Diffuse

Somewhere along the line I started

Trying too hard.

Some days I want to turn everything into a poem, but

Those days nothing gets written down.

Some days I just want to speak. Perform everything

Like it's spoken word or it's slam or it's something,

Even though it's just words.

In the end it's all just words.

God, breathe in breathe in.

Don't exhale. Just breathe in, in,

Don't stop. Let your breathe diffuse.

Some days I pretend to be profound.

It helps me sleep.

It helps me dream.

When every word is precisely significant -

Well, that's a comforting thought.

It means this, too, will fade.

God, breathe out breath out.

Don't. Just don't.

Thoughts diffuse like

Light. Through the blanket

You threw on to keep it from waking your parents.

Starlight doesn't diffuse. It doesn't lose itself through the lightyears. If only

We could be so strong....

God, just shine, shine. God.

Don't stop. Please never say you'll stop.

Unfocused. Like water spreading up through paper, diffused.

Softening it's resistence to the world

Making it unusable.

Making the ink blur, blur. Smear and dull.

Let's run away. Let's exist in letters and pens,

Let's case ourselves up in envelopes and send them over oceans.

If I was contained in these pages, would I be happy?

As happy as I seem between their lines?

God. Don't ask that.

Just write it and be done, send it and be done.

Don't live in those - that's not the way to breathe.

Let go, let it slide down the mail slot.

I want to turn all the lights off. One, two, three.

Let's be black for a while. I have this crazy idea

The night sky will fill up with lights.

My phone is going off. A doorbell song

A jarringly slow jazz number cut in elecronic tones.

And that means love. That means life, means reality.

It's something hard to hold onto, those tinny little notes.

They cut into my skin.

Ah. Breathe. In and out, for once, breathe.

Be even. Let it all flood in and recede

Simultaneously. Don't ever fill up.

God, don't let me fill up.

Let's take the bus again. I like it when the doors close

It feels like coming home.

Like locking the deadbolt.

I don't mind the one twenty-five fare, just

Leave me the transfer slips.

I'll pin them on my wall with your name.

Fading out. Like radio through mountain passes,

Struggling to hold on. Wanting desperately to float away.

Don't try the tunnels, they never work.

They never, never work.

God. Ah. Ah, I am alive. I forget sometimes.

If I lived within this keyboard, would I still?

Would the letters slowly diffuse over my surface,

Form an even plane of words?

Scattered. Like stars, like starlight.

It retreats into your eyes, eventually.

It's traveled so far and it seeks comfort

In those little glass domes. Give them rest.

Then send them back, so they too

Can come home.

Home. Sometimes it feels like my own.

Tonight, it feels still, with the lights on.

Sometimes a thought comes out, and bleaches in the rays

Let's turn the last lamp out. Let's go dark.

And let the light diffuse.

XXX--

Shoulders

Well, the rain fell like

Straight pencil lines,

And my tight shoulders,

My tight soul unfurled

Blossomed like

Like something poetic, maybe a flower,

But for now just call it an umbrella:

Inverted, filling up with rain,

Its little hands gathering up the drops to

Hold them close to its center,

Its spindly branching heart.

Tomorrow when I twist up out of

Spiraled blankets on my bed,

My shoulders, my soul will

Wrap themselves back up

Into sea-shell whorls,

The folding blades of my bare back

Turned towards the glass-cold sky

That gold-melt sunrise sky

That reminds me too much of the summer.

But for now, well, the

Rain falls in

Straight pencil lines,

Graphite marking up the

Dome of sky above me;

And my shoulders, wound

Into spindles around my soul,

Unfurl; like something poetic, maybe,

Or for now let's just say like

A ballerina's bun,

Her hair spiraling out of its tie

To fall heavily down

On her shoulders.

XXXX-

Definitely Not

My head hurts.

My - frontal lobe, it's aching,

No not from - the calculus work I was doing,

No it's not from this

iPad I've been staring at - I

Think I'd know the difference -

No, my

My head hurts

My head hurts not because I've only

Gotten - only - 6 hours of sleep each night,

Not because I've been

Filled to the tip-top, to the peak of my skull,

To the ends of my hair with

Stress over the future,

No,

That's not why it's

Just that my

My head hurts

My head really - hurts -

And it's not

It's not because I ate less dinner and

More toast that

Inexplicably included brown sugar, it's not

It's not that I've been indoors all afternoon with these

Piercingly inorganic lights no it's

It's not for those reasons it's that my

My head hurts

Just that my head hurts

Because -

Because of you or maybe because -

Because of lack of you

My head hurts

Because I

I wish so goddamn desperately you were here and I

I can't pretend that this doesn't feel like

Living "normally" -

This wash of numbing - of dulling -

This ache that is only that my

My head hurts -

My head hurts -

Because you're not

Not here with me -

No not

Because of the caffeine in that

Chai tea I drank half an hour ago, but

Because that tea

Reminded me

Of you.

XX---

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--