We Could Grow Our Own Life Together

We could have a tiny world, a modest one, all to us,

To paint our ideals, our passions, and secret wishes onto.

Caring for each other and nurturing the land

Our children, a family of colors, scents, atmosphere and earth.

We’d till and sow all our own way,

And grow a living dream, transcendent from every angle.

We’ll compose a landscape tuned to the mood of our time together,

Like living music to the moment we’ve adopted.

Seasons and years renew the youth of our creation,

So every day we enjoy new spaces of imagination to occupy together.

This is the world we birth with our own hands and thoughts,

Held together indefinitely, in reverie and splendor.

Heroes Burning

Scars make martyrs and monsters.

Idolizing the villains who were yesterday’s anti-heroes

Waiting for them to burn their capacity to create.

The angels burn brightly, softly, sensationally,

To follow chaotically into a second fall.

Exactly as dulcetly as they first sang,

They clash crassly against some new foe,

But the only ones standing in their way

Are the ones burning as brightly as they.

Radient Ideation

Allow me to indulge my radient ideation,

A spectacle of bittersweet sunbeams breaking through gray skies,

Eeking their way into my ugliest days

Like transcended smiles projected from the purest celestial lights.

They reach me bedecked in wilting blue flowers,

Exposed to the heavens in a gown of silk white,

Seduced into a dream that lasts for an eternity

Between the fragility of a body and the soft sting of twilight.

It’s wearying to be deranged for the sake of beautiful things,

And as they dull, to come to know, that madness still remains.

A song I knew grew up to be a different kind of tune,

It plays the notes that made me up and broke away from me.

Intoning prose for my own health prolongs the point of breaking,

And sharing them from mind to mind is life that’s worth the saving,

To make a scene of who I’ve been to stimulate your feelings

Is all I need to brighten up this dream I can’t stop dreaming.

Burn me with the autumn leaves, with cardamom and honey,

Leave a house to my mother on the shores of a lake that’s crystal clear and foggy.

Find me there in ashes, free from poverty and wealth,

Dead to all the world, but not dead to herself.

A Touch In Bad Weather

Some people can’t be reached no matter what you say,

Who probably wouldn’t care to feel your touch anyway,

And for all those who need, in some way, to be reached,

Our fingers might wave but they rarely ever meet.

In a dark windy heart there’s cracked glass in the rain,

Palms still untouched can be cut all the same.

Quieting the air with a gesture, I find

It helps, when you reach, to shield your hands with mine.

Those stinging cold moments with warmth underneath

Pour lakes into places overridden with dead leaves,

An Autumn-stained blush from a spring-tinted gaze

Briefly turn skies that were black back to grey.

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?

 

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.