Category Archives: Poetry

A Little Sad

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When I promised honesty, that wasn’t so much for you as it was a promise to myself. Every single thing I post is a little bit scary to put out there, whether it’s silly, or straightforward, or sad. I’m not sure why I’m being so strict with myself. Well, yes I do. I know that it’s good for me, and I know that writing is missing something when it is written by a person who won’t let you see past their walls. Posting about being sad is the hardest though. Vulnerability… Just the word makes me cringe. It’s so gooey sounding.

 

It’s easy to write a poem

When you feel something.

When passion rises

Words are cheap.

But when you’re sad

Every word has to battle its way to the surface.

I have nothing to be sad about.

All my needs are met.

I have people whom I love

And who love me.

I have access to all the chocolate I can eat

And the freedom and funds to do so.

I even have the Tao; something I can believe in.

I let go of resentment and guilt.

Yet still

Still there are days

When I am sad

And I can’t

Pin down

Why.

My sister doesn’t get sad.

She told me so.

There are people like that in the world.

There are also people in shitty situations

Who have so much trouble they don’t have time to be sad.

Maybe I’m not being true to myself somehow

Maybe I’ve inherited something

Maybe the happy people are the anomalies

And to be sad is merely human.

Maybe it’s in our nature to strive for more

No matter how much we have.

Maybe I’ll go to sleep

And tomorrow morning

Everything will be rosy again

As it so often is.

For me, the morning really does bring light.

 

It’s gotten better with age.

I’ve learned coping mechanisms

I’ve learned to express myself

I’ve learned to get exercise.

All these things make a difference.

But I guess there are some things

You can’t completely rub out.

Everything leaves scars.

On Immortality

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Who do you think you are?

There is no immortality.

Immortality is impossible.

Everything dies.

Writers who claim to immortality by their body of work?

Two generations tops.

But what if you’re a great writer?

Your work could last hundreds of years.

If you are truly great, a thousand years.

The culling process of time is cruel and relentless.

What about Plato, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching?

They have lasted millennia.

But nothing can be saved forever.

One day the library will burn.

There were great works, immortal works, before these were written.

Mankind has long existed

And long has it thought

And of these thoughts

We know nothing.

They are dead.

But

The ideas renew in us.

Stories are reinvented, retold

Concepts are worked out anew

The same mistakes get made

Over

And over

It is a parent’s pain

To watch a child stumble through life

It is our pain

That each generation must live a war

It is a country’s pain

To bloat, to weaken, to topple

It is a people’s pain

To forget.

In the end the sun will burn us out.

After that the universe will collapse.

And some say

A new universe will be born

And the same mistakes made over again.

 

We will all be forgotten.

We all only have one life.

We can’t even impress who we really are

On our closest friends.

An identity is transient

It changes with each emotion.

How then can a life be remembered?

How can a great work of art

No matter how perfect

No matter how true

No matter how it affects the people

Each person will read into it

What matches their feelings at the time.

One may read the same book

Two, three different times

And feel something different each time.

Nobody knows exactly what you felt when you wrote it.

No one can ever know.

You don’t even know.

Every new thought, your old thought dies.

Every new cell, your old cells die.

You want immortality?

You with the ever changeable identity

Which you deem so important?

You, who are already dead?

Frogs and Wrinkles

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I spent some time at the Ozarks this weekend. Two poems happened. 



The warm evening air
Gently carries the song
Of a hundred happy frogs
Over the water.

The people are out too,
Talking to each other on their porches.
Their voices different
But they sing the same tune.

 

And this little haiku:

 

Time presses wrinkles

Earned remnants of smiles or frowns

Thumbprint of a soul

On Damaged Friends

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There is a man

who wanders into my cube occasionally

to chat.

It’s a welcome break from office tedium.

I brighten up and smile.

He sees me brighten up and always seems shocked, then brightens up himself.

Having seen this, I brighten up some more.

I have to wonder,

Does no one else smile when he walks in?

Does he get so little affection in life

that it only takes this amount of love to throw him?

 

When I was a kid, we used to pass a boy on our rural back road

standing at a muddy, grassy bend.

Just standing.

He used to wave

and I would wave back.

“He’s retarded,” my  mom would say dismissively.

As if that made his all-inclusive friendliness less meaningful.

But she would wave as well.

I was always happy to see him.

 

There is a man who stands on his front lawn

In a derelict part of town.

Every day on the way to work I pass him by.

He waves to everyone whose face and car he recognizes.

We wave back.

Often he has more than one person on the lawn with him

sometimes sitting on his sidewalk steps

sometimes standing with their backs to him and chatting to one another.

His house seems to be a gathering place

at seven in the morning.

But I am a grown woman now

so when I pass him by

I worry about him.

 

 

 

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