I saw the words, their threads.
Saw them weave a blanket in thin air,
Saw the pews filled with naked souls,
Saw the people swaddled
Despite the heat and humid tears.
There is a tunnel at the end of the light,
A path through the void, a final heartbeat
Suspended, neither dead nor alive,
But something else.
“No” is a raindrop’s death in concrete,
The emptiness that sprouts from nothing.
“No” is a map, the step-by-step
Directions to nowhere.
I’ve sent him into the bowels of the earth, the miner.
I, with my appetite for the shiny and the new.
I, with the luxury to look away.
His dusty lungs are a hacking rebuke:
How much does a thousand-dollar computer cost?
After intending to compile and (self) publish a book of poems and prose pieces written between the ages of 16 and about 24, I have finally done so. I hope that someone will enjoy a poem or two!
How do I decide: essay or letter,
free verse or sonnet; what it is I want
to say to myself, to you; if it’s better
to have or to hold. Alone, I go gaunt
It must be Spring.
The begonias are vomiting diesel
Again,
Leaf blowers are whining like scapegoats
Condemned to die
Again
In a swirl
Of garbage and leaves,
And I don’t feel like being alive today.
Time corrodes the clock,
The clock devours the day,
The ocean destroys the dock
‘Till the vessel floats away.
“When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.” – Vincent Van Gogh
A mystery consumes me. I pass the morning in ardent search of last night and furrow my brows as though dreams would return in the grooves of my forehead. That is not enough. Nothing is enough. I never can go faster or slower than one second at a time. My enthusiasm teeters between the unbearable and the blissful. I want to scale the heights of human knowledge, to create art, kisses, love, peace…but the next moment carries the enormity of my desire, and I fall upon the ground of my being like an electric charge in a puddle of amino acids. So I continue, neither collapsed nor elevated. Every sight I see, every thought, however subtle, every word I read or write only adds to the fury: nothing is enough.
She isn’t loud, but neither is she quiet, the breeze.
Her whispers are parcels lost to time,
Her hem a memory that rustles upon the sky.
She carries a timeless correspondence
Penned by writer we cannot know,
Delivered to a lover we cannot see.
Where is the future? Surely not beyond my window!
Surely not in the leaves that listen to the past!
The breeze trembles before she is shaken.
I stand to face her, the breeze.
She reminds me of a nameless something;
She is a sieve collecting dreams in air.
I too am a breeze, I tell her. I too swirl
And swirl and swirl, ad infinitum.