The Poetry Marathon

I wonder why

Must you be so wrapped up,

In chasing love, like there’s some big rush?

Is it just the watching of other couples,

Engrossed in each other,

Or the crying of an empty heart

To share its laughter and woes?

Those come hard, when the smoke has cleared,

It may appear,

When you least expect it,

In the quiet murmur of the morning;

When the fairies have left the dew,

Someone places a jacket over your shoulders,

And whispers goodnight.

There’s a sort of mischief in the night

Where breezes blow,

And tickle our imaginations:

There might be monsters under our beds,

Or fairies tapping on windows,

But with this night,

Comes a peculiar scratch on my car,

That wasn’t there before.

Perhaps it is they

Playing a joke they can get away with,

Melting away without explanation.

Long before our hearts met

There was hidden camaraderie

Between our eyes

In shared laughter

Stolen glances

Inside jokes

Hyperbolic hilarity

Tempered with tangible truth

People say green thumbs are rare

Because they know not

To coax growth from dirt

Is to labour

Watered with the eye’s diamonds

Shone with topaz and citrine

Fed with air

To grow gold from the depths.

There goes the wit wit wit of the bird’s call

“Zhe ge dong xi”

Foreign murmurs

The creak of the ceiling fan

Clatters of various keyboards

Breath blown across the surface of hot coffee

A cacophony

Under the sign that has a finger to its lips

Like a gentle mockery

Of pure silence

It looms

I am buried in its shadow

It moves not

Towards me, but I towards

It is unscalable

I teeter a mere inch off the ground

But that inch is hard-earned

I reach above my head

Fingers balancing on a narrow rock shelf

And pull.

Sometimes I wish I could be a bubble

Be a beautiful iridescence

Keep my rose-colored glasses on

And ascend ever higher

But for all their shine

They are temporary

And I am not.

There are few things worse than

A cold house at the end of a long day.

What is it like to be so highly revered,

That your very word is authority?

Do masters ever feel slighted

That hours of work, years,

Labouring onward

Through dulled eyes and hazy minds

Were dismissed as ‘genius’?

A born prodigy.

A lack of talent may sting,

But excessive talent can hurt.

Hello, shopkeeper,

I’m just dropping in

I’d like to return this please,

And here’s the slip of my buy-in.

It’s something I bought,

When it and I were still new-

Everyone clamored for one,

So I thought I had to get one too.

But it didn’t suit me well:

It clanked like a great drum

And sometimes it leaked; on the whole,

It was quite tiresome.

Please take it back,

I don’t even want a refund.

There were few joys,

But the break of a canyon.

So, yes, shopkeeper,

I’d like to return this heart.

I’ve had enough of it,

I’ve mended enough of its shards.