Off-Season Poetry

Well, it's not April, but why not put a little poetry up here anyway. I'll be posting some of the stuff I've written in the last four or five months.

THE END

WOW.
Well, that's that; April's officially over, and with it, NaPoWriMo. I enjoyed it so much this year that I'm considering challenging myself to a poem a week for the next few months. We'll see how that goes...
Until next year!

From One Month Ago

You know it’s been, one month and nothing’s changed

I’m still here thinking about that feeling, trying to regain

The poem that started off this track, it’s the same but now

I’m writing for the future instead of what’s back, behind –

You know it’s all, it hasn’t changed for what,

For nine months now at least and I’m here, still the same

Pages open, the thousands of photos and, the tens of

Thousands of words I’ve read, letters on my knuckles like

Letters on your back, like letters I still lack I can’t gain,

I follow this pattern again and again and I don’t. I don’t try

To escape from this loop it makes me smile more sweetly than

The bitterness I cry, I don’t ache – like the way I did

The rake across the lungs in that grade, it’s different from

The same. Instead I smile so damn, so wide, my friends all ask

I stopped trying to hide, I let go and they, they turn away but

It’s still there, so raw and so full and so bare in my lungs

In my chest, I don’t wait I don’t rest I explode, open and up into it

It’s the same. It remains. It’s the same.

And no, nothing’s changed from one month ago, and no

I don’t try to pretend I’m not waiting on edge

At the edge of my book is the dates – and they wait

And no, nothing’s changed from one month ago. I’m still

Writing poetry about leaning out the window sill,

Waiting for the next, explosion of smiles and meanwhile

I wait still.

X----

Back Home

Here we are back in the Northwest, where

Everyone’s too upbeat about the future and

So assured that it’s all gonna change.

Here in the Northwest, our consciousness like

The Pacific, crashing and swelling and cold

And never too far from the rocky shoreline.

Here we are back in the Northwest, with

The only predictable weather and the

Forecaster has it quite easy from winter to June.

Here in the Northwest, our hearts tied by

Computer wires, our minds by ideas and

Tall metal bridges grid-lined in the sky.

Here we are back in the Northwest, where

Sometimes I miss the deep South, a world

Where life is clear-cut and restrictive and safe.

Back in the deep South, the mentality’s old and

Well-tested, the art’s so alive and lives uncontested

And the store has 43 types of thin-sliced white bread.

Here we are back in the Northwest, where

Everything’s so young and recently destroyed,

And nothing lasts longer than a music movement.

Here in the Northwest, the clouds hanging like

Coffee smells in the morning, the days lagging

Like an empty Nirvana song.

XX---

People Change.

I can’t state what you say cuz I don’t know.

The only reason that you’ve given is that shrug and small denial,

That enigmatic smile,

That apologetic way in which you slowly lose your voice.

I can’t argue if you never argue back.

I can’t reason with your mindset since you only state the facts,

If your single contribution is the lack of our locution,

And that loyalty of yours that I can only barely track.

And I worry that… you’ll never be the same.

You know that this decision’s not the game you play with colored guns

It’s a reality that’s harsher than your glaring desert sun

And it will change the man you thought you’d be

And this life that you’ve begun

And she’s right, you know, that this will make you straight –

And take if from me, straight’s not something you want to be

And I prefer you bent, we… both do.

You want respect, you’ll get incomprehension

You’ll get fear and quiet guilt and

Be ignore and acknowledged like you’re shifting dimensions,

And I, I am afraid that you won’t be the same.

People grow. People change.

But I want – at the very least –

I want your smile to remain.

XX---

The Downside to Consorting with the Gods

Woulda done, shoulda done

Lizabeth had a son

Hair being chalky white,

Eyes being black.

Asked ‘bout the color she

Said with a blubber the

Father was Charon who

Pigment did lack.


X----

He Asks No More

He said I don’t feel my heartbeat anymore.

He said I used to have a rhythm, like a knocking at my door,

I used to feel like somebody who’d never lived before,

I used to feel my body track the beating at my core

He said I don’t feel my heartbeat anymore.

He said I’m not pulled to wander anymore.

He said I used to speed on highways just to hear the engine roar,

I used to let the windows down and wish that I could soar,

I used to drive through rainstorms just to watch the water pour

He said I’m not pulled to wander anymore.

He said I don’t dream of flying anymore.

He said I used to stretch my wings and glide over the sea and shore,

I used to swim among the coral on the ocean floor,

I used to dream a world with a thousand open doors,

He said I don’t dream of flying anymore.

He said I used to feel like living. But no more.


XXX--

I Don't Miss You

Poem will not be published due to ridiculously impossible-to-publish nature of poem.
And that's all I'm going to say about THAT.

the 110th floor

I stopped understanding war when it wasn’t about the bad guys and the good guys anymore.

I stopped understanding war years ago, when parents society-sophisticated tried to explain the smoke

And the one thousand back-flipping papers in the sky

And the dust storm running down New York streets:

Firefighters caught up, women in business skirts running and

The planes came from two different directions but

Somehow there were four of them?

I didn’t understand. I didn’t try very hard.

I stopped understanding war when I realized it wasn’t just this once.

When I realized that a war didn’t have a time period, only amplifications

That the towers in New York were really the towers in Khobar and

People screamed the same in Vietnam tunnels as Iwo Jima foxholes and

Your hands shook the same on the video camera in

Tiananmen square and the streets of Syria,

Which were really the streets of Nuremberg, the glass

Sparkling on the pavement like lost stars and

I didn’t understand. I tried to sort these wars into “just” and “un” but I failed.

I stopped understanding war long before I realized the internet understood it all.

Long before I knew that Wikipedia’s blued links could lead me from page to page and

I could spend all night reading about one “operation” after another, searching for

Something headed “The Answer” or “History’s Judgment” or “A Real Reason We Decided To Invade”

Long before I apple-tabbed al Jazeera every hour to check on six separate states of Spring and

Watched hours and hours of footage too raw to be distant in which the

Same floors buckled under the strain of fire to collapse one after another after another and

I had to turn off the sound.

I didn’t understand. I didn’t have the processing power of my little-screened laptop.

I stopped understanding war even after the explosion of its supposed solutions.

The man hiding in his supporter’s dirt floor, his picture on the front page, he didn’t look

Evil, he looked pitiable – he looked helpless – he looked afraid and

The white UN drones, their target compounds didn’t just hold dictators they held a family and

When desert-camouflaged troops crossed over that line for the (gods I hope) last time

It wasn’t a victory it was a breath finally let go and

It was the excuse we needed to forget four and a half thousand left behind and

One set of blood-stained pictures dropped into the ocean after them and still

I don’t understand. I’ve discovered the end of a code-name isn’t the end of a war, only an era.

I’ve stopped understanding war and, honestly, I hardly try anymore. But goddammit I remember.

I can’t tell you if tanks in Kuwait were reasonable, or Cold War funding for Afghan rebels,

And I can’t tell you what it feels like to be hit with a water canon or lead bullets or the loss of a father

But I remember that someone does. I don’t forget that someone stood in a Palestinian camp and lived and

Someone stood on the 110^th floor and didn’t, and I don’t forget that

Someone is responsible. That sometimes that person is the UN’s most wanted

And sometimes he is the decorated war general and the foreign affairs official but I don’t forget that

Sometimes that person is me and even though I –

I don’t always understand, I remember that the violence doesn’t leave when it passes over my head

It isn’t gone when it leaves the television screen and the laptop screen and the public scene, even if it

Is sometimes impossible to understand, it is War and

It remains.


XXXXX

quindesce

One of my favorite things to write during NaPoWriMo, today's (third) poem is actually a pwoermd - a one-word poem.
This one is created with the words "quintessence" and "evanesce" as its roots, but with a meaning slightly different from either.
Some other pwoermds I created tonight (they're lots of fun) that weren't chosen in the final cut are included below.


ineffvanesable

windter

sexpectant

evangeliscence


XXX--