The Poetry Marathon

I strike out on my own because I need to,

Yet always, the looking back and feeling alone,

Wherever I am is not where I should be.

There is a cure for this.

Get closer to the center,

The inner sun.

All these orbiting planets,

In constant flux,

Often frozen…

The sun is warmed by its own identity.

Get your head out of the Oort Cloud,

You are the Sun.

She sinks for no one.

She is fire and love and a caressing sweet breath of wind,

Playfully mussing your hair.

Love is her habit, not for gain,

But because it flows.

When the darkness came to call,

So brilliant was her light,

And so much her habitude,

That it did not darken her heart,

But provided a place for becoming,

Like a butterfly’s cocoon.

“Quick,” she said. “You’re running out of time.”

I opened my eyes and blinked, tried to focus on her face.

“How is it,” I asked, “that thoughts rise like bubbles,

And then pop suddenly? Like this, they disappear.”

“No matter,” she said. “The Muse is teasing you.

She wants you to appreciate it when her lightning strikes.

Try wooing her and see what happens.”

And I knew then, I’d been an awful suitor.

Now I rebel.

Now the inner scream.

But no, I am not unhappy.

I am just hanging over the side of a great pool,

Reaching my arm in, up to the shoulder.

I can smell the surface—not water, but words—

And I see my reflection, undulating.

I could fall in, and maybe I will!

So, rebellion—explain?

Well, considering that I am feeling happy,

And alive,

I suppose it is rebellion

Against the thought that anything in the world is wrong.

I have been marching in the wrong army,

And I defect.

They’ll never catch me.

I’ve become invisible.

I ran.

I ran to run towards and away.

I ran to move.

Like a shark, I would die, if I did not move.

Columns of sorrow rose up in this city.

I never perceived them before.

It took near-fatal heartbreak,

To become sensible

To the near-fatal heartbreak that is like fabric,

Like mesh,

The warp and the weft.

You.

You threw a javelin.

How did you have such perfect aim?

And I, compelled to run,

Cannot remove it, or I will die outright.

What a heavy object with which to move.

What weight I bear because of you (because of me).

She told me she wouldn’t be mine.

Such insolence from such a common girl.

Perhaps she knows that, while common,

She is nothing but common.

She is something rare, and I don’t know what,

And I suppose I never will.

I am on fire,

Hotter than the forge,

To be shown this brand

Of disrespect, by a girl in the foolish bloom of youth.

So foolish, the bloom of youth.

I told him I’d never be his.

For I am in love with a secret.

I have been shown the magic of this world,

And now can never be a common man’s wife.

I’ll never live the common life.

The common life has already burned,

Like the coal that heats his forge.

I am the iron that has melted

To take a new shape.

I am molded by wings,

Those great, dark wings,

That took me far away,

In the moment I first saw them.

“I had trust in you.

What did you do?

What did you do?”

It is a fire alight in his mind,

This betrayal of his kind,

And loathsome weakness to forgive

And put the past behind.

And what of her,

The delicate girl

Whose existence could exert

Such frantic pull

And madness imbue,

Shouldn’t he settle with that one, too?

They will rue, yes,

The lovers will rue.

It is an itch that he must scratch,

And so he’s weaker than he thinks;

For all his might, he can’t transcend

His rage and so the lovers will end.

His rage the lovers will end.

We have seen all the same things,

But none have looked similar,

For here am I now,

Half out of my mind

With hideous things like grief and longing,

And you sit there as if yesterday

Is good enough for tomorrow.

I will go farther, and farther still,

And further and further, mark this;

I’ve lost most feeling

For this bit of rock in the ocean.

And what illumines my heart now

Is a golden light in the East.

No, not the sun.

More essential than that.

She had been silently dreaming,

Dreaming all along,

Of Wings, of Sky,

Of the miraculous.

She had never suspected,

Though she gave an occasional and sidelong glance,

Half-seeing what she saw,

That meek and quiet were protective seals,

A wax rind to conceal the power

To break her world apart

And set it alight

With just the might of thinking.

The dirt under her fingernails,

The coarse weave of her cloth,

Did not prepare her.

Wildflower crowns and dextrous hands

Did not hint.

Breaking clods of earth and singing were no foreshadowing

Of her will,

Nor of how easily reality could break,

With just a few words exchanged with a stranger

Who was not.

Hi!  Here is my first post, to work out any potential glitches.  My reflection on the upcoming Poetry Marathon is this: I am really looking forward to seeing what I write.  What types of ideas come up.  How deftly (or not, depending on how many hours I’ve been awake), I can coerce these ideas into words that stay on a page.  I have been through so much and changed so much since last August, when I completed my first poetry marathon, so this will feel almost like the first time, all over again.  I am present in a new way.