A POEM A DAY

I'm just happy to be here.

Tag: creative writing

April 16, 2025

14/30: April in Austin

You can spend all your time making money
You can spend all your love making time

-Take It to the Limit by The Eagles

The blue sky is a promise
I honor with all my might
Bluebonnets bend in the wind
I find myself walking under the Oak Trees, again

Time traveling is easy

Walk through the world

with your best friend
with nowhere to go
and nowhere to be
Rewind and reminisce.
What I carry

carries me forward
What I keep
has kept me
grounded
and searching
and still I return
to the present,
hungry for more time
with love and more love
and more love and
more time.

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April 16, 2025

13/30: When you cannot catch the wind

I cannot catch the wind but I welcome

the invitation.
I surrender to what surrounds me,
the wonder within me,

the love that moves me.
I love a song called Let the Mystery Be
Another one called Set Your Spirit Free
Listening, listening, listening .
Isn’t the spirit a mystery?
One I cannot see, one I cannot hear

All week, the sun self and the shadow self

move through the music. 

I dig my roots up from the ground
to see how deep the soil

goes. What do I know other than

what I feel? I know pain, I know the names

of the ghosts I let go.
Past or present, the feelings are mine 

and mine only. I walk through a door 

and the breeze is gone. The wind goes on.
This is what I know. 

The sun rises, the shadows show.

We grow, we wake and we make meaning.

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April 11, 2025

7/30: The Apple Tree

I move my mouth to form a letter
and you follow me like a mirror.
Together, we make sounds
called words. In other words,
I’m trying to teach you to speak,
to pull your voice from the well.
Yesterday, you say Appppppuuulll
in the grocery store. Of course you mean
apple, and the word falls out of your mouth
like an apple from a tree. Of course I mean,
the tree is me.

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April 8, 2025

5/30: Starfish

I think water is your element

In swim class, I hold your body

as the water holds us both

I used to hold my breath 

each time your head went

below water,
Now I exhale

like the bubbles you’re supposed

to spit out each time the water

goes into your mouth.
The smile on your face reflects
off the water

When you kick your feet,
it feels like you want to fly

swells and swallows
me whole.
I whisper, where’s mama?
And your body is a ship
set for shore, for True North

Mama is a lighthouse,

a silver smile through the storm.

My head so often

bobs beneath the water,

and I lose my eyes when

I hear your muffled voice

echo like a firework. I overhear another parent say,
you’ll never get this time back
The words rise and fall over me

like hands on a clock,

and when I look over my shoulder,

I see class is over.

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April 3, 2025

2/30: A Migration of Love

With thanks to Evita Tezeno, Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You” and Sofia

No one else makes me feel the colors that you bring me
is the title of the painting before me
on my birthday.
A husband holds his wife in the kitchen of their life,
and the color of their love brings me to my knees like a
proposal
I prepared for over and over for months.
The gallery is full of exhibits invoking love languages
and I think of all the languages I want to tell you love you
and the only two I know now.
Any love poem I write for you sometimes feels like a love poem for Houston.
It is my wife Adela’s birthday too.
Adela wears blue crescent moon earrings
I remember her buying years ago.
Sitting on the patio of Tiny Boxwood’s,
the song Blue Moon croons through the morning breeze
Joaquin wishes me a happy birthday and tells me
his peach tree waited to blossom for me, assuring
This is a good omen
A chocolate croissant kisses my lips then my love’s
This is a good omen
Adela sees an orange bellied robin descend
and run along the ground until its wings woke up
This is a good omen
How to measure what tethers us to tenderness?

We are looking for elephants from the Great Elephant Migration: A Coexistence Story
in the middle of Hermann Park, walking past the Oak Trees
where I kissed Adela years before for engagement photos
On the way to see the elephants, we run into
a woman who is also looking for the elephants
I see a sign about the Migration of Love and think
what is love if not movement between two places?
What is grief but the refusal of love to migrate to the great beyond?

The woman is named Sofia
Sofia offers to take our pictures under the pink rose arch
inside the McGovern Centennial Gardens
we pass on the way to see the elephants we’ve never seen before,
when suddenly, Sofia asks, do we know where the elephants are?
And her path becomes our path
She tells us, it is her birthday today
And her path becomes our path
She confides, her husband died three years ago,
and if she talks too much about it,
she will start to cry
And her path becomes our path
Sofia was kind and warm, wandering and alone
until she found us too
her grief, migrating to love
our love, migrating to love
The three of us moving together
on our birthday, alive under the sky
coexisting
with love and grief
as the candles on our cake.

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April 11, 2022

3/30 – Stargazing at the McDonald’s Observatory on my Birthday

Fort Davis, Texas
I never said a prayer for Darkness.
Usually I salute the sun like a flare
and swim in the lightyears,
A gold fish that forgot its shadow
even existed.
I’m standing now before
a crescent moon and under
enough stars to swallow time
I learn the word Earthshine
so we don’t forget
the dark sky is alive
the dark sky is alive with stories
the dark sky is alive with stories
the dark sky is alive with years of light
Looking up, my eyes are perform
a timeless practice, ancient and honest
I hold the only person on this Earth
who makes me shine in Darkness.

To be alive and in love with life at the same time
under the cover of night
How a light year needs the Darkness
to prove its still there

I am here in Fort Davis, Texas
with a prayer for Darkness on my lips,
spellbound by what my eyes can see
as soon as the dark overwhelms me.

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April 7, 2022

2/30 – The Morning of My Life

Marfa, Texas.

Early sun
Light overcomes the first night of April
all around me
Every color of blue echoes around you
The sunshine is a silent alarm
The silence moves me to write
I’m quiet in my creation
My wife asleep next to me
dreaming deeply
The glow of morning falls on her cheek
Her half smile, a desert flower
in full bloom
The wind from yesterday still in her hair
You are where my love rises
A satellite speeding
through the stars still can’t catch us
When the light overcomes the dark,
the morning begins and it is time
to celebrate our lives,
and how we are here, in love,
and alive.

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April 12, 2021

10/30:  ON SAYING I LOVE YOU TO YOUR FRIENDS BEFORE THE CALL ENDS

I end every phone call to my brothers and my best friends with
I love you.
No qualification, no hesitations, no reservations.
It’s a natural cadence, no need to pretend.
Seconds—it takes seconds to say I love you before a call ends.
I do it quick, and its got all the rhythm of a natural law.
I do admit, my heart jumps a bit when I say it.
There was a time when I didn’t tell my friends
I loved them. My masculinity taught me to be silent.
The shame of my youth is that I listened.
My brothers raised me then. They were boys too.
Boys raising each other. We said I love you
mainly as penance, the price my mom made us pay
for fighting each other. You’re brothers, for crying out loud!
It made sense—instead of salting the wound,
we used love as the salve. How the words
leave my mouth now! Declaration
is documentation. Tell you friends that you love them.
It deserves to be heard. Preserve the record.
What do you have to lose by speaking the truth?
Toxic masculinity leaves little room for evolution.
A text message, on the other hand, is very different.
I will write the words, but I prefer to give my voice to
the verb. I know the power of a spoken word. A phone call is a stage.
On the other end of the line is an audience that knows
the stories behind your name. Before the call ends
like a sentence you wish you could re-write, speak up.
This is what I’ve learned to do.
I end every phone call to my brothers and my best friends with
I love you.
Life has its rules. This one is mine.

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May 1, 2018

30/30: I EXIST NOT TO BE BROKEN

I make a promise to myself, and like a law, I exist not to be broken.
Though I know breaking. Whatever the reason you have for going
where you are going, I think it’s best you leave an hour before sunset.
Time the drive home with the sun’s low descent towards the horizon.
Keep going into the sky. Take the long way home like an oath to remember
how far you have come. I’m running out of time. I’m trying to show myself
the meaning behind all my tiny moments. I’m in love with the miracle of detail.
With the way I tell a story. With the way a story begins with a voice and a purpose. Keep going if you can. I’m here at the end, and I’m miles and miles past worthless.

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May 1, 2018

29/30: A POEM FOR JESSI

Jessi,
bird of my heart,
monkey in my bed,
giraffe of my dreams,
you sing to me in your
baby-talk, in your
gimme-dat clap, in your
nap-time nuh-uh cry,
oh my Jessi, you are everything
you are supposed to be. Right now,
you are shouting for the sky as the
swing-set in the park down the street
from my house brings you closer to the
moon, the stars, the sun, each one: all shining
for you. This is what the light does: it tells us
to reach, to look up, to swing into our shadows
so that darkness will not ask for this dance.
Even now, the Oak trees see you becoming one
with yourself, and I am helplessly in awe at the
call of your voice, the raw power of your smile,
and how I wish you could stay a little while longer.
In this swing, your joy sings me a song. I watch you
rejoice in the shade, alive and singing, here with me.

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