A POEM A DAY

I'm just happy to be here.
April 25, 2017

23/30: AMERICAN SONNET ENDING WITH A LOST KEY

I would like to walk in your mind barefoot
Naked, mouth open. Strange glory of the body,
I ask you protect what I neglect. Here,
your soil is asleep with secrets
I softly wake with my lips. Strange glory
of the dirt, what mad joy you keep alive.
The triumph of where did it go all wrong
Fills the vaulted ceilings of your feelings
Like slow water in a dance hall. Last call
Comes like the last straw and I grab your hand
Like quicksand. Hear me with your whole body.
The secret entrance to our secret selves
Once had a key, but where did we leave it?

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April 24, 2017

22/30: EARTH DAY

Out of my own wilderness I return.
After gathering the shade scattered in the garden,
I want to thank God for the Earth,
Rejoice in the sprawling worth, remembering
Spring as the time I swam and did not sink
Remembering my flintstone feet as a sundial
While I try to see the tops of the redwoods
This earth never once betrayed me
I want to thank God for this

But stop myself

Cause God allegedly gave us earthlings too
And what this earthling does in the dark of night
Underneath the marauding magnolia trees
Maneuvering between the wind as the bayou breathes
Can spring a loathsome wrath against the space we share.
Not enough of us care, even though there are more of us now
Than ever before, and the earth is smaller now than it was,
I can see it in how we look at one another.
But today, I reach for the light.
Out of my own wilderness I return from a hungry loneliness.
Even in loneliness, I have yet to love the light less.
Were it not for the pictures of my grandma’s backyard garden
All over her Facebook wall, it’s possible I’d never forgive myself
for staying inside the house.

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April 22, 2017

21/30: IT DEPENDS

“You happy now, bitch?”
-Buck Moreland, The Wire

It depends cause when I was in Venice with my cousin Marcos I ordered a drink called the Papaya King, and instead of just telling the waitress the name of the drink, I told her I’m ready to declare myself the Papaya King, and for the rest of the afternoon, that’s what she called me, and I drank a sweet kingdom. I became a kinder sovereign to myself. Nobody ever looks at the laws we follow. I’m here to change my constitution and that takes time. Who am I to promise time? I am always giving what I do not have. I want to be less selfish but I want more time for myself. If it weren’t for the places I travel in my head. Dark passengers and all crawling under the flood boards. But that plot is boring. The plot where I could be happy right now is ideal especially since I just went home for Easter, saw my cousins and brothers, saw my grandma and grandpa, saw my aunts and uncles, saw my best friends, and saw my brothers, all the pieces to this puzzled person who processes an infinite number of ideas together at once. I pull a memory like a thread and run through the past and the people who saw me grow. But where I go isn’t always so sweet. Like if I explained to each person I met the number of sad departures my mind takes every moment without ever guaranteeing my return, it’d be too much. But god I love the rush of remembering. I keep the pantry stocked with details. I’m not even looking for the truth and it still surprises me. Admit or forget, admit or forget, admit or forget. Pride is a pickle so don’t call this confession. It’s the lonely in-between I run from. But my hamstrings are weak, the muscle memory is terribly tender. This game of hurt is a worrisome sport. The thing is, I hurt myself more than any contact with a woman could. I make a promise to pretend cause it’s easier to revisit the invisible futures we could’ve had than spitting up the apple. I want to anticipate the taste of temptation, tired of hesitating at the jump, just want to be done waiting, but ask me if I’m tired of wanting, or yearning, or hurrying the present like I need my faith in the future sustained cause in twenty-four days I graduate law school with honors and this year I take the bar to become a lawyer and this is history in my family, this is a dream I see on my calendar, like this past Valentine’s day, my first niece was born, crying in the afternoon heat, the love I felt then would’ve destroyed the demons of kingdom, would’ve tossed the tyranny of guilt out like rotten fruit at the end of spring, but spring is still here, and these days, a swarm of birds follow my car home and in my head, it’s the Flying V from Mighty Ducks, and I am not alone anymore, which is such a fucking relief. When people ask me how I’m doing, I usually reply, I’m happy because I’m here, and I’m here. I admit it. I admit it so I will not forget. Today the sunset looked like a papaya pulled apart. I stood in my backyard like a proud Papaya King. I tell my people who want to know, it’s not always yes or no. I rest my case, Your honor.

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April 22, 2017

20/30: BIG MAC

I meet a guy at the Walmart Neighborhood Market on Belfort and Gessner who says his name is Mac, but people call him Big Mac, so Big Mac asks what I’m about and what I do while we both stood in the parking lot after discussing the cooking failures caused by empty propane tanks, laughing off backyard disasters when I finally tell him I’m about to finish law school, and how I’m almost a lawyer, and that’s when he stops me, that’s when interrupts my sentence like a cloud passing over the sun, and he says no you are a lawyer, you have to say it, for it to be true. Put it out there. Big Mac pulls the doubt out my mouth like a spare thread on the sleeve of my dreams, and I unravel into my grocery bags and both my hands are carrying my gratitude for this afternoon’s agent of kindness reminding me to let the good word be heard, and we shake hands and part ways like old friends, and once I return to my car, I rejoice in who I’ve become, how the world is run by none of us but we all choose to participate in fate, even when I’m late to the learning, life delivers me from my mistakes, and this is a lesson I take home with me Thursday afternoon like a ticket stub I keep on the wall in my room

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April 20, 2017

19/30: little things

When my dad would lose in backgammon, he grumbled
About luck, about both my brothers and my failure to adhere
to the updated rules of the game. I mean, the man justified defeat
Like a dying king in battle
And I believed in his brave wounds
Even when I did not see the foreshadow,
in how he salvaged small sorrow into a ship
like a sailor stuck in the sea of himself.
My father carves a life boat from each lesson
From each lesson, he rescues himself.

When I would cuss growing up, my mother would
admonish me, Zachary Fredrick! Do not cuss!
To which I reply, but my father is a sailor!
And she’d laugh where she stood, her eyes heavy with
the past,
and my tongue was a sail in the wind of an ocean I’ve
never been in

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April 20, 2017

18/30: TASTING SPRING

“Busy missing you — I have not tasted spring.”
-Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Susan Gilbert, April 1868.

Oak trees cloak the afternoon 
Like spring’s longest shadow.
With nowhere to go, each color
Grows larger in my head.
I save enough room to bloom,
for my coffee, for my mistakes.
I feel powerful in my perception,
picking apart the atoms of my affection,
fixated on the future
of my joy like a laid-off prophet.
The breeze flows without interruption
and I join the congregation of naked leaves—
both our bodies sway together
in the open bed of the afternoon.
How much further must I cave
before I say your name?
I’m in my chair
but I feel like groundwater.

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April 18, 2017

17/30: LOVE BETTER

“Therefore, dear sir, love your solitude
and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation
the suffering it causes you.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Dear Zachary, sir—I need you to love better.
Dear sir, I need you to love better and mean it.
You can start with me, and all the sweet-sounding
suffering I cause you. This isn’t advice.
I love watching you try, but what good is
showing up, if you do not follow through
with who you wish to become?
Apart from me, you are another and I am other.
As if we exist in separate dimensions.
Am I a place you go but do not mention?
Dear Zachary, together, have we not walked
through shame like confetti and cascarones
underneath pink evenings? Have you forgot
the wilderness of your childhood, the backwards
deliverance of our innocence? We passed the time
like a jar of fireflies at dusk, opening the closed
jar to see how far we could see trace the fading
light. Each time you proposed an exit strategy to
get out of your head, who was your canary?
What if I told you it is not possible to love
someone until you love me? All the pain
in our heart is instructive. Isn’t that what
you call precedent. Would it please you
if I gave my argument with authority?
Because I know how you hate the past,
And yet, you protect your agony, unequivocally
too stubborn to learn the errors of your ways
And I know this weighs on you. I can feel
the slow puddle of your blood form when
you refuse to participate. Dear sir, please,
I am not an exit strategy. I am an invitation.
My only wish for you is to receive what
I give without leaving me behind. Remember
how it feels to stumble through the unfinished
plot of what is lost and what is gained? I know
you need me most when it rains and the air
changes instantly, announcing to the world
what is here and what is to come, the same way
you wish you could change back into the man
you wrote about once before you became an
island, stranded in the sand of your fears.
I hear you talk to yourself when you refuse
to use your voice. I know all your tricks.
In the mirror, when we visit each other,
Your eyes trace our body in the dim light.
Dear sir, don’t you see the space I give
is empty for a reason?

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April 18, 2017

16/30: on the fridge, in two parts

i.
rain by us
sweet pounce
clean lick
Can water ache?
Could the sea boil over?

ii.
Some long
melancholy evaporates
I watch the dark
dark weather of us
asking,
Does the sky see
what does not last?

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April 18, 2017

15/30: if you’re looking for a sign, this may be it

it’s Saturday night on East Cesar Chavez and I’m on foot
in stride, side-by-side with a man I’ve known long enough
to give me back my faith in people, back again in believing
in every human’s innate goodness. Again with belief, again
with hope, again with being a hopeless believer, I begin again.

But not like clockwork, or counter-clockwork, or how an alarm
works. More like the blinking clock next to my mattress next to us after
a storm erases time off the face of the earth when the power yanks
time from and the only way to know what time it is to get up and
stop pretending the world isn’t waiting, watching me hesitate.

it’s Saturday night on East Cesar Chavez and I’m on foot
in stride, telling Marshall about my latest heartache, when
an empty church stops me, but only after I notice the barb-
wire praying to a passerby like me. The painful invitation
of god has robbed me of my desire to dance in my own hurt.

Above in the sky, an oak tree homily interrupts me once more:
Run the race of life to win an ETERNAL crown, and my life
is now in the hands of my feet, and in this moment, I’m on foot.

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April 18, 2017

14/30: ARS POETICA

I laugh like salsa kisses
My echo is everywhere
I talk like water goes
My voice is survival
I kiss like a cemetery holds
My mouth is a lousy mausoleum
My poems are the flowers
I bring when I forget how to sing
When the dead weeds of my deeds
need to be pulled up, a poem is a
palm in the soil. Does poetry excuse
my dirty hands? All I ever loved
was to try to help everyone, except
myself. Some mornings, the poet
pretends he is a boy again,
watching his words
escape like balloons
he wants to trade in
for hope.
If it comes down to it,
I may say yes to silence.
Most days,
I smile like my poems try to forget.
So I write to leave the door open.

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