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
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.
I promised honesty. The following is something between a poem and a journal; it’s how I sort out my thoughts. I have pages of this type of thing stashed away, little mental snapshots of who I was that day.
Don’t be fooled when you read it: it sounds like I’m hugely popular. Really I’ve only had a handful of likes and it’s already breaking me! I find myself getting obsessive, checking back, checking back again. I do the same thing with Facebook. Microrewards for each action (e.g. ooh, another like!) are causing my brain to spiral into an obsessive loop. Aren’t humans crazy? I think I’ll take a break for the rest of the day.
A nectarine in my palm
The smell is sweet, sour, tangy, floral
It makes my mouth fill with anticipation
The skin is soft; like human skin
Cool to touch
Heavy with moisture
A baby tree inside
It’s so alive
I want to bite it
Oh how I want to bite it
Take its life for my own
Every act we make
Is an act of destruction
There is no peace
This blog is already breaking my tao
What a fragile thing peace of mind is
Likes and follows haunt me
Opinions like a hurricane
And I find myself thinking,
Is this good enough
Can I please them?
I’ve got to get it out of me
I can find my peace again
I can blog and find my peace
It’s a level up
Not worrying about notoriety is easy when you’re unknown
It’s easy to be vulnerable
Where no one can see you
I can’t hide
If I hide I go backwards
I must maintain stability of mind
I must remain empty
Because when you let yourself fill up
You are no longer useful
What is it about the rain.
Maybe because it is the only thing left that man cannot touch.
Its anger may kill us
and there is nothing we can do.
It makes one feel small
to know the rain,
the lightning, the thunder.
The largeness of it all
envelops the sun
until even the tallest building
casts no shadow.
Everybody runs from the rain.
Everybody hides.
The ones who embrace the rain are anomalies.
To stand in the rain
is to stand alone.
There is a stereotype that these are the ones who know how to live.
No. These are the ones who turn to embrace
their own destruction.
And in doing so,
they live more brightly.
Under the flickering lightning
only they
cast shadows.
How to Blog
First you go through a lot of work to make a website
Then you realize you have no idea who you are
And it takes a sense of self
To blog
Whoops
All that working on being Tao
All that losing the ego
Is strangely detrimental to blogging
Blogging is about throwing your opinions around
Blogging is about knowing
Blogging is about showing off
Blogging is about trying to change the world
Well
Fuck that shit
This blog means nothing
And maybe that way
It’ll be a little bit nicer than most
That’s my hope
Oops I accidentally hoped.
Sarah D. Silvey 