Grandfather

You had a lot to say,

A lot locked behind all the walls of your losses,

Heavy half-truths, unexhumed feelings, and prejudices.

A doomsday prophet, razor-focused on the end.

So absorbed with abstract death, present miseries eluded you,

That was, until they burdened you, and wore you down.

The last eight years of your life were some of the strangest of mine.

We needed each other, but I couldn’t always depend on you.

You were the last person I would trust with anything personal,

And in my lowest moments, I hate to say, your words only hurt.

I couldn’t be your grandson, though I pretended to the end,

Hiding everything about myself as I tended to your needs.

And when you were afraid to die, I stayed beside you,

Comforting you with the same love you had for me,

The unconditional, but seperated from real empathy.

The truth is that we could never accept each other

For who I am and what you believed.

For all the years we spent together, just ourselves,

Every day was a little painful, with all the tension I concealed.

It was all for you, and now you’re finally burned and buried.

It hit me hard, knowing our interactions are done.

Your voice is embedded in my mind, your words and persona.

I miss you, and it’s bitter, even though I’m glad you’re gone.

Goodbye Grandfather, I’ll remember all you taught me.

I’ll remember because I’m unable to forget.

You taught so much and still learned so little.

The end of the world is surely coming, even though you missed it.

Goodbye.

Waiting For A Funeral

This place is more quiet than I can remember.

I knew it would come to this, but the experience is still new.

I feel like taking some of your old clothes,

The ones you asked me to take but that I never wanted.

I’m trying to remember the good times we had,

But it’s hard to think of anything we enjoyed together.

Mostly, I just feel the absence of you from my life.

You weren’t always great, but without you there’s still that feeling,

That missing piece your presence embedded in me

Freed up and empty, an unfamiliar abscess that aches.

The funeral is in two days.

I’m anxious to finally say goodbye.

Sixteen Hours

It’s over and begun again

Before I was awake to contemplate my place therein

And now there’s decisions to make before another day is wasted;

Time to get out of bed and make the most of who I am.

Sixteen hours to occupy.

There’s money I need to make,

Feelings I need to hold at bay,

Friends I ought to engage with

Dreams of mine to explain;

I know I should write another poem,

I know I should do more for myself,

I should work harder to realize my potential,

To help others and bring more beauty into the world,

Oppose oppression and lift up the beaten down,

Make new memories and new connections into love,

Write meaningful stories as impactful as I am able,

Speak truth to power and lead others to something more.

Sixteen hours.

A day’s weight to carry and divide

With all the urgency of our dwindling time.

My God, I need a release and space to hide,

Some poison to feel temporarily satisfied,

A window to the make believe, to live a life that isn’t mine,

Immediate pleasure, to be ok alone and pacified.

A day’s tension and relief , begun again, immobilized,

Consistent as death with all the awareness of being alive.

It needs to end, this state of being that leaves my paralyzed,

Because all the stress within a day hurts less

Than witnessing your life go by unrealized.

When Summer Never Ends

A neverending summer is coming

And then, will all of us live authentically

With space to grow?

On a transformed planet

How deeply will we confront ourselves

To become something more?

Our chaos, our need, drives far ahead of our rationality,

And rationalizing our needs only breeds further chaos.

The narratives we believe in feed the roots of our beliefs.

Skies burning, tensions rising, anger, anxiety, malaise.

Nature pressures us from every angle,

Guiding us forward to communities of love and

Societies of strength.

Flaws and preferences notwithstanding,

Will we shape ourselves to live abundantly or

Apply pressure to stay restrained?

They say love conquers all as strength enslaves.

Compassion may carry us through tumultuous times

As Egoism may grind us through arduous days,

And how will we console ourselves when the hot breath of summer comes to stay?

 

Frankenstein’s Angel

Detatched features,

Faces, fingers, scalps, and skin

By silver knives and blunted hammers

Stripped from many and made whole again.

The Human Ideal and depraved’s obsession,

Perfection in a women’s form,

Assembled with passion, ardor, and precision

From stolen bodily possessions and one pair of volunteered eyes.

Her mother blinded, her father fanatic,

The night dreary when she came alive,

The mind of a girl with the body of an angel,

A gift to the world, the artist’s nightmare and scientist’s prize.

By design, incomparable to any other being,

At sight, overwhelming one’s sensitivities to shape and light,

And having glimsed her, any obscurrance of her face induced pain

In the heart so profound whole crowds were made to cry.

Musicians and poets wrote nothing more but about her,

Some despaired knowing what they could never have or be,

Multitudes gathered daily to witness and adore her,

All the while laying cash and other gifts at her maker’s feet.

The living embodyment of faultless beauty

Drew wealth and satiation into her father’s hands,

Admired by all the world for merely existing,

Her mother, whose eyes she had, became her only friend.

The crowds, left outside constantly yearning,

Grew more restless, depressed, and frenzied every day,

Bewitched every moment she allowed them her presence,

Dead to all pleasure while she was away.

In time, sight alone wasn’t enough to ease their torment,

And an unprecedented emptiness stole their collective minds,

Demands to be loved by the being that was perfect

Grew from callous whispers to a full-blown battle cry,

But the angel, who was a girl, hardly loved a soul,

The consuming gaze of strangers seperated her from all

But the mother, being blind, who saw her without desiring

And the father who idealized her as art’s true and final form.

The final levy broke, and the people flooded their home,

Cornering her in the attic where she’d only recently been born,

The crowd shouted unanimously for the love that they deserved,

With guns, torches, and hungry eyes prepared to take by force.

There is no way to love anyone by choice, the angel knew,

But when so many want your life there’s little you can do,

Ascending down the letter, every voice was silenced,

Scalpel in her hand, she did what was required.

She slid the steel past her cornea and cut the optic nerve,

One after the other and offered them to her observers,

“My mother’s eyes are the only gift I ever truly loved,

Take them and know I’ve given you all I have.”

Torches were dropped, legs fell away as if broken,

A stifled cry echoed loudly and gave way to screams unrestrained,

Many shots were fired into the temples of their holders,

And many more gave in, weeping into the devouring flames.

The house erupted, the blinded angel bleeding, motionless,

Suffocating, sweltering, and without thought of escape.

A pair of arms found her, above them all the most devoted,

The eyeless mother, holding tight as the world fell away.

Identifying A Woman

Far be it from me to tell you

What a woman is or isn’t

Because even the act of living it

Leaves ambiguities.

 

Do you believe identities

Are something we experience internally

Or something we’re assigned

By nature or how we’re perceived?

 

There are hormones and chromosomes,

Patriarchial structures and feminine superstitions,

Poems and stories devoted to Goddesses,

And those who break away from all traditions.

 

Desire, lust, and expectation,

Something defining or something latent?

A human being entrenched in Image

Or a depth of feeling you simply experience?

 

That which is not man

Or that which is only artificial,

A culture, a gender, a sexual character,

Someone you recognize but can’t quite decipher.

 

Style, substance, intuition,

A history of subversion and subjugation,

A relationship with words like “beautiful” or “pretty,”

The feeling of being prized or hunted.

 

A mystery, a darkness,

A power not delicate but malleable at the edges,

A subject that either fits you or doesn’t

But not a thing that can ever be taken or given.

 

 

 

 

 

 

They’re Not The Same

There are characters and stories I’d always imagined growing old with,

Looking back on forever as formative to my being,

But while growing up changes a person and our worldly understanding,

Stories often remain undeveloped and unchanged.

There are moments in books that once thrilled or astounded me,

That were once profound, insightful, or full of mood,

And while many of those words still make me feel something,

Their meaning seems to change as often as I do.

Themes that represented the concepts I believed so perfectly

Have revealed themselves to be shallower over time,

And writers whose minds seemed so beautifully percipient

Have fallen behind perceiving the experiences of life.

It’s sad to watch something beautiful be diminished

When circumstances change how it reflects in our gaze,

And characters that fell so easily into our hearts

Transform into beings from which we’ve become estranged,

But, if there are stories we’ve grown away from

It means that we’re growing all the same,

And becoming new and better people will always alter

Our understanding of what the past means.

Sentences and ideals that mattered then can still matter

With new understanding settled into the narratives we’re making,

And the stories we’ve left behind can still inspire us

As we renew our loves and troubles into characters worth creating.

 

 

 

 

 

A Place Away

There was a house in the woods

Bordered by a ring of brambles and thickets

Encircling lush ambrosial gardens

Fed from a narrow cascading stream.

It was concealed by enchantment

From the designs of outside eyes,

Untouched and immoveable,

Unfazed by the works of time.

There, knowledge distilled to one question,

That of pleasure between souls,

The unfurling of tangled psyches

Like fine beaded twine softly pulled.

It was home to several dozen

Who stole away from haunted homes,

Caught lost inside the darkest forest

And running from the world.

In place of statuses and structures,

There are faces always warm to you

And hearts always open

Never asking for or taking dues.

Nothing you thought you were

Or what others did to hurt you

Need go unspoken or lamented,

There’s time to attend your wounds,

And ambitions have all died

As did the barriers between minds.

The house that’s in the woods

Holds space for passions to spring alive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fear From Complacency

People who deny

You the chance to act honestly

Often undercut empathy

With the fear of being erased.

To be oneself

Has almost always proved risky,

But it gets frustratingly

Arduous when one’s identities are retraced.

It tears at the nerve

Between confidence and sympathy,

Criticism from complacency

Cutting crosses in your face.

She says she’s afraid

Because her very being is threatened,

She who’s being

By that standard subjugates.

Equally communing

Past your deliberate segregating

Proves tryingly absurd

As you blocked yourself from seeing.

Look at me

Without holding back your feelings

And tell everyone listening

What your posture really means.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buried Tension Still Bleeds

When it takes volumes

Of vehement talk and effort

To express a single truth,

 

Singed by rejection,

Denial, the negation of being,

Choking on what’s unexpressed,

 

With desperate passions

Unbound against callus walls

Of corroded empathy,

 

The need for action,

Reclaiming vital recognition,

Becomes irrepressible.

 

Buried tension still bleeds

As the unmoved try to move on.

When words and reasons fail,

How can you make them feel?