A Poem a Day

Keeps the heartache at bay

Tag: love

  • The Weight of Memories

    The Weight of Memories

    “I will have had to remember you, longer than I have known you.” C.C. Aurel


    That notion alone makes me immeasurably sad.
    Can you imagine the weight of having to carry you with me?
    Knowing you once existed but no longer exist.
    But that’s not true either, is it?
    You exist in me, in my heart and in my memories
    but that will never be enough for me.
    I so long for the physicality of it all; for one last touch, not whispers of a scent that once was.
    How is it possible that the years will trickle by, and I can only carry you with me in my mind.
    I so long to have you back in my arms.
    The space in my heart you occupy is now weighed down carrying the bits and pieces of a soul you left behind.
    I hope you’re comfortable in your new confines
    but oh how I long for you to be free again.
    To be here again.

  • The Sound of Grief

    The Sound of Grief

    “There is no grief like the grief that does not speak” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


    It’s not so much that grief cannot speak, its moreso that all it does is scream.

    So much so that I’ve learned to block it out,

    Allowing the days to drown it in monotony and routine. But then there are the times it feels like it’s drowning me.

    Holding my head beneath the waves,

    Allowing them to crest in my lungs,

    over and over, until finally, there is reprieve.

    The swelling of a monsoon that drags everything with it.

    The peace of a moment before destruction.

    A shallow breath before it all comes crashing down.

    That’s what grief speaks like, it’s what I hear all the time.

  • The Sound of Existence

    The Sound of Existence

     

    Silence is nothing more that the absence of sound.

    Death is nothing more than the absence of life.

    And what is life, if not sound, feeling, seeing.

    What is life if not tasting, yearning, ongoing.

    Because even in death we do not end.

    Donde hubo fuego, cenizas quedan,

    Where there was once love, an imprint remains.

    On the world, a place, a home, a person or people.

    Is death the absence of life?

    Then what is it that keeps us alive?

    That keeps us going when the goal for us all is to die?

    Isn’t that the pathway to the grand prize?

    How we all arrive at the eternal life promised to us by the word of God?

    Is death the answer to life?

    Does that make life suffering, in turn making death a way out?

    Have we become so sated with questions that we have forgotten to live?

    Was this the curse unleashed from the tree of knowledge, when Eve made the decision to eat?

    Is this endless crisis of existence the fruit that bore of that tree?

    Endless questions and endless dreams.

    If hope was the last thing that remianed in pandora’s box,

    does that not make it a plague all the same?

    If silence is nothing, and death is nothing

    Does that not then mean that within us lies something?

    That in order to fill a space you need more than what physically exists in this space.

    There is life, there is death and there is after, even if the something we were ceases to exist.

  • Wonder

    You ever stop to wonder what it is you’re praying to?

    If God is actually a little elf in the sky, collecting prayers like post it notes, selecting the ones to answer by throwing darts while blindfolded and hope that it’s nothing they promised not to do, like curing world hunger…

    I do, all the time.

    I wonder and imagine and try my hardest to paint the plain of God’s face with my fingertips

    And get nothing.

    Nothing but a dark sky with a gathering of stars for a face.

    Do you think that’s omnipotence? Or laziness

    Because if we really were made in their image, what if God just really doesn’t fucking feel like it?

    If they bob and weave and dodge those prayers because answering them just takes too much energy.

    They created us and suddenly, we’re too much.

    Those prayers have to be going somewhere.

    Because I refuse to believe that we are really this lonely.

    That there is nothing, and no one higher in power than this blemish of humanity in a timeline we created.

    Do you think they just vanish? Eroding like pennies at the bottom of a wishing well.

    How far do you think prayers travel? Are they shot like arrows, bending the breeze to catch their target unaware? Falling back slowly as they meet resistance.

    Maybe only some prayers make it to God, or maybe they die in the sky, suffocated by the atmosphere, set aflame and snuffed out all at once, never having reached their intended destination.

    Is there anyone actually listening? Do they find our suffering funny? I can almost hear a teenage group of deities, giggling.

    But they got to go somewhere right? Like whispers on the wind.

  • 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.