A POEM A DAY

I'm just happy to be here.

Tag: national poetry writing month

April 27, 2015

24/30: ODE TO SUBRIDENT, SORT OF

I can’t leave my street/ without turning into an Ode/ I want to write beauty disembodied/ then proceed to explain/proceed to blush/ at my deconstruction/ devastated by the simplicity of my lust/ but before me/ A form I recognize/ Breathlessness is what the afternoon brings/ Praise my lungs/ unafraid to bloom/ Praise the colors of spring/ beauty embodied/ unafraid of gloom/ Wouldn’t that be something/ But I have left my street/ The name of my neighborhood is the Shenandoah Valley/ I do fear evil/ I do fear death/ The road before me is callous with wind/ Among this vast expanse/ Darkness goes unrestricted/ among the Storm Systems/ siphoning faith like the wounding of color/ The sweeping exhilaration of thunder/ unloosens the stitch/ in my side/ My toughness collapsed/ My collection of light/ cracked open/ for all to see/ the nucleus of marbles/ each particle pinballs to create a stronger thing/ Have I spoiled the mystery/ Has anyone seen me before the warm heat rises/ before the cool air quiets/ before the sun riots/ before the masquerade of the storm/ has made you forget your own flesh/ but this too shall pass/ but not before the spell is cast/ Look/ up ahead/ the horizon is unhaunted/ Look/ before you/ my heart/ Unhunted

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April 15, 2015

14/30: THE FRUIT OF GRIEF

What do we want?

More certainty!

When do we want it?

I don’t know!

Tomorrow!

Maybe!

And the days
Parade
Forth.

The Unknown

Unceremonious.

Want is a seashell pretending to be the ocean.

That’s why Van Gogh cut off his ear.

Where’s the rationale for rejection?

How do you measure the value

of something lost?

Benefit of the doubt is a stupid phrase.

Nobody benefits from doubt.

Not in this country.

Belief only

Please.

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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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April 17, 2014

15/30

ARGUMENTS AGAINST MYSELF II.

Again, with this?

You go to bed gnarled by how long it has taken to see what is not there.
You sleep quiet, ignore the other half of the bed, and this pretending is
now a lullaby. The brim reach of solitude has spilled, flooded and
and now everything you own, occupied by lonely, a piece of driftwood
refusing to go to anywhere and what do you do?

Why we all know you sink, precious. By morning you surface possessed
by love, more porous and less afraid of blisters, more aware of bursting
than ever and oh this means you are a shipwreck, or a ghost, or simply
a remainder of what the world forgets the most. But the sea is yours to
suffer with or against, and sleep drifts like a quiet anchor, afraid to choose
whose heart to sink its teeth into.

Oh, alluva sudden you undid your faults. Just done, like that.
You make yourself joy
sink your teeth into displeasure
drag your mouth in the mud
And this makes a meal?
How many words have you made a meal with
before you washed your hands?
You want to be the river but know nothing of clean water.
Is this why you boil so gently?

 

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Aside | April 15, 2014

12/30

There is nothing in my stomach and the only thing unusual about this is my surprise at the growling. What meaty emptiness I provide for myself. What myth of fullness I cannot help but cavil against. It’s not that I abstain from consumption, but that I confuse how much force I must use when I am swallowing food and people, so I withdrew my tongue because I still have a hard time choosing. This is nothing new. I am history, repeating itself. Have I said that before?

Whenever I ran out of lunch money, I refused to tell my mother. I feared the things my mouth might say when I tried to tell her I am empty today. Thought hunger could be helped if I kept it to myself, so the boy in me became a king of self-consumption. Craving kept me royal. How majestic must one pretend his breaking is? I eat, sure. I do. But don’t you know I can’t always stop myself?

There is nothing in my stomach, but this stopped being strange. It has become something like familiar, or was it similar? I guess it is both, or either, or neither, or even now as I dive deeper into my belly, I am biting my tongue at all the terrible, even now it is dinner and I am still appalled at all the room left in my mouth. Have I said that before?

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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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April 13, 2014

9/30

What strange hum fluttered inside this
featherweight of a boy
when he found himself falling
with the wind?

It was the everything that
made me music.
It was the everything that
made me howl ‘til I ached
myself away.

I tell myself
nobody owns my wilderness
but even that feels false
too.

I do not believe in eternity
per say,
but I do know that most
of me will be forever translating feeling
from fiction or fact or ash
and that I cannot ask questions
without second-guessing
what is said next, but isn’t
what’s next always a guess?

Tomorrow is there as it has
always been but it does not
begin until we say so and that
is a terrible truth to swallow.

The swallow of everything is terrible
but only because not everyone thinks
it is music and so they do not lose themselves
in the falling, but I know now
to land is to know love
again.
I know to be a featherweight of a boy
is to feel the fall days long
but it ain’t as bad as it seems.

Whenever the wind leaves now
what comes out is not a tired
sad strung but a humble hum
that I refuse to let leave
my lungs.

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April 7, 2014

6/30

Texting the girl who I once
drowned all the blood in my body
for, I type into my phone
my dear but the damn machine
puts my dead instead
and my stupid thumb hits send
confuses enter
professes epitaph and
now my bones tap
nail in coffin without knowing so
even my mouth begins
breaths impossible to cough gone
so many things
born to exit, is this what
makes love turn
my insides into
water slides?
because it remains
even when the river
tells it not to stay?

Anyway, I misname love
death and kiss the both
of them like family
because they are
because familiar is a fever
this brown boy boils to remember.
Even in the spring when
frustration falls pretty
out of blossom and the wind
wins your heart by
blowing the broken away,
even then,
the harvest will seem unremarkable
when what’s inside of all I do
are the seeds of rotten fruit,
listen.
I don’t need to be reminded
of the ruin. even when I make
it a habit to have it for breakfast,
I don’t always taste the disappearing
merely notice it the way it complements
everything my mouth has to say.

My dear, the way I die every day
is by loving this way and my dear,
death is the next best thing to
snapping
these sappy-ass
heart strings
which was inevitable,
of course, the earnest in me
like the rest of me
is a product of eventually,
like the all of us
who will not last
but love like we do,
and oh that is my favorite part
to love something to death,
you put a breath to both
and lose yourself in the
afterglow.

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April 1, 2014

1/30

Every day is a poem when you smile at strangers.

I am a poem today, tomorrow too, and suddenly
smiling is to sun is to Texas is to sweat. Lip
sweat means I’ve been speaking or singing
or confusing the two, and that is a poem
too.

Every place is your shower 
as soon as you start to sing
too. 
I hate that when people are asked if they like to sing,
they say only in the shower. When they really mean
only when I control the drowning
only when the bathwater is listening
only when the water is my own wonderful
as if this world did not weep seventy percent
of its life. 
as if our bodies were not stifled with the sea
the moment our mothers saw our fathers sweat
in the Texas heat, which is a smile, which is
proof that the body does not sing when it
is supposed to, but when the water in us
sets and we feel the sweat announce itself
as surrender. 

Every day is a poem when you smile a song
in the shower of South Congress and Riverside.
I am sweating and not sorry because
it has to happen like this. 

Water went through me
Wet me with the wonder
that was my own. Oh it’s happening again.
The songs are smiling, I am sweating
surrender. The day, which is a poem,
is asunder with symphony. Are you
listening?
Tell me,
What stone sunk before me
and what self came up
after?

 

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