A POEM A DAY

I'm just happy to be here.

Tag: love poem

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 27, 2021

23/30: A LOVE POEM ON SATURDAY NIGHT

Across the stars and lights of the flamingo pink walls
of Taco Cabana off of 45 South and Wayside
and
under the waves of headlights surrounding us inside
this fast-food parking lot on a Saturday Night,
Adela turns to me from the passenger seat
And proclaims her life-long belief in soul mates
In the idea that two people are meant to be.
Without missing a beat,
she looks right at me and smiles a mile long
and confirms that I am indeed her soul mate.
As her husband, I feel relieved,
So relieved I could sing!
And I do,
all the way home.

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April 22, 2021

21/30: FOUND STICKY NOTE POEM

For my wife, Adela

Adela sings Spanish love songs to me
in the passenger seat
on a Saturday night.
She plays the air
with her voice,
lingering
like the shadow of the moon
and I look at her
knowing I cannot translate
the music she makes,
but when I hear her voice,
I wish to sing too.

           

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April 20, 2021

18/30: A SUNDAY TESTIMONY

For Adela

A simple Sunday. Spring cleaning and soft rain. Driving with the windows down. Cool air on the other side of every closed door. Feeding lazy cats. A sound track to stifle the silence. Your hand in mine. The promise of a hot meal. Sundown Moscow mules to fuel the buzz of young love. Your green eyes at dusk. The two of us together. My voice and yours blend into the wind. We change the world around us. At least our love does. Just a simple Sunday when anything is possible and so is nothing. So much to do. But I let go of time. Decided eternity wasn’t impossible. I just choose a moment, any moment, with you, and I refuse to let it end. Ask me for the evidence of my love and use this poem as an exhibit.

Thinking of you feels

More powerful than a dream

You are what you seem

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April 30, 2020

28/30: I’M GOING BACK IN TIME AND IT’S A SWEET DREAM

This is a love poem for my fiancé, Adela.

When I missed you, when we weren’t together,
I would write down song lyrics that made me
think of you. Each a different melody of longing,
a little soundtrack for my loneliness. That was
years ago. And just the other day,
I stare at you
from across the room
of our home
I watch you exhale on the front porch
Dusk before us, the faint
echo of the wind chime
bouncing off the trees
and into the sky. Another song
just for you and me, Adela—
never forget, you are the one
who keeps my heart beat dancing,
the reason I sing. My favorite song
is called Just Being With You.
The Things You Say, my favorite playlist
Your voice, my favorite instrument.

 

 

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April 5, 2020

4/30: In the Month of April (For Adela)

After Robert Bly

In the month of April, when the rain blesses us,
notice the song it makes. Like today, a chorus
kept me awake. All morning, kept me from dreaming
away the bad news telling us nothing is the same as it was.
I see a world afraid of stillness, asked to be still and hold its breath.
Then I understand— I love you with what in me is still hopeful.

I love you with what in me is unmovable.
So hold my hand in the rain. Hold my hand in the morning.
Hold my hand in Costco. Hold my hand in the dark. Trust me:
in times like these, the only place to be is next to you.
In the early morning hours, we rediscover our arms
as branches, outstretched like the oak tree outside our house.

Just this morning, you wake up before the rain wakes me.
Slide your body out of bed and across the hardwood,
disappearing into the dim blue room. And I am perfectly
still, in a world afraid of stillness, disappearing
back into the subconscious, stretching this simple moment
into a thousand more just like it.

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April 16, 2018

14/30: IN RAINY APRIL

After Robert Bly

For Adela 

In rainy April, the Aloe Vera outside my window is unstoppable.
You lay your head across my chest like a path of magnolia leaves.
We turn into each other’s body and rearrange the soft grey light.
I have no choice but to adore the green eyes sleeping next to me.
I want you to know I chose loving you over losing you.

The light in my chest casts a shadow across your name and I know.
My path leads me back to you like groundwater returning to the sky.
The two of us tell time by counting the freckles between us.
You are the breathgiving woman who makes my heart sing all my favorite songs.
And for as long as you want, I will sing a song of joy.

In rainy April, I kiss you like a season I never want to forget.
The light coming down between the trees leads me back to you.
A laugh travels down your lip and I plant it like a seed.
I run my finger down your spine like a sentence I want to read.
Our bodies choose to bloom against each other.
I hold you like the clouds hold rainwater, and I do not let go.

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April 9, 2018

6/30: YOUR HAND ON A COUNTRY ROAD IN A LIGHTNING SHOW

On the darkest country road, I touch your hand in the dark
to remind my wandering mind
of what it feels like to be held while lightning
surrounds the sky the same way my arms do
around you when we sleep together and my breathing
slows down the same way storm clouds move in the sky
Something inside of me is forming
The sky’s bright siren is a warning signal
And where we are going, I have nothing left to fear
It is April and all the flowers laugh in the distance
as my car speeds past rolling hills of bluebonnets
I’m reaching through every reason I have to stay
And your hand anchors me to the Earth like a law
I will always follow. I only know
it took years to see
the possibility of not being alone

Whenever the clouds swallow the lightning,
I know you are my waiting horizon
I know you are the light that stays
I know you are the hand that reaches back

On the darkest country road, I interrogate the fate of my heart
Is this the place we start anew?

I look over to you in awe as lightning circles your face
Songs fill the space between us, music rolls in the clouds

And we listen
as the car carries us forward
together

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April 17, 2014

16/30

“Mama. What’s vacation?


Vacations when you go somewhere…and you never come back.”

-Forrest Gump

TO THE WOMAN I LOVE, WHO IS STILL ON VACATION

I changed my mailing address, but I don’t think that matters.
You can forget about the refrigerator magnets. Something tells me
the magnet wouldn’t attract anything anyway.

What is left of yours remains in the lost and found of who
we once were. I rummage through it at least once a week
to keep the dust a dance away from deluge.
I went weeks deluded, convinced the months would
run out of ways to move forward, pretended my bedroom
would become baggage claim, and you would see me convulsing
on the conveyor belt like being yours made my blood
want to leave too, so perhaps I can’t blame you
or perhaps I just wanted nothing more than your touch
to topple me to pieces, for your hand to burn through the wreckage
and wake up a bird perched against the worst of it.

I am a coward when it comes to claiming
But still bury myself with so much baggage. This body
has blackened into a fisted ballast, a broken knuckled
ballad that probably sounds like elevator music
repeating forever, the pieces picked apart, a part
of me is still wishing you were here a part of me
still wants to be the place where you go even if it
is only to take what is left of yours

I can’t be in a room with an open door anymore.
Ajar. I know what a jar is. It’s where I pretend our love preserves itself
only the lid is always open and you are always going
bad, or back, or ahead.
Ahead. I know what a head is. It’s where I hear myself
raise the worry into bread. Our love,
a spoiled loaf, an oath that tore like a one-way ticket
stub that said everything but stay, or sorry, or
I’ll be back for you.

I don’t know where people go when they leave a place
or a person they never want to return to, but I hope the exit
wound is clean. I cannot keep caring about maps and the lines
they leave for me to follow. As far as I am concerned, they all end
the same. 

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Aside | April 14, 2014

10/30

I loved a woman made of white noise for so long
It wasn’t until I threw my heart into my mouth
for the last time that I realized her static song echoed
the loudest whenever I decided to leave.

When the good left, and nothing but the bye remained
I burned the last of her from me and drank hot tea in the dark
to calm the scattered static that greets me whenever I am hungry for her again.
The tea didn’t tuck the storm happening inside me asleep
so I built a ravine out of bed sheets and burned books,
caught the rain water between stories that were not afraid to melt
and thought myself sturdy like that too.
So I boiled most of my body down to brass
’cause even though she, my once darling darling,
picked me clean from her teeth like rotten meat,
I still like what happens when I cool inside another’s mouth
how melancholy breathes an impossible beat
how my tongue is tearing its skin into miles of brass in the heat
and even though I am singing the blues back to the sky
I am reminded that loving a  woman made of white noise does not make me a songbird,
it just means I love without thinking, it just means I did not need to think to love her
I just did.
And even if the static she left made me second-guess all the color in my breath
I still got the blues burning through me and
though I know it though ain’t much,
at least I can finally get some rest.

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