You are frozen as this photograph of you
an imagination
bend yourself to fit my memory;
your memory is quite different, because you see reality in hindsight:
20/20
a dream that changes each time
what could have been, but actually never was. Unfreeze!
Everyone shuffles, makes poses to exemplify their lives
the pretend-believe of it all.
This is who you thought you were three years ago...
Who you are now fails all expectations. Breaks
all rules.
You always did...you never really could help it.
National Poetry Month - Day 6
National Poetry Month - Day 4
And I hope your heart is insured
or stocked up on bandages, because I aim to break it;
hold it while it hopes for me
and I give you less.
Today this isn't working out. I kept thinking about the first line. I'd actually been thinking about it for a week now but couldn't figure how to work with it. I think this is my worse effort thus far, but who knows later it may work into something successful, just not today...
National Poetry Month - Day 3
Walking the valley of metallic trees
iron trunks and copper-coated branches;
the air heavy with electrons, bouncing
the frenzied whirl of loose atoms.
They are quiet in their excursion picking
their way through the thickest part this night
both shoulder backpacks and weeks of burdens
heading without direction towards: escape.
Weaving moonlight in their footsteps,there are no maps in their strides
only purpose and a plan directed towards daybreak.
National Poetry Month - Day 2
Shadows sleep awkwardly across his face
timid of daylight or another day breaking
silently; he shelters himself in polos and chucks
uses his backpack as a shield.
His peers are dragons
and he is no St. George; not fireproof or tested.
His skin is paper and they watch him crumbling
fraying at the edges, transparent in the center.
So I can say that I wrote this because all the headlines right now about bullying...
National Poetry Month - Day 1
papier-mache lion you roar in crumbling notes
un-fearsome
unfathomably you matchstick the roads you've already traveled,
trailblazing. You comet flame
burning an ideal long past it's lifetime. You burn at half-light
I burn on a daily basis, end to end
a furnace brimming with ashes.
Submerged
The decisiveness I lack I make up in dreaming
the ability of my off-sync heart to unscrew your hinges.
I see you better than you see yourself
and I always see me the same: a little abstract
like a pointillist painting from a distance;
the colors are all bleeding together,
into something that could be beautiful if it tried.
I’ve never been known to try
too hard.
I can’t tell you where I’ll be in five years
or five months or five minutes, but I know my heart is nothing
if not potential
like I am waiting to be sprung kinetic
like I am waiting for you to realize I am 75% water; you can drown in me.
Too Soon or Too Late
That night “we” were a nameless entity. Friends? Too simplistic for our complexities. Lovers? The connotation too tangled without tangled sheets. Abbreviated story: I already have a girlfriend; or rather until recently I had one. She is waiting alone in our apartment, for me; mind spinning wildly with imaginary scenarios of what we’re doing. The truth? We are watching TV innocently; she is chewing supermarket sushi, I too nervous to eat, keep thwacking her with her own pillows. I am a five-year-old boy, this is how I say: “I like you” “Do you like me?” “Check yes, please…this story I’m living hurts too much for me to finish it.” Saying, “Maybe you could resuscitate me…”
She turns knowing eyes my way, startling in their ability to pick me apart. “It’s time to go back…” She whispers, we both have finals in the morning; this is a moment of fantasy, it cannot last.
Idling her borrowed Honda outside my lit apartment we are motionless with what could be, but I’m too afraid of what already is to move forward. What is waiting for me behind these red brick walls? What is waiting for me in the weighted silence of this car? A smile that reaches her eyes…A kiss that comes too late? Another fist pressed lovingly against my throat?
Relax?? (Untitled Poem)
"Relax..." She husks lighting soft fingertips down my arm. She uncoils my springloaded fingers, tries to get them to lay flat. Doesn't realize that a fist is natural to me.
As much as I claim non-violence, the preparation for violence
is natural to me.
Fantasy, she is unknown to violence. A variable belonging to closed eyes and kept secrets.
She, inhabitant of a parallel universe is a citizen of my dreams.
I am a citizen of reality.
This means I am a citizen of fists
My hands don't believe in relax.
The Space in Between
This is the space where you breathe, a hitched breath
I should say something prophetic:
I love you? Definitely not.
And my mouth is too tired to begin this lie again,
so we lay here awkwardly, not touching…
after touching so intimately moments ago.
