Neutral gray walls
Neutral gray walls
Good boss
Adequate paycheck
Few words
No fights
Long quiet hours
Peace.
Just you
Typing
Alone
With your demons.
Tag Archives: Poetry
Inside a glass of water
Thin wet wormy spiral
Color mixing in thready dissolution
It lands at the base of the glass
Still heavy with momentum
And spreads
A loose puddle
There is no place like the world
Inside a glass of water.
Rules are different there.
Things bend without breaking
Moisture saves anything
Moisture ruins everything
Insinuates from the outside
Desolidifies
Dissolves
Until everything
Is just water again.
Dip into creativity
Dip into creativity
A deep black well
Creatures run deep
Under the glassy still water.
Just a cup is all you need
Look close and see
Tadpoles, minnows, miraculous life
Crayfish, seaweed, plankton, krill.
Swirling alive
Unfathomable life.
Sometimes you can catch a big fish
But content yourself with minnows.
Even these
Some cannot catch.
Even these are a boon.
Lucky, lucky, lucky.
Home
When you’ve spent your days
Scooping up viscera
Hosing down gore
When you’ve spent your nights
Huddled with the others
Waiting for the next shell to hit your trench
When it’s them or you
So you pull the trigger
And fear to miss more than you fear to hit
And you want to dream about peace
But all you see when you close your eyes
Is the face of that kid dead in the rubble
And the yielding pressure of her body underfoot
Before you realized what, in the haze, you had stumbled over.
When food tastes like water
Water tastes like worms
And heavy smells permeate
Gun oil, swamp foot, metal blood
When all this smells like home
Then
You’ll understand.
The cave
Based on a nightmare I had.
heavy cave walls
darkness pacing around me like a panther
trapped between two tiny chambers
each tunnel leads to the same dead end.
hope is a small bead of light in the rock
just big enough to see air, freedom,
my family.
they leave, unaware of my absence.
forced onto my belly
crushed by immovable stone
i realize the terrible truth of my situation
i will have to wait in this hole all night
i am so far from the path that
i may never be found.
the air was thick but now it’s smothering
i scream
one long cry for help
one expression of fear
when my lungs are spent
the black echo hooks its claws in my thin hope
shredding it to tatters.
the cave closes for the night.
one by one, the floodlights shut down.
I woke up with the pillow on my face, threw it off, and took the sweetest gasp of air I’ve ever tasted.
Sarah D. Silvey 