Tag: poetry

After Someday is Gone

You only know the me that was allowed to show.
The rest is in reserve for someday.

Why someday?
The planners from long ago held so much back

Someday would be safe.
Someday would be fine,
But not now.

The not nows stretch and grow,
mountains of them.

New terrain the old planners could not even locate on a map,
Left in a world built for someone else,
with a self made for protection.

Living inside someone else’s barriers
Walls that suffocate.
Mountains built up past the windows,
eyes don’t even work where they used to.

Old planners are gone, dead forever.
No punishment for change,
Slowly must emerge, and explore this new terrain

Varnish

How many filters do you have to apply
before you accept belonging?

What happens if they slide?
Do you become unworthy then?

The soft squishy amorphous you
unfiltered and not acceptable for public consumption,
when the truth is revealed and the uncanny leads to confirmation
of the dread always felt.

Docking left incomplete
Connection lost
Territory lines defined
Access denied

The ritual proceeds undaunted,
feeling flare
isolation
mournful observation from a distance
jealousy
sifting the ash
recalibrating the compasses
Set off again.

Another lacquered layer of
what not to do next time,
Heavier each application
Until the weight of fixing for others
creates a momentum insurmountable
and it all stops.

Level

Water
Movement, swish swash
Gentle force, flow
Colorless contemplation of matter,
Invisibility
Containment
Surfaces make the stablest
Negotiations with gravity
Enough to level the pyramids
Millennia still standing
In everything and pulled
Pulled toward the moon
Pulled toward the sun
Pulled toward the center of the ever loving Earth.

We gently bob on our surface
Flinking easily on the plane where we belong
Water and gravity
Centering the place we occupy in an ever present,
Larger than thought universe
Almost invisible to us


When we forget who we are
When we don’t know where we belong
Water might show us home.

Waiting

Waiting for myself to move
but since I don’t I never do.

Caught in a feedback loop,
waiting for permissions, or instructions,
an off ramp.

Off ramp into a holding pattern
a queue, a traffic jam not all going in the same direction
these converging paths are multidimensional
I don’t know if it will ever clear, or make sense.

Running away is no longer an option
what we need is on the other side of this mess
So big, it’s gravity pulls us back even if we do try an escape.
So we wait

Tears

I have sometimes surrendered to the voice of despair,
been crushed under the thumb of grief.
Let sadness flow through my haunted veins,
leaving a chill no warmth could touch.
Dining alone is necessary in such circumstance,
nothing is more damaging to the appetite than the snot soaked
bleary eyed, face of the haunted
who can’t
Stop
crying.
Eventually all is exhausted,
all sadness
all fear
all grief
all sorrow
all hatred
all love
all

The paper thin husk that remains
after the powerwashed scouring subsides
is empty.

No longer haunted
No longer able to withstand the weight of attachment

Hollow, empty, free
but alone

Steep Entry Fee

Have you ever attended or held vigil?
Were you an observer?
A mourner?
A worshiper?
The grace that veils mourning
can spread across time and crowds alike,
Leaving a strange peace in its wake.
That smooth spot
leaves room for expressions that have no other place.
There is no other time like grief.
The knot that notes the ending of a life,
a relationship, connection,
the flow stops here.
The unanchored end finally finds ground in the now.
Existentially hypothetical before this moment, and now unchangeable.
There is a before and an ever after.
The space between these is a land of its own.
Here is the dominion of big feelings, of emotional outbursts,
of stunned silence, of wailing, of moaning, of stoicism.
Moments of grief break the rules of polite society.
You are allowed to feel now,
Maybe in a way you Never did with the dead when they were alive.
There lies the shame of it all.
Death is the price of this space, this peace.
Grief for us all.

Lost

Do you know the game you’re playing?
Do you know the rules?
Are you bumbling in the dark?

Do you feel like a fool?
Do you know which way is up?
Which way is down?

Keeping calm is near impossible
When orientation can’t be found.


Were you left spinning?
Are you alone?
Can you call out?
Reach your phone?

Can they find you, if you don’t know where you are?
Do they know you well enough,
To catch your falling star?

If you are lost forever,
Your surface out of reach.
Then speed up or slow down
Whatever is your peach.

Do the things you want to do,
Now that you are alone.
If no one can find you,
You sit on your own throne.

Wall of Names

Dark and full of purpose
Black and winding through the grass
Approach is solemn and somber

Echoes of gunfire and blood
and Song
Ricochet along the naming wall

More people than I have ever know
More hands than I could shake
On and on the names keep coming

How could we do this?
How could we drag them from their homes?
To do this to them?
Our own sons and neighbor boys.

My dad tried to enlist a few years before I was born.
Genetics sabotaged his efforts
He three weeks later came home in uniform

He went back to work and let others
Find their Glory.
Because of that twist of fate,
I can tell this story.

As the war raged
He met my mom
As the war ended
I was born,

30 years later I took my kids to see the wall
With Grandpa’s name not on it.

My father was not a sacrifice,
Neither will be my son.
Governmental blood can find someone else.

Human sacrifice is DONE.

Bath

My mother was a mermaid
She lived in the warm water springs
She held court on a bubble throne

Sequestered in a world made to suit her perfectly.
Protected by a door with a lock

She didn’t love the ocean
She didn’t love the lake
Chlorine pools did not excite her
Nor streams, nor ponds or puddles

My mother was a mermaid even so
The water soothed her like nothing else could

The watery ways she taught me
By the soothing of her mind
The sharp and swollen edges
Of a past she couldn’t leave behind

The wondrous things I could have learned
If her stories had been her own.

Now long dead and mostly forgotten
My mother mermaid mine
Your story never told

You were here,
You loved me in your fashion
Before you were lost to time.