A POEM A DAY

I'm just happy to be here.

Tag: poems

April 23, 2014

21/30

21/30

THINGS FALL APART

The last band we saw together was Built to Spill
over at Stubbs, when November was its nastiest
and Winter felt so true. Thirty degrees and dropping,
I pressed my body so hard against yours, I expected
sparks to consume whatever it was we could not control
like the weather
like each other,
and each of our expectations filled with what we
both wanted, which was not each other,
I learned that from the aftermath
and that is the hardest part.
To be a lesson and not even know it
until you have to.

But oh, if I had to do it all over again,
I’d do it just the same. Even if I know
our sparks won’t stay long enough to last
through the winter of each other, I will
still build the a fire for you,
even if I have to burn myself down
to do it.

“We’ve all seen enough, now it’s time to decide
The meekness of love or the power of pride
It doesn’t matter if you’re good or smart
Goddamn it, things fall apart

Let’s go for a walk, yeah, let’s go for a drive
Don’t know how to say thanks for being alive
Let’s go for a lifetime, let’s go for a fling
Don’t know how to say anything”

 

 

 

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April 21, 2014

19/30

I am sleeping too much again.
Yesterday I woke to find the day dancing
and couldn’t find my dancing shoes anywhere.
There’s a story there, but I shut my eyes before
it sees the sunlight and decides to rise likewise.
I hit the story with the bunt of my fist
and it collapsed like snooze.

It is morning now. Afternoon, actually but
I just woke up so what’s the difference?
Nothing happens other than what is supposed to.
What is supposed to happen is the problem.
Overwhelmed by mostly myself, I run into people
who make me feel less alone because to me that
seems easier than the alternative.
There’s a story there, but I’ll replace it with a quote.
Octavio Paz wrote, “Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are
alone.”

Is there a word to describe the feeling of missing someone
before you actually leave? What about missing everyone?
I am trying to anticipate the craters my own absence
will create, the crashing and burning that will become of me
when I lose half my universe and though I cannot control
where the ash goes, I can be ready for the blood, or at the very least
the realization that I am alone. I can’t help but hate the way my sleep
repeats cast-away phrases like leave me be, like nothing ever stays
so what’s the use in staying awake? Even my coffee’s gone cold.  |
I am not losing, I just know I’m leaving soon, and I can’t even 
find my damn dancing shoes, and everyone I love is on the dance floor.
Everyone I love is staying around to see me, but I am too tired.

Snooze.

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April 18, 2014

18/30

HIGH & DRY

All the cars     go somewhere     this makes you think
you should too    makes you wanna gamble your morning
breath     away      on   your 8 AM playlist    a shuffle so sad pours
replaces the sugar in your coffee with       Radiohead
and now this suffering refuses to skip   I am sobbing songs out to an audience
invisible from the outside in but oh        I don’t just sing    for nobody   now
Ya see?     I remove the stirrer now a tongue and the thickness of it
curdled the cream    degreased the deadbolt  that keeps the best thing
 I ever had           whole  and no one knows
or remembers how to gather gone glory    even after you showed them.      It’s ok, though.          
‘Cause this morning       I can sing     about wishing to make love
without my inside falling to pieces      again.

Anyway       you are not in your car yet and you think still
to step out      in such an environment     will make you        imposter      
or maybe just impossible  or maybe      opening the door
will affirm           what is waiting         and what is waiting  is what is   not yet
yours but that     will always be       waiting    so
what’s the rush? Maybe now      you are the open door
Welcome!   you think   to the world  whose constant availability
vindicates   the time it takes for you to          open so true      maybe
none of this is what you thought would happen by noon but
It is Friday   nonetheless       you have now drank two cups of coffee
finishing neither but your breath says otherwise and now you are awake
now you are in your car              going somewhere        but you still haven’t left.                                                                            

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April 18, 2014

17/30

THANKSGIVING
or
How I Let You Go On The Most Depressing Day of the Year
and Feel Pretty Good About it

I burned all the leftovers. The pie too.
It is as horrible as I am making it seem and
more. I am used to more but there is no stuffing left,
nothing left to stuff but silence.
When stuffing is the love you shove
into your mouth, what happens when you
run out?

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving
when I last saw you and when everything
didn’t happen like it was supposed to.
When asked what you are grateful for
all anyone hears is hesitation, air taken by teeth
and you leave a silence so grand I bow
at the base of it. Is that what giving
is?
No, thanks.
The rain came like it was supposed to
and I am still smothered in mud, my
god.

Driving home, I am my own soundtrack
Words like why, again, why, again, why, me
again, why is there always an again are lyrics
the speakers are familiar with.
Driving home, I am my own carwreck.
I exit the highway onto a country road
which then turns into a mouth of mud
and I am stuck and sad and so oh very
sad at being stuck.

If I count all the times I asked you to come back
I could not trace my way back and oh to be stuck like that—

All it does is take and that is a terrible
and true fact.

A stranger tells me a fact I go home to Google to make sure it’s true.
The first Monday of the New Year is considered
the most depressing day of the year. Something about
having to begin again but this time with follow through. Something about
having to show up and mean it, on a Monday
no less.

Driving home, we are on the phone. Most of the talking
is by me and I forget what I said but most assuredly
it rang to the tune of me promising a safe place to crash
or fall or call home, even if we are all bones or blown to
little bits of I told you so, oh don’t you know
I would have showed up and meant it
every Monday?

Driving home, we are on the phone when I run out of gas.
A stranger helps me push my car to the side of the road.
It is the coldest day of the year, which means it is the first
day we felt our skin sting and suddenly I cannot help but
count the coincidences. This same stranger brings me hot tea
and tells me
Waiting all alone is the worst.
Tells me today is the most depressing day of the year, and how he hopes
how much that isn’t true.

I call you later on the phone, and you showed up but
we both know you didn’t mean it, and so I tell you then
like I tell you now, the last words I will say to you are
I love you and goodbye.

It always ends the same.

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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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April 9, 2014

8/30

I am sitting under a tree when all of a sudden
form matters. The branches of my body
interrupt the sky so quietly, I cannot
understand how my
almond skin can crack into a thousand pieces
and still be enough to snap the sunlight
when all of a sudden I remember
it is Spring in Texas and I am a sap for
seasons that surrender and people that
remember how to
too.
On days when the wind is a wish,
it is impossible
to trace the blue in the sky without
becoming it. I kiss a bluebonnet
with lips light as fever and the entire state
begins again.

I set my sun hands against my body
and break into myself to see what
fruit is left.
I am forever
finding fields of lost treasure so most days
all I think of is the buried bloom and how this
must be what the earth feels too when we
consume her heirlooms and do not tell our
our tongues to slow dance in chew.

When Vincent Van Gogh saw Almonds blossom
he did not think of me. He thought of his new nephew
and of life, beginning again. Ol’ Vince saw almond trees
blossom against the backdrop of everything
we know as home and heard parturition
part his paint brush into
Have you ever wanted to
borrow the blossom of some other fruit?
I swear some days, I am a mango tree,
or a man made of mango, or maybe just some
other man. Either way
I’m familiar with being a sweetheart,
with eating my heart out of some other
body until all my blood cells gush gold,
and now I am better than I once was
the best of me is what happened when
the rest of me stopped sleeping in graveyards
and started digging gardens. Now all
the hard that once was
laughs on my lips,
the soft flesh of what is left
simply lingers like a first kiss
or a last breath.

My mother told me I was the first kiss of spring
so I know how to surrender my mouth
without unbecoming. I denounce the wreckage
of every previous season because all the winter
did was tell me what I was not. All the autumn did
was love me to death. All the summer did was
make my heartbreak humid. So, yes. I want
To be part of spring’s announcement. I want
To feel the flowers finally firework
inside of me without having to set myself on fire.

Can anyone tell me
What it means to see a beautiful thing
and have your first thought be
“please don’t ever leave?”
Can anyone tell me
what it means to see yourself
as a beautiful thing?
I have waited most of the harvest season
to manifest but only because
I respect the process.
I gave myself to graveyards all my life
but when the sky surrenders
itself to love like it does,
what else am I to do
but fall in love in with myself too?

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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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Aside | April 5, 2014

4/30

The softest girl I ever said I love you to
smashed me up the tidiest too
so my tremble should not surprise you.

If it does surprise you, then that means
sad is still startling, and boy, what I wouldn’t do
to be surprised by all this too.

I am weeping at the grocery store
again. Either it is because I am lonely
or none of the avocados are eager

enough. Why does soft still stay
forgotten? Oh if I could wash
the rotten in sink water, will the rest of 

me suffer? I keep wanting life to be sweet
but if the skin stays sugar, then
I am nothing more than melting meat.

Oh, the heat of the evening 
is how dinner greets me. Even
the best of me gets eaten by

what’s left of me. Is this what 
remaining is? To feel so much
dust, you wonder what it is you’re still

covering up?

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