True Blue

Been a few days since I've posted anything, so I thought perhaps it was time to share something new.  I wrote this poem as I lay sprawled out across the floor in my bedroom trying to work on a different poem.  It wasn't really coming to me, though, so I just started writing what was happening in my head.  It was sort of a brief exploration of my writer's block.

Like it?  Don't like it?  Let me know below!  If you find that you DID enjoy it, I'd love it if you'd share it with your pals.


True Blue


Two hundred and six pounds of mushy me
Lay across this too-blue-to-be-true-blue carpet,
Ankles crossed, large head resting on the pinched vein
Of a restless elbow that feels like buzzing.
The hair croaks “chaos” in a turbulent mess
Of chestnut flames that dance with every breath as these
Graphite words trace the flight of a moth too close to my cowlick,
Then, a mutinous elbow, and with a crash this face falls
Into the blue with a kiss of indifference.

An old wintertime housefly of ideas
Drones lifelessly, until
Thunk.
Sunlight vanishes as it pours through the site of the crash.
Now rouses a two hundred and six pound entomologist,
An insect coroner intent on autopsy
But an intertangled beard keeps his face pinned to the floor.




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Rambling at Five O'Clock on a Sunday Morning

On the seventh day God took a well-deserved nap, but I'm just waking up.  This rousing is nothing more than an accident, but surely I'm not the only one, after all it is time to get up.  Five o'clock is clearly morning, except outside in the dark where it's clearly nighttime.  Soon it will be that time where language gets funny because definitions begin to change.  That darkness will become a little less black and then it will become a little bit blue before becoming a weird something else and then suddenly it will become light.  It will become light and thus will be the true birth of this day.  With a scream of warmth, the placenta of night will fall into the ocean and send ripples crashing on every shore and the birds will begin to chirp and the reptiles will crawl onto rocks and I will be a few hours closer to expiration.

Expiration (n): 1) that point when language gets funny because the way you are defined begins to change, 2) when the life within gets lumpy and unusable, 3) death.

I'm eating an expired pig sandwich, though the ham is still good, and it's blackness is a sunrise inside me, changing from dark to something else to the light that is my life.  Oh, and I'm coughing.
My flu shot, designed to give me life by injecting me with death, has gotten me sick again this year.  So my nose leaks like a wound and coughs rack my mushy frame as my anti-bodies (who are on my side, despite the name) defend my life against influenzaic death.  Sometimes I think about those anti-bodies giving up and me dying.
On the seventh day God rested and called it holy.  The seventh day is when He stopped creating and soon after that, we must imagine, things started to die.  Killers gotta kill.  Sundays, then, are the time in between life and death.  They are the between-darkness-and-light of five o'clock in the morning, if we were to play the tape in reverse.  There is no moment which more energetically rebels against definition than five o'clock on a Sunday morning.  It is the in-between moment of the in-between day, where light and darkness meld together like life and death.  It is the moment when I eat the dead flesh of a pig to give me life.  It is the moment when I think, 'death probably can't be so bad.'
And then I think of my dog.  He was mostly dark but he had some light.  He's dead now, but he's alive in my memory.  So, I wonder, what does that make him?

Five o'clock on a Sunday morning.



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Nostalgia

Having been home from my adventure for a while I've really started to miss it.  Waking up and knowing that I was going to do something new and see a place I've never seen was really invigorating.  Now I'm back home and, though I managed to maintain an interesting version of my life for a while, I'll very soon be slipping into a different pattern.  I'll wake up and go to a place I've been before and I'll do things that I've done before.

I'm not totally sure I really know what anxiety is, but I may be experiencing it.  For me, there's a serious discontent which arises in knowing that large portions of my life will be familiar.  I wrote this poem during such a time of discontent.

If you like this poem, I'd love it if you'd leave a comment or share it by way of Facebook, Google+, etc.


Nostalgia


It’s been three months since my friends and I have seen our homes,
Though hundreds of photographs have made their way back to our families,
Those voyeurs who peer at us through the keyhole lens of my 35 millimeter.
Our endlessly smiling faces have become the prisoners of a future scrapbook,
Tapping a tin cup against the bars lining every negative.
My memory is still fresh,
But like a patrolling warden,
I’m looking through them now,
And I hate what I see.
A well-timed pose at a sign near the border,
Another perfectly impossible grin.
These heaps of manipulated memories laugh at me from behind the bars,
Because they’ve known what I now do:
Manufacturing an experience is like framing the accused,
While the memories worth keeping are all on the lam.


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fear

Sarah Kay

I've decided to open up my blog a bit.  It won't simply contain poetry of my own, but also works of art I manage to find in my occasional searching that I think is worthy of being shared.  I recently discovered a few channels on YouTube which are related to one another by their connection to the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.  When the weather gets a little bit nicer, I'll be going there to enjoy some of these word wizards and anyone from my personal life who wants to come along is welcome.  Anyone else who is outside my personal life that would also like to go, I'd be more than happy to join you at a table.

Though these aren't my own works, if you enjoy the video or any other part of the blog, I'd ask you to share it with your friends and family on Facebook, Google+, or by e-mail.  I'm trying to nurture my small garden of followers!

This is a video from the Bowery I discovered while watching hours of spoken word poetry.  She is a beautiful poet, and though this short poem is indicative of her and her style, it's not necessarily her best.  I'm sure I'll be sharing more of her work in the near future, but for now, I present Sarah Kay!

Rain

Sometimes when I'm feeling like my life is becoming too complicated or stressful or compromised, I go for walks.  I don't need to go very far, I just need to hear the wind and the leaves and maybe some water and I'm revitalized!  One day during my walk I got caught out in the rain and decided to just sit and enjoy it.  I like when it rains, like I feel most people do on one level or another, and I wrote this poem as I reflected on it.

As usual, I'm going to shame myself by asking for responses from anyone who encounters this poem, whether they find it enjoyable or otherwise.  Below there are several check-boxes and I ask you to check whatever one most befits your attitude after reading.  If you have questions or comments, feel free to make them below, and if you'd go so far as to say that you LIKE this poem, I'd appreciate it if you'd share it on Facebook or Google+!

"Rain"

Who first claimed weather was the cause of ruin

And shuddered at these falling globs

Ignoring all irony in what they were doing

As they bemoaned their luck in heaving sobs?

Instead, such a preference for the boastful sun,

The eternal burner and giver of light,

Ignoring millions of droplets that act as one,

And are equally significant to the tree of life.

Despite having all the heavens as their source,

Those clear, cleansing waters are humble,

Quenching and flowing and washing with force,

They never are proud nor falter nor stumble.

It is only a fool who could dislike the rain,

Choosing exclusively to favor the sun,

As a wise man would realize both are the same,

For enjoying this life and for having some fun.

To all of those for whom my words are unheard,

I wish I could share what it is I have gained,

How much I have grown, developed, matured,

While learning and loving each time that it rained.

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Good Intentions

I can largely sum up my life in the things I've never done.  Some of those things are grand or impossible or are expected to remain undone.  Other things are the stuff of my promises.  They are the chores I really thought that I would remember to do or the hobbies I truly intended to pursue.  Those who know me can name plenty of things, if they put their minds to it, that I said I would do in a moment of strength and that slipped into the part of the world exists outside of my routine.  This is a poem about those things.

I hope anyone who reads this will take the time to comment on it in some fashion.  I don't necessarily want praise, I'll take criticisms (or Facebook / Google+ shares) just as readily.  It's nice to know that people are looking at all!  Well, without further ado, Good Intentions:


This is a poem about good intentions,
About the thank-you notes which clutter my drawer,
And keep me from finding the calligraphy pen which writes so nicely,
The pen I meant to give to my sister.
It’s about the good china sitting in its cabinet,
Dustily waiting for the dinner party I’ll throw one day,
And my bible, tucked quietly on a cluttered shelf of paperbacks.
This poem is not about the sweatpants in my bedroom,
But about the treadmill upon which they drape.
It’s about the unopened envelopes from charities,
To which I’ll write a check some payday, and
The keys I dropped on the table near the door,
Below the key hook I thought would keep things neat,
But that sits as bare as the sketchpads under my bed.
It’s a poem about the rhyme scheme that somehow isn’t here,
The presidential debate I recorded and never watched,
That was going to reveal the candidates for whom I never voted.
I heard once that Anne Frank believed people are really good at heart,
But as I toss another unpaid bill into my otherwise empty fruit bowl,
I can’t help but think that just isn’t good enough.

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