Home

When I turned down that road

it was by accident, but somehow

I knew it was right.

It was like an answer

blurted out in the drop of a moment,

unexpectedly containing truth.

"Stop," he said, "we should have

gone the other way,"

but I couldn't stop,

not with destiny breathing down my neck

on the hairpin turns,

not with every jolt of the dirt road

scattering sparks along my spine.

He clung to the other side of the car,

almost wretched,

afraid of my search's intensity.

Still, I pushed on

past tall cliffs and the barren desert,

seeing only glimpses of hidden life

behind a rising smear of dust.

The sun was no lower when I stopped,

transfixed by its golden dance

in a dry riverbed.

"I'll drive us back," he said,

pushing my hands off the steering wheel.

"Don't you worry," he said.

"I'll drive us home."

I met his gaze, both of us

locked in the harsh half-light,

and I saw a thin flutter of confusion

spread across his face.

So, I touched his shoulder

as the distance grew between us,

and without words climbed out.

In the very act of trudging

through the forgotten dust

I raised my head and knowledge struck

through me,

knowledge as clean as the distant sky:

One day I'd come back to this place

where dead trees met in a perfect arch

over a one-lane road.

One day I'd come back, alone.

One day

I'd come back home.

Paint (Unfinished)

The one paintbrush I have

is old, with ragged fibers

and teethmarks from mouths long grown up

and gone away

sunk deep into its yellow handle.

When I see it,

I am reminded of that day

you picked it up and, laughing,

held it between your face and the light.

You let the watery yellow-orange

drip from its squared-off end

onto the clearness of your skin,

running down your cheek like a tear

from the source of all happiness,

and I thought you could have let it

stay there forever,

there where it gathered

with other tiny droplets

under the roundness of your chin.

But I guess it wasn't yours to keep,

because it fell from you,

burying itself and all its brightness.

Meeting

Never before have I met anyone

as cold and silent as this,

so still that the tips of her fingers

are tinged with frost.

I want to ask her

what she's waiting for,

but I don't think she will

hear me.

She will not choose to listen.

Instead she stands,

bending before me and the world

in a long mocking bow,

waiting for the first sounds of warmth,

waiting for the clear echoes

inside her chrysalis.

Somehow I know,

in the swift darkness of my blinking eyelids,

only then will she fly.

Absence

Things are not always built by adding,
but sometimes by cutting away the unnecessary,
leaving only the slim, the clean, the essential.
Today, there echoes the absence
of voices no longer heard,
realities no longer visited.
It's a curious balance struck between
opposites or things almost similar
when negative space is as noticed
as what is there
and when the world's defined
by lack of definition.

Rise

Sometimes she feels as if she's alone in her determination.

She wonders if anyone else even knows

the true meaning of the word

like she does,

or if they would tell her

to get up and keep going

if they knew how much

that defense was costing her.

Each day fills her with the heaviness of years,

and each day she is left alone

to fall and rise, fall and rise,

measuring progress only in

obstacles overcome.

She barely half-understands

the unconquerable force

that pushes her and only her along,

tumbling her down a road

filled with rocks and thorny weeds,

for a reason so faint and worn-down

it might as well be nonexistent

except for the imperious rattle and pull of it

deep within the darkness of her chest.

Battle

The greatest battles are those that no one else sees:
the constant ebb and flow
of pain, nausea, pride, anger,
straining against the thin veil
that holds them just beneath
the surface.
These are the battles that really matter,
the ones where all sides are equally strong,
equally righteous, equally deadly,
and always
equally silent,
conscious of their growing importance
in the underbellies of human minds,
dependent like all great secrets
on their capacity for grace
and patience.
How dare people talk of peace
when they themselves will never know rest,
when their minds are so obviously
created for debate and division?
Inward turmoil goes hand-in-hand
with outward calm,
or so it seems when soldiers lay down their guns
and shake hands,
their eyes still darting and searching
for invisible weapons
to hoist against their private enemies.

Run

ANOTHERPOEMOMGYAY.

----

I run
when the sky turns to water
and merges with the flat grayness
underneath
I run
in the darkness
down streets lined with
sugar-frosted houses

timing my breath
to the ebb and flow of distant muscles

In between last light and first light
I run

even if the running is mostly in my mind,
where I am unwound from my heaviness,
where I sail freely on feet that are not
or maybe were once
mine.

I run.

To Want

*Note, this inspiration was taken from a most excellent book called North River by Pete Hamill.

-----

To want. Everyone's first verb.

This is the glue to the paper of
all first sentences,
the slim grasping thought that
documents our first glance up
from the mud.
To want,
the story of all humans
in a syllable,
of all things, really,
but humans distinguish themselves
by pointing out so clearly
and with such longing
the underbelly of inspiration.

I want, too.
I want. I want. I want.

Fragile Strength

In the time between one second and the next,
after the alarm clock goes off
but before the world stops spinning,
I find myself alone in the silence
which is no longer taken for granted.
I close my eyes, letting my spine
recollapse into the forgiving hug of my bed,
seeking again the fireworks blackness of sleep...
...but only for the time it takes to pull myself
closer to the beginning.
My feet seek the floor, tendrils from an uprooted tree,
even though they ache like no tree
has ever done.
The cage that holds me cracks with
every breath I take. My neck pulls
to one side,
determined, painful.
This is the way it has always been
when the sun and I meet each other
at the moment of my lifting
and ride out together
to conquer the expected promise
of the day.

Q and A

Another poem at the end, but first a bit of ranting...

Junior year sucks majorly, even at my tiny school, and I can't imagine how awful it must be elsewhere. Truth is, my class isn't even that bad, there's just a few people who ruin it for everyone.

I sit alone in my last class, and in my elective. It isn't by choice.

/end self-pity :)

Only 180 more days until I am free again!

THE POEM...*looks downward*

Answers are elusive things,
clambering around in the hard shell of my brain,
wanting to be reunited with their questions
even though I have forgotten how to direct them.
The more days I live,
the more I am convinced that the biggest answers
are overgrown transparent creatures,
weak with disease and age.
Their bones must be hollow from
the thoughts I have piled onto them.
We are the ones who most deserve release.

Remember Me

Inspired by Explosion in the Sky's "Remember Me as a Time of Day."

Remember me as a time of day.
Think of me as an undefinable warmth,
as the warmth of the morning sun,
steadier and more capable than your bedroom lamp
as you stumble down the shadow-lined hallway
and breathe in my promise, a man released
from his wrongful grave.

If it is cloudy, or if you are denied
that first stretch, those first breaths,
let me be the busy energy of the day.
I will be your strength, even through the power of my absence,
guiding you down the one sure road you choose to take,
weaving your life and your memories
so tightly to the daylight
that no one can look at them and tell them apart.

And if there is no daylight for you,
remember me as the night. Remember me as
a faint glimmer of watchful stars,
or let me be the coolness in your room,
the whisper of wing that tickles its way
across your face
and sinks deeply into your dreams.

Remember me as a time of day,
so that when your clock stops or
your city's fog shuts out the seasons,
or when you no longer have clear memories of me,
still
you cannot say that I have been forgotten.

Dinner Talk

There are languages beneath the words,
currents of meaning carrying the thin white foam along.
I sit silently at the dinner table,
unmoving yet never still,
following the step-by-steps;
not only of the words,
but also of the flick of eyes,
the strategic clink of forks on plates,
the just-in-time coverings
of faces by napkins.
It's enough to make me wonder
if dinner really is only a time
for families to talk,
or if it's a time for separate
universes to come together,
a time for fragile shadow bridges
to be built
and for messages to be signed across,
unspoken but still received,
under the ceaseless gaze
of the watchers.

Speak

Speak.
I want you to use the voice that you were born with.
I want the roundness and smoothness and hurried tones
of your voice more than I've ever wanted anything
before.
Your words deserve to be released
from the polished silent luxury
of your mind.
The sentences and speeches that you could
toss out with a single twist of your tongue
would
save
the
world
if you let them.
Speak.
Stop being the person who fills up the corners
of benches
and acts out a story of her own happiness.
I want you to spell your soul
in the way that we both know
you've always dreamed of.
I want to see you silence a room
with the quiet power of
your speech,
and then
I want you to scream, shatter the
sound barrier,
let everyone know
the imperfect truth of you.
Everything and all of this and more
should be yours
but is not.
And when I watch you in the mirror,
notice the line of your jaw
that is also mine,
the sadness in your eyes
that also belongs to me,
the tilt of your lips
that could only ever
belong to us,
I want to hold your two hands
and tell you,
command you,
to speak,
but I do not
have
the words.

War

We can't explain the truth of things

and neither can we set our sights on anything real.
Something called faith, called freedom, called standing on
a ledge watching the drowsing city of generations' dreams, silent in
golden light -
and the way it fades away from you as the door
closes, never to open again but rather
to be blown from its hinges and ripped to wooden shreds.

Yes. We're all going to try to be very good.

Driving Practice

All of us are,
deep inside,
scared teenagers
driving at breakneck speeds
down midnight roads,
hunted by a feeling,
guided by emptiness,
south of the final edge
of the last map
and comforted only by
our own wheels' humming
and our anemic faith
that soon, the tangle of roads
will solve itself
and we'll find ourselves
back at home,
cringing under the harsh words
of those who love us,
but secretly
(not on our faces
or in our eyes)
secretly, carefully
smiling.

Search for the Answer

in this tiring endless circle
of school, then work, then sleep
we get caught up in the doing
and forget to look beyond
the words on the page.
we miss the meaning of the equations,
the rich stories unfolding
in languages as yet beyond
our comprehension.
the search for an answer
is everything, we think,
and none of us ever look up
even once
to accept as it is
(with its flaws and its failings,
its limits and chains)
the magic
of knowledge.

Mountains

I was a child of the quiet suburban streets

forever filled with warmth

in my memory.

On one side, the busy network of roads

pumping life to our neighborhood

and back again;

on the other side, the desert,

my desert, 

extending to the mountains

that held their secrets far above

my head.

My past is a story full of 

mistakes and regrets;

I was glad to escape elementary school,

glad to be rid of middle school,

and in all the gladness of these

necessary endings

we left that drowsy, melancholy house,

removing any attachment

that might have lifted it above

all other houses in my mind.

So I became a teenager of the city.

This house is an island of sanity

in the middle of the rainbow weavings

of cultures.  I traded

the narrow-mindedness of my birthplace

for the boundless acceptance

of my second life.

But still,

I cannot see my mountains

through the haze of dust and smog 

that falls like a widow's veil

over the land.

The sounds are harsher here, the smells

less vague, more insistent.

The song, though, is the same.

I can still hear the patient rhythm

of the earth itself, bound under buildings

and laced with concrete and roads.

And when I sit in my room

in the dead of night, the rhythm

brings me back to the days

when I lay on my stomach

and hugged the land itself to me,

staring at the purple beauty

of the sun-touched mountains

against the sky.

The Heart of the Wilderness

She walked
with measured steps,
draped in striped and fringed cloths,
treading the earth proudly,
with a slight jingle and flash
of barbarous ornaments.
She carried her head high;
her hair was done
in the shape of a helmet;
she had brass leggings
to the knee;
brass wire gauntlets
to the elbow;
a crimson spot on
her tawny cheek;
inumerable necklaces
of glass beads on her neck;
bizarre things,
charms, gifts of witch-men
that hung about her,
glittered and trembled
at every step.

(She must have had the value
of several
elephant
tusks upon her.)

She was savage
and superb,
wild-eyed
and magnificent;
there was something ominous
and stately in her deliberate
progress.
And in the hush that had
fallen suddenly
upon the whole sorrowful
land,
the immense wilderness,
the colossal body of the
fecund and mysterious life
seemed to look at her,
pensive,
as though it
had been looking at the image
of its own tenebrous
and passionate
soul.

- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Paradise

In the end we will all kneel at God's feet,

or maybe at the feet of Mother Nature or some

unheeding and hooded fate,

and we will wish for silence so that

we might better hear our future.

We will stare into the blackness of uncertainty,

stripped of our carapace of lies

and faithless before the presence

of limitless faith.

Then we'll remember the days

when we curled up in our boxes

and beds

and succumbed to the stories

of a lurid paradise.

We'll look back at the days spent

chasing the perfect life

and wonder if things would be better

if we saved memories of small things

and collections of the real

in the corners and closets

of our mind

to be released later, fireflies,

into the darkening skies

of our existence.

There Was A Time

There was a time
so long ago
when you were not
a memory
an idea
a voice in my dreams
or a faceless identity
behind a computer
screen

There was a time
when I wrote for you
and sang your name
in the darkness
of my life
believing it would
save me
from forgetting

There was a time
when you
and I
were people