Got this Idea from Robert Brewer's Poetry Asides and tweaked it a bit to work for me...
It's sketchy at best...I mean I finished it earlier today on my last break...so, let me know:
It Opposite Death
For the ladies,
for the hell of it!
“It just happens sometimes…”
“It just went that way…”
Way we might have gone;
way of our fists.
Fisting my way through life,
fists clenched.
Clenching muscles, cramped.
Clenching, grinding teeth.
Teeth, forced smile.
Teeth chemically altered white.
White masked malignant,
white walls.
Walls, in an ever shrinking box;
walls padded and restraining.
Restraining order;
restraining our hands.
Hands: scarred and peeling.
Hands: out, open, upturned…
Upturned life,
upturned and carefully chaotic.
Chaos in the middle of order.
Chaotic designed survival.
Outsurviving the fittest,
Survival against the odds.
Odd, that we have turned to this…
Odd, that I am me not we…
We are, that, which we are not…
We diverge on forked paths;
paths cemented in bones,
paths of which only our strides are aware;
aware that we are moving,
aware that any moment we could stop:
Stop pretending.
Stop breathing.
Breathing in slow and deliberate.
Breathing out shaky and shallow.
Shallow thoughts lead to empty plans.
Shallow dreams lead to empty hearts.
Heart un-begrudging its beating.
Heart fortified for fighting.
Fighting: because we were born brandishing tiny fists.
Fighting: because we don’t know a better way to survive.
Survive another sunset.
Survive because the only other option is death…
Death, because you stood too still;
death because you were too scare to move.
Moving
Still…
Blitz Poem
Another Wayward Love Letter to Atlanta
I’m still wondering if you can be homeless and homebound at the same time? Concurrently adrift and set to some unknown path. A lighted beacon, a glowing hearth…
I know without realizing I don’t belong or realize without speaking the words.
I know you write love letters to Chicago, Providence, New York; I leave post-its for Atlanta on my fridge. We only speak in snippets; terse conversation of an impeding divorce. She wishes I’d sign the papers already and leave. And I wonder if we were ever in love or in love with the idea of being so.
I wonder if this was a marriage of convenience. She kept me afloat for a while…
And perhaps, I owe her something for this, roses on the eve of tomorrows that might never come. She always tried harder than I to make this work.
I’m still wandering towards something that instinctually feels like home. Both well aware she can’t be it for me, no lighted beacon, no glowing hearth; but she leaves the lamp on in case—still lost—I find myself stumbling back.
