The Poetry Marathon

Ingredients:
1. Courage
2. Dishonest Lovers
3. Dead Friends
4. Years of Recreational Self-Destruction
5. Surrendered Ego

Directions:

To begin is to fail.
If you are trying to be intentional with this recipe,
you will certainly spoil the flavor of its culmination.
You mustn’t try, you just have to keep participating.
Make choices, have some courage,
but to get anywhere with this you’re going to have to mess it up.

Love comes swiftly, or what you think is love, unripened,
yet so enticing you pick it from the branch before its ready.
Quick to taste it, to make it yours,
And when you give it your breath, it spoils in your hands,
wilts behind your turned back,
rots out of sight of your bowing head.
Pairings will never be perfect,
which is why all of them are critical elements to this recipe.

Hearts grow wide as they deepen.
Those who sing a similar song come and go,
or come and stay to share the weight of life’s approach.
Fun is had, be generous with its amounts.
Dreams are birthed from tender lips, mix them in quickly,
discard lesser ones if you have a change of taste.
A place is created, inhabited in the stories unfolding,
where fellowship and inspiration are cultivated in a trustworthy company.
Death appears like yeast rising too quickly in the oven,
like the white froth boiling over the pot on the stove,
with the burner set too high.
Death’s flavor is bitter and unforgettable
You will never be the same.

Your appetites will change, diseases and demons will want to feed,
the reach for true nourishment shadowed by the luster of hollow magic.
An emptiness that aches to be filled in,
that makes you believe you can add enough ingredients to satiate the hunger,
You’ll be stirring this for a long time
but it’s consistency will never hold.

If you fail hard enough and long enough at this you might get it right.
You might end up with humility that connects you with every other living thing,
void of any identity that separates you from coexistence.
Perhaps a little more careful with what you crave,
aged to taste.

In a paradise of dreaming fields,
walking the inner path of righteous purpose,
pores open along the mother’s young, incubating body,
skin fearlessly drinking the living warmth of the sun’s rays.

Protecting the child, the idea, the seed of the future
swathed in white, rose-petaled linen.
In the silence of her steps that barely
disturb the dust of this sterile road,
memories of their atrocities are not far behind.

When the holy house on the hill comes into view
she checks over her shoulder,
for the shouts and the cries of the innocent,
the bombs and the wails of the dying still echo—
all the horrors of the world persist.
The soul of humanity at risk of being lost,
severed by a fear-hunger feeding upon itself,
the world at war but the child in her arms still sleeps.

The abyss is insurmountable, measureless
a yawning vacancy of indifference swallowing all,
everything dances momentarily upon its lips.
Nothing is safe, only delayed in its ingestion.

She sets the child down on the edge,
carves its name into the earthen flesh of human consciousness.
Save this dream blossoming upon the graves of war!
Knowing the cost, knowing the risk,
she steps forward knowing that all
might change for the sake of belief—
FREEDOM.

White roses dissipate,
an ethereal fire escapes the darkness.

Looking forward to another creative purge! This will be by 3rd full marathon. I have been in a slump with my writing despite all the great material occurring throughout the nation and world lately. I feel my voice should be stronger during times of great change, but I have honestly been overwhelmed I think, sad, afraid, voiceless.  I am hoping by committing to a full 24 hours of nothing but my need to create poetry, and by sharing in this event with fellow writers from all over the world, I might find the inspiration to compose what I want to say; to make sense of what I am feeling.

Good luck, everyone!

Cut open, tear. Bleed from magic inkwells
Stare. The window’s pane is a television screen;
what you see outside is not actually happening.

The president is trustworthy
The police are protecting you
The children are safe.
Remember to giggle a little
if anyone tries to tell you differently.

The information that confirms your own beliefs
is a veil thickened by the media scenes,
biasedly depicting the facts as conspiracy
blurring the line between truth and honesty,
magnifying the delusion you choose to fit your understanding.

But If you have found yourself living in a world
you no longer recognize, trust your eyes
because reality has become that alarming.

America, America, it is of thee I sing. Home of the brave, sold out
land of the free. Our country is being stolen by the
freedom of corporate capital, the freedom to violate the earth
for quick fortune, future generations forfeiting their inheritance,
permanently desecrated by the oil tycoons greed.

The freedom to exploit another human being
because he can’t read the fine print, or afford a lawyer
to interpret the endless legal jargon, or because he is
so desperate he skips meals to feed his children,
the freedom to take him for all he’s got because
he would sell his soul to fill their hungry bellies.

Our country is being sold by those who value
the dollar more than human life. To sit by is to choose
to do nothing. To look away is want to do nothing.
To avoid, to underplay, to deny is to choose to do nothing.
To write an internet rant, a poem, to cast a vote
is a little more than nothing, but to stand up, make a fist,
and say “No!” Now that’s something.

Power is only gained, taken, and kept through the threat
and direct use of force. An uncomfortable truth,
they don’t teach you directly in school, but if you read between the lines,
of the one-sided lies in the World History textbooks,
a common theme holds thread through to today,
just as it did at the dawn of civilization:
Power is assured through violence.

The powerful only fear violence, because in a world ruled by money,
they are the untouchables gods of industry, but everyone can bleed.
And it is only when they are personally confronted with death,
do they see that life has no price. It is only when their hands are holding
the ebbing spill of their entrails, they finally realize the frail impermanence
of monetary luxury. As we consume, so too are we consumed,
for there is no liberty for the cogs in the machine.

So when you see nationalism, bigotry, racial pride, police forces being
used to protect the investment interests of the wealthy, stand up! Make a fist!
Resistance requires mass.

The most potent emotion I can recall
from my childhood is a feeling of needing
something I could not explain. I have countless
memories of pestering my mother in the living room
of our home, complaining that “I’m bored,” and
“I want to do something.”

My mother usually encouraged me to be
constructive at first, such as finishing my share
of the housework, which I often neglected.
She knew this wouldn’t work, it wasn’t what I was after,
but still, she felt motherly enough to remind me.

After this option was shot down,
she would canter through a list of activities: drawing,
playing outside, reading; all of which sounded unappealing,
and still, my dissatisfaction would fester
like an ache I could not mend, an unmet need
I couldn’t understand at the time.

I saw a grey squirrel scampering
up a sweet gum tree with a plastic
yogurt cup clenched between his teeth.
disgusted by how our waste harms
the wildlife we share space with,
I thought to take a picture with my phone,
so that I could post in on my social media feed
and publicly shame fellow members of my species.
But the squirrel, delighted to satiate his hunger,
did not want to pose for me, and I had to interrupt
my three-year-old’s piggyback ride to even get to my phone,
which didn’t make him happy,
and I lost the squirrel somewhere above
the overlapping branches.

The swell of my heart is a pale fragility
passing for life found quiet
beneath a gently nestled river stone.
Accompanied by my subterranean neighbors
infected with less than aesthetic features:
spineless, many-legged, permeable skin.
Lowly inhabitants to keep
my lonely heart company.

How dare she lift that stone,
so perfectly were we
in the mud and wet earth,
I, my heart, the worms, and the dirt.

She, bringing sunshine and oxygen
making my woodlice friends scramble for cover.
And me, stumbling blindsided by her light,
with an idiot’s stare,
too ignorant to follow my friends,
too dumb to know when to run.
Baffled by her strange glow.

*But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would our story be one worth watching? The interplay of hearts
struggling to pull some meaning from the love they gave away.

Then coming together again, years after the war had receded,
to find that same spark which ignited a lifetime together.
Oh, what sweet day, to fall helpless at love’s unveiling.
To arrive once again, at the beginning
with a heart folded like tempered steel, reopened to its core,
laid bare so that its soft center may
be strummed by her familiar touch.

*First line from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

A three-year-old shivers unbeknownst
to what is causing his body to spasm involuntarily.
The horrors of the sad, clown-faced parents
exhausted, humorless, their internalized torture
exudes an aura that suffocates the pale, tremored
waters of the hospital room.

Sitting alone in shadowed corners
feeling the weight of a marriage dissolve
as worry for our small child lingers over
the dull cadence of a heart monitor’s finite calculations.
Waiting to hear but nothing is ever promised.
The sway of information, up and down,
we cling to any bit of hope offered.
Bargaining the entire world away to save one life
to see you safe…
our child.

Dear Graduates,

An entire class of walking portraits,
emerging selves eclipsed by worried dreams
shuffling through illusionary thresholds,
initiated by the anxiety of insecure authority
governing by mandate
while still teaching through sleepless hearts.

A world of wild dreams chase you,
untouched and promising, your lips speak of a
relevance somewhere between the safety of naivety
and the dark truth of responsibility.

Structured learning taught you to function as a mass
within a system that produces the individual as a part of the whole.
How much will you rise above the rest? Or how far will you fall from where you stand?
It’s up to you now, anything more you want from the world
has to begin with your efforts. It won’t merely be provided.
No one is entitled to care about your feelings,
or to listen to what you think. If you want those
relationships you have to cultivate them.

Create your path, or life has a way of creating it for you.
But wouldn’t you rather choose it?