Category Archives: poetry

America Is

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america is

America, you are a patchwork.

Yet, you’ve tried so hard to forget what you’re made of.

Built on the bones of oppression and the backs of servitude

You began with audacious claims –

Equality

Liberty

Happiness as a pursuit

Living up to these has been a grasp

And a miss

A step forward

A freefall back

What is America?

She’s been called many refrains

She welcomed yet erased

A beacon of hope

A place of such misery

America, picking the pockets of the poor to line those of the vilest hoards.

She made a social contract,

But kept changing the language,

And who could sign.

America is

A mirage, not a dream

A charade, not a promise

America is war and secret ops and

Also, very much a gun

Rebellions, succession, a North and a South

She has always been in angst, trying to blame, cover, shame.

The country, built on no god or king

Keeps letting the lords and the elites weigh its scales of justice

She’s been to the brim with hate

Because the melting pot refused to mesh

She asserted herself on the world like an inpatient lad,

Sometimes for good, but more often for not

The golden age, the great era, was before equality came

These were decadent times for the white men who have always had the lead.

She’s made so many fight for the chance to simply exist.

There have always been

Two of you

Two faces

A heart and a rot

A Janus plunged in duality, beginnings and gates

An assaulting contradiction whose true identity is not the story she likes to sell.

America, a land stolen, never discovered

The founders took it, and although they declared their independence from tyranny, did create some of their own.

It’s not un-American to point out the flaws; it’s wholly patriotic to do so.

America is broken.

America is shackled.

America is no home for the many.

This is not who we are? But isn’t it? Rinse away the whitewashing and propaganda, and what’s left?

As the words from the constitution fade into the machine of hate and cast out evident freedoms –

The question becomes, when do we, the people, all the people, reject this purgatory of injustice and inequality?

America is greed over humanity.

Will it always be?

Scrape away the apathy, eyes wide, and believe we are no longer the resistance, we are the rebellion.

Rage, rage, Thomas said, against the dying of the light that cast such a closing shadow.

America is in the moment of her final fight.

That Picture: You and Me

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that picture you and me

There’s this picture

In my head

Sometimes

When I need some kind of nudge

That if I don’t conjure it up,

I’ll never see it again

And I’ll just fold forever into fight or flight.

The picture is nothing idyllic or rose-colored. Who would want to fish for a dream of perfection?

When we all know, there’s

Never been any Eden.

What has transpired in the never-ending bullet train of time is a lot of imperfections.

It’s been messy.

Rage and greed and hate are not new.

They’ve always been a part of this human condition,

Instead of holding up the social contract, it’s the hate and the greed and the rage that start to turn the picture as if it had a soul that was threaded loose.

A moment, a civilization, a species that may simply unravel.

The picture I want to see:

It’s really just you and me,

And it’s just a normal day.

Sunshine spreads, and the world turns once more.

In those moments of nothing really,

There’s peace and comfort, something we all cling to.

We’ve made it through, and the people decided that they could no longer

crave the greed and the hate and the rage.

They looked around and, more than not, just couldn’t bend another day to the mongers of cruelty.

Why are some even this way?

Wrapping their condemnation in something less uncomfortable

What is so dead or malignant inside of them?

Well, it’s the rage and the hate and the greed. It seemed like such a fit.

But it wears them more than they don it.

It’s breathing and fluid, tentacles of tyranny.

There’s no picture for them. They’ve really got no image anymore; they’ve fallen to be the worst of us.

It’s no place but the present.

But as Orwell said,

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

The control sits on a carousel, faster and harsher – where will the picture land?

In the ash or the hope-locked thicket?

I won’t let it go. I cannot be – I cannot let you, the best of us, be consumed by the hate and the rage and the greed.

That picture, I will forever call for it.

Not for the memory; it’s not one.

We aren’t anywhere near anything great.

We are addicted to the spin and the other-ing and the misplaced self-importance.

Look around.

Snap some stills in your head.

Ask yourself to record what you see.

Is it there?

Do you have it?

Will you remember it?

If you do, I’ll see you on the other side.

In the picture of you and me.

She Is the Kind of Thing My Heart Always Needs

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she is the kind of thing my heart always needs

There is spirit in her laugh.

It’s the kind of thing that captures a memory.

And we’ve had decades of them.

Yet I’ll never grow tired of her remembering them

or waiting for the next ones to begin.

She is someone I’ve always longed to be close to and

Someone I had many firsts with – the kind that write your story.

It’s the kind of thing that conjures a feeling you never forget.

She was magical and brave and full of sparkle even when she thought she was wrong

or strange

or just too different.

She never tried too hard,

letting her springs of curls do as they pleased.

As childhood turned to adolescence to adulthood, there were times when we had to grow apart to come back together.

One of the best days of my life was the day we became whole with one another again.

Nervous, I was to see if we still fit.

That first hug brought so much rushing back.

It’s the kind of thing that will make you weep whenever you glance back.

The world has been harsh; the playout often cruel.

No one gets through life

without the scrapes and scars.

But if you have real love by your side in the form of someone like her,

It’s the kind of thing that gets you through.

I’ll never be unloved or alone with her in my tribe.

Celebrating her is a joy of my life.

With her heart connected to mine,

It’s the kind of thing that makes the big, dark sky of the unknown less scary.

This, my friend, my sister, my love is a true story about two girls who never quite felt right where they started and learned that was so very okay.

Beautifully, they found brighter paths and never lost each other.

It’s the kind of thing that emboldens us with audacious hope.

A poem today in celebration of my very wonderful and true friend, Kelda, on her birthday. To write poetry is to live among the beauty of words.

Better Man

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better-man

I wished for so long
you were a better man.
All the wishes
in all the worlds
couldn’t make you
a better man.
Because in the end,
the very end,
you are whatever you think you are.

Even though what you do now
doesn’t touch me,
all the things you didn’t do
still haunt me.
No phone calls,
no notion that I mattered.
You never showed up;
not at the hospital,
the funeral
or any of the other wonderful or devouring things in between.

And there were so many.
I’ve paid for your sins.
I kept going back
to this starry-eyed belief
you were a better man,
or I could make you one.

Your better man just never showed up.
I’d like the time back that I waited.
Deposit every minute back in my hour glass.

Some call you a better man.
They deserve to have their view.
On the opposite side,
I’d wish now to go back and whisper in my ear,
“He’ll never be a better man.”

I would say in soft breaths,
“You will take this pain, this disappointment
and shape it into stories.
You, you will be a better woman.
And, you won’t have to tell yourself
that you’re something else.
It will just be true.”

 

 

If you wonder why I left

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wonder-why-i-left

If you wonder why I left

If you wonder
why I left
just know
it was probably me
not you.

You, see
there’s this duality in me.
The before and after;
before the deaths
after the deaths;
before the truth
after the truth.
When my history
looked less like what the photos say.

I would never say
my life hasn’t been beautiful,
dusted with pure and brilliant
moments: saltwater lips, wake up hugs,
that can’t be
dimmed by the heartbreak of loss and fear and leaving.

If you still wonder
why I left
it’s because I can’t dissolve into your memories
because they are not mine.
Those photo albums, they tell stories.
I was a blonde haired little girl with ideas and fears,
feeling less like a child every day,
but loved without constraint
by the person who mattered most.
I know it because she looked
at me
like I mattered,
like my ideas and stories were bigger than that small town.

If you wonder
why I left
there’s the answer, or part of it.
The pictures don’t show it all;
the black
the blue.
No one puts that in an album.
We don’t show off our brutality; we hide it.

So if you wonder
why I left,
why it’s been 20 years
just know I needed my own story, one where
everyone doesn’t die.
One where it’s okay to expose the shatterings of a child soul.
In the real story, there was a family,
and they all loved,
and they all hurt.
One day it was just me,
sitting in a rubble of stories,
other people’s stories.
I never wonder why I left;
I did it to write my own ending.

I’ll never not want you

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illnevernotwantyou

Today is the day we celebrate love. To be honest, we don’t really recognize Valentine’s. Maybe because it’s turned into something that means little about love. This is not a condemnation or assault on roses or heart shaped boxes of candy. For us, we show up for each other every day, respect each other every day and of course love each other no matter what the day brings. However, to prove I’m not a Valentine’s Scrooge, I share with you today a poem for my love.

I’ll never not want you

I’ll never not want you
near me.
I’ll never not want
to hear
your heartbeat
under my ear.

No matter where you are,
I feel your
smile, wrap around my thoughts;
your voice
slow and soothing
tunnels through my veins.

Somehow, some way
in a world of a million stars
and unkindness at many wrong turns,
you found me, and I found you.
We looked out at those stars,
those millions of glimmers.
And instead of feeling small,
we felt full.
You took my hand,
like it was more than just a hand,
but the most delicate of flesh
that connects to a heart that drums
with a special murmur just for you.

I’ll never want you
near me.
I’ll never grow
tired of you,
and the way you make me feel
every day
like I’m your favorite star
in a sky
of glimmers.