The Annual Death
Autumn is when the dead awakes
From its grave of stillness
To spread its ghastly state
Across the vibrant life of the world.
Nothing lasts
As the dead sweeps by.
No leaf withstands those grotesque winds,
And each bit of foliage falls slowly to its death
To join the mass grave of others before.
And the world turns grey,
And the trees creak with an eerie moan
Because they don’t have enough life in them
To utter refreshing words from their branches.
Hidden Streams
How I long to know
What a hidden stream knows.
To see what it has seen.
To hide amongst the tangled branches,
And be revealed
Only to those special few
Who take the time
To look for something more in life.
Degas’ Dancer
(A poem based on the “Little Dancer of Fourteen Years” by Edgar Degas)
The lights go out
One by one
Throughout the echoey museum.
I stand there
On my pedestal,
Watching the nightly shadows
Coat the exhibit walls with mystery.
My feet are turned out
In a perfect fourth position,
And my chin stretches slightly upward
In constant obedience to my invisible teacher.
I was built to dance.
The dream was slipped
Into each layer of my waxy figure,
Every gentle fray of my tutu,
The entirety of my disciplined stature.
Yet my feet are plastered to the ground,
And my limbs are casted in this wax
From which I was formed.
Tonight will be different.
Tonight, I will break free
And fulfill my destiny.
And I proceed
To balletically articulate my feet,
To balletically articulate my feet,
Peeling them up from the pedestal below.
I then extend my wax limbs,
And feel my muscles contract
With newfound strength.
I break my forced, obedient gaze.
My eyes slide every which way with complete ease,
As if they were well-oiled
After years of being rusted into place.
At last, I am free!
And I dance
And dance
And dance
Through the halls of the quiet museum.
I weave with grace
Between the beautiful works of art
I thought I would never be able to see.
I prance over artifacts
And ancient relics
And leap towards the sky,
The moon shining bright on my waxed cheek,
Piercing liberty into every inch of my being.
But as always,
All good things
Come to an end.
And the sun starts to rise.
Its rays begin to harden my wax
And force my jaw into its familiar upright position,
As I make my way somberly back to my old pedestal.
“This is not the end,” I promise myself.
And it wasn’t.
For every night afterwards,
That ballerina
Woke up from her sculpted sleep
To laugh and dance and rejoice
Under a cloak of starry darkness.
Swallowing the Vitamin
“I am sorry” are not words to be merely spoken,
They are words to be swallowed.
And it should hurt,
Like a jagged vitamin
Dragging its way down your esophagus
To sit in the pit of your stomach.
Those words should rest there
And sink in.
It should feel uncomfortable.
But just like a vitamin,
That apology will heal you,
And nourish your soul.
But you must swallow it,
In order to experience its benefits.
For you can only heal
If you’ve first encountered pain.
Words can be muttered,
Wrought out of the mouth,
Yet you absorb no nutrients from a vitamin
If it just sits in your mouth,
Rolling about your tongue.
Swallow it.
Feel it travel through you.
Let the nutrients absorb into your skin,
And be at peace.
The Unification
I am poetry,
And poetry is me.
The ink courses through my veins,
Bleeding out onto the page
From a fresh wound,
Seeking to make sense of itself.
Seeking to make sense of itself.
It spreads out in different paths
Like a tree growing in fast-forward motion.
My blood carries truth,
And stains the blank canvas
With genuine words
That swim through my haunted mind.
Each lament is a twitch of my eye,
A tear dripping onto the paper,
Dampening its surface
With pure emotion
That can no longer hide.
Every stanza is my skeleton,
Mapped out bone by bone,
Wrapped in the muscle of my words,
Each syllable stretching and tensing,
Moving me along.
Keeping me grounded.
The poem’s rhythm
Is the rhythm of my heart.
Hear it beat.
Again.
And again.
Constant.
My heart is opened to you.
Take it.
Grasp it.
Read me from inside out.
Be with my soul
Long after the rhythm ceases.
Full of blood and tears,
Full of body and passion,
This blank page is no longer innocent.
Nor will it ever be again.
And that is poetry.
That, my friend,
Is me.
Webbing
Amid the morning fog
Lingering amongst the trees,
A spider’s creation
Lay scattered within dark hedges
That hide behind a thick, vaporous haze.
Every construction holds a delicate uniqueness,
As the silky thread sprawls every which way.
So intricately designed,
No pattern is exactly the same.
The mist of daybreak
Has seemed to put its touch on the creation,
For every strand is strung
With numerous balls of dew.
In some regions,
These glassy beads of water merge with one another
Developing larger collections of moisture
The size of raindrops.
What a wonderful site
To see a spider web
On a foggy morning.
With each thread so carefully placed,
How could these works of nature
Not be considered art?
It is a tangled web we weave
If we are to think artists only exist in human form,
For not even the most talented human
Could replicate such beauty as this.
Roasting
There is something ghostly
About watching a marshmallow roast,
As it is licked by flames,
Coming so close
To being consumed
By the overwhelming power of fire.
Its edges begin to brown to a crisp,
And its body becomes swollen
From the heat that radiates through its surface.
And the marshmallow finally melts away,
Like a mysterious specter
Fading into the background.