A Poem a Day

Keeps the heartache at bay

Tag: Lifestyle

  • 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.

  • 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 

  • 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

  • What is Comfort to an Anxious Mind?

    Free of pain, the easing of grief, the alleviation of distress. 

    I yearn for the comfort I once knew. 

    The tilt of a smile, the tickle of a laugh, the thunder of peace as it washes over you.

    There was a time that comfort was so much more than 

    a rainstorm, the sand between your toes, roaming clouds in a starry night sky.

    Has it always been measured in moments? Sporadic continuous efforts to 

    Hold on to a peace that is fleeting, and yet can alter time to stretch 

    a second into a minute,

    a minute into an hour,

    an hour into a day,

    a day into a lifetime. 

    What would a lifetime of comfort be like? Would grief bow to it?

    Instead of pain, would the thought of a lost loved one bring me serenity?

    Would the thought of their absence in this realm console me?

    Would my days be filled with warm teacups overflowing with coffee? Hot stew on rainy days?

    Would dancing in that rain bring me relief? Would it dull the daily aches of being alive?

    What is comfort to an anxious mind? 

    To calm the panic that is constantly on the rise.

    Three things that are true,

    You are loved, and that love is warm,

    You exist, where there is pain there is life,

    You are in control, all it takes is a thought.

    Three things that I can see,

    My hands with which I create the most beautiful worlds,

    A blank page for those worlds to take shape in,

    A pen, to release whatever form this world chooses to take.

    Three things I can hear,

    The racing of my heart,

    The shallow end of my breath,

    The voice inside my head.

    I am nothing more than a connoisseur of tranquility.

    Measuring all that is and may be harmonious with the turmoil that drives me.

    Seeking solace in the sunsets of the lives that existed before me, 

    The stars that twinkle above me,

    The sliver of wonder in which we all exist in the same lifetime. 

    Can you imagine it, perchance? Can you see the awe the world created when it allowed us to be here together?

    Making creatures of comfort, monsters of habit, and spirits of peace.

  • Love at First Write

    I fell in love, but not in the way one would think.

    I fell in passion with cadence,

    Fell in between the lines of a stanza.

    I gave sestinas and soliloquies my everything,

    And I gave the feeling of it all, half of my heart.

    I fell in love.

    And it wasn’t all at once.

    It was a slow sweet conquering.

    Lifted words off the page, branded them against my memory.

    One by one I inhaled the letters of the alphabet.

    Learned how my tongue twisted around each one in every idiom my mind could remember.

    I caressed them with ink tipped fingers on any blank page I could get my hands on.

    Can you imagine such a catalyst?

    I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.

    Let’s make love on this page

    In between every line.

    Let’s pause on commas,

    And end on exclamations!

    Or in them if you rather.

    Talk to me about verbs and nouns.

    About how adjectives did you in,

    How sensory details flirted with your desire.

    Until all you could do was inhale me off the page.

    Until you could taste me on your nerve endings.

    Until you could see me in your imagination.

    Until you could hear the soft mornings of italics, the sweet thunder of bold.

    Until your fingertips created the dotted lines of my body.

    Moving up to my beginning, and caressing the end.

    Using past and present participle to finish me off.

    Deliver me in cadence!

    Deliver me in song!

    End me with a period, in finality, our resolve.