wants to rip at my tee-shirt—
scream kaddish with a minyan
of 10 howling ghosts, claw
a nesting place beside
your bed to sit shiva.
Do a mitzvah for each
and every soul who
covers my quaking
heart with soft
winding
sheets.
Biting cold floors on bare feet,
the smell of plastic bags,
pushpin skin for an IV drip,
over and over and over.
My life upended.
Finding a place for myself
in a world that suddenly feels
so foreign, so new.
How had I ever lived
in it before?
Was it always this painful?
This frightening?
“How do I do this?”
I ask everyone, anyone.
“I can’t do this,”
I tell my husband, at least twice a day.
“I think I’ll do it anyway,”
I tell myself, swollen belly cradled
in my hands.
Wars starts on Friday
after the markets close
when the populus is obsessed
with high school football
-date night
When pundits have taken a break and
politicians have headed home
thinking we won’t notice
-or care
I woke up with an idea to get more out of life
This world has too much chaos and too much strife
A whimsical awakening is exactly what I plan to do
If you are tired of riding this crazy train I hope you do too
First thing we must do is think of a few things that makes use smile
Dont overthink it and its perfectly fine if it takes you a while
When life gets busy and sometimes hard we forget thats not where we have to stay
This is your reminder that every mornins is the start of a fresh new day
What is something you promised yourself that you would some day do
Write a book, visit a far away place or learn to start choosing you
For me I want to make the world a colorful magical place
Where love blooms bright, unicorns are real and fairies dance with grace
I will create a place where I can be me and go there everyday
I am so excited to see where I go and who I meet along the way
Do you remember when we were summer and sweat,
when we were barn snakes and lit matches,
towering sycamores, and white pine?
We were crawdads in creekbeds,
clayface warriors, and mud-covered cavedwellers.
We were rocking chairs, and feet perched
on the balcony waiting for the storm to roll in.
We were crackling fires and damp railroad ties,
a million pin-poked holes in the fabric of the sky.
We were trails to Sugar Camp and Buffalo,
with no switchbacks to save us from erosion.
We were leaves of three, let them be,
and patchouli-soaked skin. Do you
remember when we were iron ore
and slag, a doxology sung through
the throat of a furnace? Do you remember
when we were a swift-moving canoe
taking advantage of the current?
Tell me, do you remember?
Returning to work after Memorial Day, a man jumps in front of my car accelerating 40 miles an hour onto the Clark Memorial Bridge. Some nameless folk singer is crooning through the staticy amazon drop shipped auxiliary cord to keep me awake. It is 7:54 am and this man is waving his hands in the air like a human advertisement as rain falls like silk sheets—or Egyptian cotton, overpriced on a wedding registry—and behind me another man reaches his hand out in front of the Omni hotel to grab a bundle of purple weeds in the median and hand them to his passenger. Downtown Louisville is alight with life begging to be snuffed out, and across the bridge rests a murder of crows—one of those phrases you say to make yourself seem smarter in the eyes of people who already hate your guts—huddling over the body of a doe hit by a driver after a night of drunken summer celebration, ready to be removed in the morning, just driven past then pressed away from my memory as the folk singer and I both dream of mountaintops and jumping like rabbits through the brush and onto the road not taken. I get to work and contemplate more caffeine at 8:42 in the morning and wonder why we allow so much of our lives to be spent in glass cages and mugs and microplastics. At home after a long day of pretending to work I beg the poem to come out again like an animal from under the bed, growling at my outstretched hand. I grab it by the scruff just to hold it once again and call myself a poet with a day job.
how about not less effort this time
something i will not be embarrassed by
with at least a bit of truth in there, somewhere
can i bring laughter or tears
or create a true Ponderer
i don’t suppose i’ll ever know
i’m the worst judge of myself
and others tend to be kind
in their rush to push through
the obstacles of the day
it’s not that i have nothing to say
i do
it’s not that there aren’t others who wish to listen
there are
it’s more about the effort—
planting these words, here–
waiting for the rain
to see if they may grow
Sometimes you have to get up really high
to understand how small you really are.
I’m going home now.
–Felix Baumgartner
To behold
the curvature of the Earth
and believe
your feet could touch the ground…
From the ship
into stars
down through space
and too-thin air
a whole wide world
land and sea
continents
and sovereignties
falling free
midst feathery cloud
charging through
the barrier of sound
then a parachute
deployed at last
the magic of flight
and landing safe.
Can you teach me
how to love again?
Can you show me how to have faith
again?
Paradise is a distant planet
whose gravity I hope I’m still in
but that would require the release
of all the things pulling me away.
Weather balloons of fear and imposter
drag me toward a realm of empty
whilst the risk of falling to death
keeps me frozen on the final steps.
It’s in the girl across the bar
who I never find nerve to speak to.
It’s the open office door, the boss
who might do nothing with my problems.
It’s the novel still floundering in infancy,
files left closed, locked by writer’s block.
Yet here is a man
who leapt toward the Earth from the stratosphere
while I quiver in fear from a lie
that I will never be enough.
Here is a man
breaking the sound barrier without engine
while words I need to say die
in my throat or on my fingertips.
Here is a man
generating a sonic boom in body alone
when I can’t even make her phone ring
or utter a question for her to answer.
How can I call myself a man–
how can I promise to love and protect her
when the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say is
can I take you out to dinner?
Can you teach me
how to be brave again?
Can you show me how to be strong
again?
Can the fearful and the faithless ever find a way
to collide in realms of eternal creation?
Can a brought-low man ever pull back together
a life he long-ago thought lost?
Behold, the curvature of the Earth–
she is so beautiful, isn’t she?
I look up for guidance from the man
who jumped from space and lived.
I want to go home now.
We live in a society that has
become quick to judge and
condemn those who look,
think, or talk differently.
Let us not be censorious
but open-minded and
inclusive and embrace
one another’s individuality.
Just as the cardinal shares
a limb with the robin and
sparrow, let us share a limb
with someone who may be
different in the tree of life.
Imagine a world with no
originality, that certainly
wouldn’t paint a very pretty
picture.
Let us not be afraid, but have
the courage to walk our own
steps and forge a path inspired
by our own thoughts.
