A Poem a Day

Keeps the heartache at bay

Tag: Art

  • Dancing Queries

    A Dance with the Devil, a Date with Death

    I have never been afraid of death.

    Wary of it, yes

    But curious, nonetheless.

    And I guess curiosity might finally kill the cat.

    Only this time, satisfaction can’t bring it back.

    Is it wrong that there is a part of me too loud to ignore that would be okay with that? 

    That would welcome that outcome.

    Yet, another part of me is just as loud, and she rages against the idea of an end. 

    Fights with tooth and nail until she’s bloody

    But the opponent is inevitable, the only thing that the determines how long you will fight is time.

    Time is the thing to fear most.

    Time allows you to believe you own it, you have it.

    But it is nothing more than a handful of sand.

    The more you try to grab and possess

    The more of it that slips through your fingers, 

    Right back into the hourglass.

    Back into the fold, isn’t that how the story goes?

    Polvo eres y a polvo volverás, no?

    That’s the silent part of me, the one who weighs the most.

    Who steadies the devil on my shoulder, and stifles the battle angel in my soul.

    She waits, for truth, for confirmation, for the answer.

    Be it received now or decades down the line, she simply waits as acceptance and denial murmur words to sway her. 

    To tilt the scale one way or the other

    To react.

    But silence is nothing more than the absence of sound.

    She is my anchor of peace in a world that is too loud.

    She does not fear death, nor does she embrace life, she merely exists. 

    And for now, that is enough.

  • Thank You, Mom: A Celebration of Love

    Thank You, Mom: A Celebration of Love

    Thank you, mom.

    Thank you for having me, for carrying me and nurturing me before I ever set foot outside your womb.

    For loving me and teaching me and yelling at me.

    Thank you for chasing after me, for never letting go or giving up..

    Thank you for existing, I would be nothing, not even a thought in this grand universe if not for you.

    Thank you for being you, for teaching me all of the best parts of you.

    For letting me carry you with me in my heart.

    For being the best person, mother, friend I could ever want. 

    You are the most amazing person I know, the most kind and caring with the most beautiful smile and laugh.

    Thank you, mom.

    For all of your pain and your sacrifice

    Thank you for it all.

    For everything you’ve done that we couldn’t see, for all the things you did that we could.

    I can’t thank you enough. 

    I could never give you enough. 

    Thank you, mom. Just thank you.

    For living this life and allowing me to witness it.

    For laughing out loud with your whole body.

    For your advice on conflict management.

    Thank you, thank you, thank you.

    I have no bad memories of you, no ill will or hurt feelings 

    But I would relive every argument, every fight we ever had just so we can make up and get to where we are now, in the end.

    Mom thank you for being my very best friend, my counselor, my teacher, my reason. 

    I just wish I could keep you forever.

    Wish we could swap places so you could feel all of the love in my heart for you.

    Mami thank you 

  • Unlock the Passion: Read Me Now

    Unlock the Passion: Read Me Now

    Read me.
    I want you to inhale every one of my figurative details.
    Hold a sensory image in your brain of what I look like.
    Let my pages describe what I feel like, and what happens when I skim you.
    When, my eyes devour your chapters in seconds.

    Pick me.

    Lift me off the shelf and bore your eyes into mine.
    Let my lines sing to you the beatings of my heart.
    How they flow in time to the sound of every page you turn.
    Drown in the sands of my hourglass.
    Let my words pour into your soul and complete the understanding.
    Tell me you see me, finally.
    Read me, like your favorite story.
    Predict my lines and rewrite the dialogue,
    Just read me, it’s the only way you’ll see me.
    Believe my words, feel the passion behind them, they are my most sacred treasure.
    And I’m giving them to you.
    I want to share myself with you,
    But I am so lost in these lines.

    I need your help to find the page where I left myself behind.
    I’ve jumped into the pages of your lines,
    Of my part in your story.
    Read me, pluck every syllable from my soul.
    Define my adjectives, nouns, and verbs.
    Get to the root of my words.
    The root of my soul.

  • Blank Canvas

    Blank Canvas

    Do you know what it’s like to live in between the lines of a blank page?

    The vastness swallows you whole, but your essence is whatever you desire it to be.

    You can morph this page into anything of your choosing,

    Sail from line to line, fine tuning the details of your story.

    This page, this canvas, this world, the universe that is you in its entirety,

    Exists between these lines.

    You are free between these lines.

    And me? If I could live anywhere, I would choose to be immortalized inside the confines of a blank page.

    To make my home whatever my heart yearns for.

    Shaping my realm from lucid dreams to a vivid reality.

    My home would never be empty,

    I’d forever be accompanied by nouns, verbs and adjectives

    Skipping vowels and hard consonants

    Can you imagine? What it would be like to live in a place that always ends in exclamations.

    To mark the answers to your questions with periods instead of ellipsis…

    No more to be continueds, just straight living.

    Wouldn’t you like to make your home between the lines of blank page?

    To live out your days in a world you can call your own.

    Plant your flag on this imaginary planet.

    Hitch your ride to this chimerical wagon

    And imagine what home could be to you if only you lived within the lines of a blank page.

  • In the Arms of Chaos

    In the Arms of Chaos

    I’m giving up poetry. At least that’s what I think; I don’t know if it’s what I mean.

    I’ve been at this place, time and time again, and I always regress, back to my notebook where everything seems to hold less stress.

    Poetry is who I choose to be.

    It’s not what I do it’s who I am.

    So yeah, I don’t know half of the shit the workshop instructor said.

    Who the fuck is Charles Bukowski?

    Let’s just say this is all new to me. I don’t research my craft, I just put pen to paper and it happens,

    maybe it’s a natural born talent,

    it’s not like anyone ever tried to help me.

    The knowledge everyone else has, doesn’t make me,

    poetry flows through my veins it is me.

    Today they desire those who know about modern poets, and their work.

    But when they need a Pablo Neruda expert they’ll regret sending me away.

    When Edgar Allan Poe needs a tell-tale heart, that’s when they’ll remember my name.

    Langston Hughes had a dream deferred, but little did he know it was passed on to me.

    I know nothing about sestinas and soliloquys but the day you need a metaphor or simile lean on me

    because no one knows how to put an off base rhyme together like I do.

    No one knows how to push out excruciating pain thru pencil tips like I could.

    No one knows that me and poetry go way back.

    Back to the womb of my mother,

    back to the race between me and the other billion sperm cells.

    We go back,

    back to the lost memory of my sight, the first breaths of my cry.

    We go back,

    to elementary when my teacher asked me to write.

    She told me to write anything I wanted.

    And in my fist I gripped that pencil and in the funny squiggles that were still unfamiliar to me,

    I wrote, “If you met your heart what would you ask it?”

    And I keep meeting my heart and breaking it.

    Keep hearing my shadow scream at me you’ll never make it.

    But I am it,

    so fuck the name Bukowski.

    Bring back Silverstein and Frost.

    Because these people of which you speak I know not of.

    My limited knowledge does not make me, it shapes me.

    Yes, I’m a ragged edge and you must take care around me

    but no one can claim that my heads not in this game, because I have my soul in it.

    I sit at home and watch YouTube videos about it.

    I close my eyes and dream about it,

    I am that unheard brave new voice.

    Def. poetry jam is what animates me then it tears me down as I read the bios.

    They know so much more than I could ever catch up to.

    I don’t need that much to let my words be heard, and touch the endless skies miles from me.

    I know nothing of what they teach but I still go to learn.

    And I dare someone to say I’m not about it, I’ll show them what it is.

    I’ll lay my words onto storm clouds and let each word fall in the shape of rain.

    I’ll turn every gunshot into a story, I’ll make my project building be the stage and me the narrator.

    No one’s ever told me I was born for something greater, only something slightly better than where I am now.

    My head was never filled with you could be president or anything like that. In fact, my writing is supposed to lead me

    nowhere.

    I don’t think anyone sees that this isn’t something I do, it does me,

    it enters my body penetrating every inch of me,

    no it doesn’t fuck me, we make love to each other,

    I don’t chase it, it chases me. Around every corner, in dark alleys, on park benches, sandy beaches by the water, it follows me.

    It doesn’t belong to me I belong to it and it cares for me.

    Poetry invaded me, and I gave myself to it completely.

    Every tear I never shed ties me to it,

    every secret I never said ties me to it,

    every scar on my body ties ME to it.

    We’re entangled on paper sheets, slammed on spray painted walls, even the floors are marked up.

    It knows me, and embraces me, the wind that whips around my short hair, it whispers, you need no other knowledge than you just love me.

    Am I giving up poetry?

    It’s impossible to give up something that lives in me, it controls my limbs, my mind even the gestures I make with my hands.

    It’s fused in my fingertips, enforces the open and closing of my hand.

    I have been in love with poetry since the race for humanity began;

    It will always be a part of who I am.

  • The Halls of our Memories

    The Halls of our Memories

    Every time I write to you it seems as if the circle has gotten smaller and smaller.

    Yet the love in my heart is unchanged.

    See the present maybe be barreling towards the future at an unfathomable rate.

    But it’s taken my heart and my mind quite some time to catch up.

    It has become my favorite pass time to linger.

    That’s it. To take my time amongst the walls and halls that hold the moving portraits of our memories.

    I am no longer satisfied with an unexpected glimpse.

    I choose to observe each piece hung in the museum of our lives

    To study every smile, and the emotion that shaped each of our faces.

    That lined them just enough so that we would always recognize one another.

    Distance is normal, time marches on and the chasm grows even deeper.

    Fractures and cracks along the walls that once connected us all

    Fragmented into the different roads we all headed down.

    And while it is true we can never go back, that there is no back to go to

    We can always stop, and admire one another from a distance.

    Summon the light show and watch how we fire up the skies once more with our dreams for the future we are now sitting in.

    Reminisce the times we were forced to leave behind because we were convinced that ahead only lies greater.

    And we were right, so we stand up and dust off and march on as time does, moving the present towards a future we are still imagining, still creating.

    But every so often, we look back in the distance and see the lights of our past.

    The fractures come together once more, and we dance with the ghosts of us that once were, 

    the ones we swore we’d moved on from and left behind. 

    But this life is ours, now even more than it was then, so why not indulge the love that was left behind? 

    Why not open your arms to the ensemble that once existed only to play the sweet music of our dreams?

    To watch the movie of our lives one more time, while we can still linger in the echoes of that love.

  • Grieving a Mother and a Friend

    Grieving a Mother and a Friend

    You were once beautiful to me, and now I find myself constantly searching the pain in your face for that beauty.

    I don’t know how to cope with what you’ve lost.

    Not for me, not for you.

    I don’t know how to accept these changes,

    In me, in you.

    I so desperately want to rewind time to relive life close to you.

    I’d gladly suffer through all of the bad of it meant I could also relive all of the good.

    And there was good, right? 

    We were happy most days, even if the dark days loomed above us, behind us, around us.

    But we laughed, we danced, we lived.

    And now, the beauty has dried up, and all that’s left is this husk of you.

    The will to live fled the banshee cries that come out of you.

    I don’t know how to get it to come back.

    I keep trying to gather the smallest pieces of us, but it feels like life is spilling sand through the cracks in our hourglass.

    Some days I wish you were gone, that the present was a wisp of a memory on our timeline and the past a balm to the scars on our hearts.

    I want to rush into tomorrow with open arms to welcome my life back but I can’t seem to hit the ground running.

    Because I want you to be there too.

    I want you to be here now, but everyday we lose more and more of you. 

    I don’t want to hate you, not in the slightest or at all, I just want you back.

    I want it all back the way it was, because you’d smile at me while you chew your food, a knowing smile. 

    One that rosies up your cheeks and makes your eyes twinkle.

    I hate that I hate you, because it’s not you, hasn’t been you in a long while but, sometimes, you look at me and that knowing smile creeps up, tinting your cheeks, letting me see that slight twinkle that shines just for my sisters and me

    And I can almost believe that I still love you and you still love me.

    But then it’s gone, swallowed up by your screams

    Wails of agony that pierce right through me.

    You’re still beautiful to me, even if life right now is really ugly.

    I might hate you right now but it’s not you I hate, it’s this disease.

    This hate exists only because there is so much love for you in me, without a home, without a place to sleep.

    I wish I could give you my strength, my years.

    I wish I could cure you with my tears. 

    I wish I could allay your fears.

    But alas, there is nothing more I can do but shed sweet poetry for you.

  • Collectibles

    What am I if not a collection of scars?

    Of scrapes, wounds, and tissue. 

    An encasement that has been battered and thrown against the wind.

    All so that it would ease the pain felt by the soul within. 

    Were we not taught to roll as we fall to lessen the breaks and bruises? 

    Pin pricks that deposit ink in place of blood has become my solace.

    Placing the story of my life on my skin

    Sparing the soft flesh of the true self that guides this exterior facade. 

    Marking it up so that it looks more like what I imagine is close to god.

    Mapping the cartography that only exists in suffering.

    Recreating the outline of the land so that it soothes it instead.

    Finding joy in the life we lead because it is still ours to lead 

    Admiring the roads and cavernous mountains crossed to have arrived in this new terrain 

    Find the joy in what once was pain 

  • Finding Solace in Silence

    Finding Solace in Silence

    The small things,

    Turning the pages of a book,

    The inspiration of a sunset as seen from a high rise,

    Surprise visits and a forehead kiss,

    My heart warms at the melted muscle memory of this.

    The fleeting things,

    Snow days and sleeping in,

    Milky, sugar frosted cereal, and cartoons,

    The soft whisperings of the radio, and the deep rumblings of the news.

    I am nothing more than the solace I find in silence.

    The everlasting things,

    Butterflies born on the lips of a smile,

    Cackling laughter carried on the wind,

    The twinkle in your eye as you gaze upon someone you love.

    These are the few things, the favored fragments of life where my soul resides.

  • Searching for Home

    Searching for Home

    I’ve been searching for home for as long as I can remember.

    In people and in places, even in the most intangible of things.

    But, what I’ve come to realize is that home has always been with me.

    I wipe it from my eyes every morning, and lay with it in my arms every night.

    Home has followed me throughout the entirety of my life.

    It wraps around me like the warmest of memories.

    Home lives in the taste of sweet, bitter coffee.

    It is the scent of cigarette smoke and imported mints.

    Home is the sound of laughter and passionate conversation.

    It dances in the sight of every newborn cousin,

    And feels like hot stew on a rainy day.

    Home is a wish that I’ve whispered on silent, hopeful lips.

    A seed planted faithlessly, yet watered in good faith all the same.

    I used to think home was a place,

    I once thought I’d find home in the planes of a lover’s face.

    Truthfully, it seems that home is where the heart is indeed,

    And how lucky have I been to discover that that heart

    Lies within me