Inanimate Ties
I tell people that
I rotate the plates
after washing
to evenly wear and
tear them but
I actually do it
so none of them
feel lonely
I tell people that
Bubbles on bodies
makes the night go by quick.
While the tattooed, clearly adult
men approach.
You bask in their attention.
The sirens on the rocks
vs. the humble sailor.
Unknown who should be feared more.
While the siren has her teeth,
the sailor has a gun.
And you are
fourteen
drunk
and left behind.
It seems I always start out with the best intentions. Maybe we all do. But somehow I wake up one day, and find that I just couldn’t keep them. In this particular instance, I just couldn’t write a poem every day for a month. I tell myself I don’t have that many in me. But then I’ll be driving and three will come to mind and I think, I’ll write about that when I get home. And I step in the door and the dog distracts me and there is always a chore to be done and oh I forgot to respond to that text and what am I doing for dinner and then I just can’t seem to recall what I was going to write about and I am chagrined to have done that again. Even just there as I was writing about being chagrined I thought about signing up for yoga tomorrow. Which would take me to my phone and away from this poem. A poem about how I just can’t get myself to write poems.
Tomorrow is a new day. I wish me good luck.
we stay strong
not by following along, towing the line
but by speaking truth
being who we be
admitting consistency
of thought
independence
from the very beginning
like monarchs taking flight
rather than sitting on thrones
Let me stand in this light rain,
iridescent and not very present.
I’ll be made of pixels, and one day
you’ll pull my words from the ruin,
and the isotopes from my hair.
You’ll be in awe of such intensity
and its brevity. I’ll evade capture
by your glass jars. I’ll be a mirage
for the spectators, waning, breaking.
For now we can pretend this isn’t finite.
All is slightly unsettled. The trees drip.
It’s alright. Let me have this moment
to incandesce, feel something powerful.
You know that potent silence pleases me.
Tonight the fireflies are innumerable,
the sloping field in front of the house
dances with their presence
and as day gives up its light
the brighter planets appear
and the milky way begins to spill it stars
across the southern sky.
The grand sweep of our slice
of the universe is the evidence
that we have always had,
before telescopes
before the theory of relativity,
that our lives are fragile and brief.
There is certain beauty
in seeeing how little we tip the scale
Frogs call
I wait in the punctuated dark while
lightning bugs tease my imagination
with promises of fairies if I follow
those flashes,
beacons of dreams and damage
anything I can fathom
anything my mind cooks up
pulled from the depths of past
pleasures or past pains.
I sit still
listen
trills and eeks and
banjo string plucks of green frogs
echo, and nothing
I envision while entranced by bugs
daring me to step into the woods or
while hypnotized by longing amphibians
is darker than when I head inside and
open my phone.
