
not laws that bind but cartographers of possibility --
lines drawn so builders know where to trust the ground.
A code of common rhythm that lets many hands keep time.

Think of a bridge: bones measured, bolts known,
so two strangers can meet in the middle and cross
without asking the architect's name. Think of language --
letters paved straight enough that a hope can travel miles.

Standards are lighthouses on fogged coasts:
they do not steal the shore's mystery, they promise ships a place to aim.
They are the grammar of bravery, the scaffolding of wild invention,
a map handed forward so a child may climb farther than her parents did.

When we agree on measure, we make a stage for trust.
When we choose clarity, doors hinge wide instead of closing.
A rule kept is a seed planted in common soil;
standards are the weather that turns seed into orchard.

They pare away the needless options that drown momentum,
and in the space left open, new shapes take root -- surprising, tender, true.
Standards teach us how to walk together, not how to walk the same.
They give us roads so strangers can become collaborators,
and in that joining, opportunity wakes and sings.

So hold them lightly and hold them well --
not iron cages, but frames that let color and motion live.
Let standards be the promise we leave to those who come next:
a shared light, a steady plank, a language that says,
Come. Build. Begin. The world will hold you.