Day 2: Things to Remember

When your hands are empty

remember all the brightest things

burning on the edges of your peripheries.

Remember sunshine creeping across hard wood,

and steaming tea warming your tongue and fogging my glasses.

Remember us laughing.

Remember hand-made marshmallows floating on thick hot chocolate,

and the soft smell of new pages,

and curtains drifting in the breeze.

Forget the gaps between your reaching fingers,

and remember the high heavens watching the top of your head while you drift.

Remember yourself,

your glowing pinprick life,

tracing crooked, lovely paths across every mapline.

Day 1: Weighing Our Options

We are waiting for so many things,

hands outstretched for summer rains.

We are hoping that everything will settle,

that the stirred-up dustiness of the present will fade to order.

Because the world seems full of roses and soft breezes,

of the tempting call of springtime,

ushering us on towards heat and air conditioning and bare feet,

but all we can remember is our dread, on these evenings,

the small pebbles that weigh heavy in waiting in our stomachs.

 

NaPoWriMo

Today is the first day of National Poetry Writing Month (okay so I’m a few minutes late…)

I did National Novel Writing Month last November, so I’m thinking I’ll give this a shot.  Even if I am participating in Camp NaNoWriMo and trying to write 30,000 words this month.  And trying to decide where I’m going to college.  And organizing a Literary Magazine event.  And doing all my schoolwork.  

Well, here goes…something.

As I Slowly Slide Towards Autumn, And It Falls Into Me

There is, inside of me, the melancholy of autumn.

I can feel my leaves shedding.

Beautiful in all their flaming pageantry, they have tinged the months with crispness.

I am dropping down my leaves in the sharp, new air of the fall.

They slip from me in sheets,

drifting to the ground, borne by the dancings of the air and the wind.

I watch them spin upon invisible currents, to music I cannot hear, playing upon the wind,

and sit bare and wondering.

It is all so beautiful, but the falling of this season has settled in me with sharpness and the light.

It is lonely here, still and solitary amongst the changing of the world.

The autumn is full of melancholy, and I am full of autumn.

We Are Battles, and In Them We Live

The storm is raging outside.

We are living in the midst of a battle,

born to tempest,

born to wind and to fire.

We are accustomed to shadow.

The rain falls in crescendos in the darkness.

We are living in a war-torn wedge of earth,

born to lightning and the crack of cannonfire.

We will hold on with wearied fingers,

with our tattered cuticles and the breaches in our nails,

with the trenches in our skin.

We will surface.

We are living in the midst of the downpour,

in the open mouth of the Earth’s shakings,

on the edges of our fading

as we hold on to the battle we live in.

As We Departed

What

between the meteoric moments cluttering the backs of our cupboards

was I watching for?

The sky vast and splattered with instants of gleamings and otherwise empty

reflected back to us our stained happiness as we chased circles

against the dark backdrop of the grass

and waltzed in cycling pairs away from our fear.

Walking barefoot across the hard stone pathways

a freedom forbidden

we faded into forevers stretched thin and full of promise.

Small circles of golden light hung across the ground where we gathered

drawn to the light, watching each other’s eager, cracked faces.

Where

amongst the muddling of my possessions

shall I place my meager words,

to remind me of the magnitude of evenings?

Greatness

What are you waiting for?

Your heartache fumbling in dark corners is fading

and your toes skim unknown constellations.

Your skin is the satchel wherein you hold your bones

your dreams

your majesty.

Forgotten are your mumblings,

but your declarations yet to come hinge on the strength of your

miracles.

Installment III

So, there was that thing I was writing before.  Now there’s a third bit.

There was one day when I left school, and it smelled like cigarettes and I was trying not to look at anybody because I just wanted to make it home, and she was walking all by herself.  I ended up walking behind her halfway to the train, only I ducked into a store because I felt like I was following her.  I felt like since I usually took the bus, and she usually took the bus, I was following her wherever she was going.  And the thing was I really wanted to know where she was going, but I liked that she was just her, and I couldn’t ask her because I didn’t know her like that.  I mean, she was the only person I’d ever seen who made me really want to know stuff, and she was the only person who seemed like a person, and not a somebody.  But she had her hair up in a really tight ponytail and I was afraid she was doing something important and who was I anyway.  I didn’t want to be a somebody, but I didn’t want to be a nobody either.  It wasn’t that I wanted to be with her, not the way people talk about being together.  I just wanted to be with her, just talk to her and have her listen to me talk and hold that notebook real tight with the pen right inbetween the pages, and see her just looking so normal and nice and different from all the somebodies in the whole world.

How We Have Mended Ourselves

We angled our way through

disasters and

spherical rotations of unknown moons.

When we settled,

finally,

upon foreign shores,

unfamiliar coastlines and cliffsides climbing over us,

we meandered our meager ways eastward.

Our best-laid plans will pan out like train tracks,

wide and yearning and glinting in the sunset

and under the spreading onset of stars

as the moon hangs liquid in the deep inky sea of the sky.

For I Have Known Summer, and Watch How it Fades

The roses are blooming.

Bushels of bushes bursting into fiery crescendos of color.

The roses are blooming, love,

and summer is falling.

Caught amongst the sway of pendulous, pantomimed waltzing

as curtains, caught fire with buds and blooms and

promise, settle into evening.

We are strolling into evening,

the stars lazily lighting amongst the pastel-painted sky.

The breeze is lilting metronome tunes through the branches

and thorny tangles are caught amongst the stillness.

Everything is coming down to murmuring and muttering

and metropolitan skyscapes tinged with the longing for seascapes touched by rain.

We miss storm clouds, with their heaviness

and the way they send down lightning and slow rumblings

and solitude.

The roses are blooming.

I am breaking into fractures and fragments and

slivers of self, forgotten

amongst the topiary.

We will wander midst the gathering of clockwork things

and as they tick out endings and growing things

we will stand amongst the roses,

watching as they fall slowly out of season,

out of time, and out of tide.

The roses are blooming in movements and measures

and I will stand in the metropolis,

stand amongst the roses and watch the sauntering of summer

and the slow arrival of the stars.