Poetry is like the ever changing moon with me. Some days I don’t see it being an attractive way to spend my time, and others involve me sitting down for hours watching my emotions being transcribed across the blank white sky that is my computer screen.
Either way, the importance of poetry, at least, never escapes me. And so here are three poems I wrote, to answer various prompts set up by an old teacher of mine, that explore different parts of the world and how I feel about them. They are some of my first attempts at poetry meant for the page, as I usually write poems meant for the stage.
Diviértete. :)
Colors on Prospect Street
What is the street you live on like? Remember it, and let those memories spill on the page.
Quiet.
Quiet people walked
quiet dogs under
quiet trees.
The color of our skin was loud—
Our lawn mowers, our music, our misplaced farm animals.
The front of our house screamed tulips and morning glories and statues of goats in sombreros
To an audience of lawns
That stared back in green silence.
Coffee houses and vanilla families,
We seemed to have it backwards—
I still remember how aliens
slithered out of Mr. Shirley’s mouth
like the snake
in the pool across from us.
When the pool closed and fall fell,
The middle school kids walked home on our side of the
street, going swimming in October in our little lake of
leaves, putting on a show
for the congregation of ravens
huddled in cloaked wings with our neighbors’
eyes.
But,
When the sky dumped mountains of snow
And the air froze every door,
We were the same as everyone else—
Winter was the only time
That we are all white.
Autonomous Drift
Write something from a narrative perspective, but using someone else besides yourself. Someone very different from you.
My taste buds are still angry.
Words slug over them.
“I’m going to miss you.”
Hand, lips, muffled thunder of a tear
on the deserts of my cheekbones.
I love you.
As my eyelids dance,
I wonder if she
forgives me, too.
Last night,
I told her she could come
with me.
She had laughed, a forgotten sound when
“last” paints six months past
with ghost smiles,
but
our lips were where we stored our secrets,
and
her kiss said
she’d thought about it.
The pain is losing its grip—
I’ve become too heavy for it.
God— I think it’s God—
chastens my liver
and the throbbing ceases,
but Dr. Kilorn said two minutes
after swallowing.
I think I have one minute of pain
left.
The walls take turns
with the back of my eyelids:
Shauna, before I found her
floating at her bedside.
My mother’s hands,
the heat sprinting away at the whistle
of the flat-line.
Richard,
back from the war
in a little yellow envelope.
The bed has disappeared
I’m lying on black clouds
I’m everywhere balancing
on the edge of nowhere
but she hasn’t let go of my hand
I did this.
I clasp the pain and
scratch at the mud until a ray of
life shines through.
Vis-à-vis, thank you
for everything
you’ve
History Is Painted by the Victors
Take a painting, understand it, and let whatever consequential inspiration fuel you to write something about people.
Supernovas in
letters. Pores sing with
wind. I remember glacier eyes
atop a firefall grin
and
an expanding universe
for a chest.
Our clothes melted
like snow off evergreens—
the sand entered her
before I did
but
the sand didn’t become a bird
like I did.
Just once.
The diamond man and
the clothed future and
the setting sun and
the
Just once.
The beasts inside our
naked hearts
cried—
an arpeggio of openness
barred within our rib
cages,
locked.
