24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
Prompt 12 – Closet
The Closet
The closet is where his clothes hang
his favourite dinosaur T-shirts
his favourite shorts too.
Stuffed teddys sit on top guarding
it watching over him,
from time to time he’ll check for monsters
kids imaginations can run wild
but the fact he knows everything in the closet
brings him peace of mind
Mya, aged five
Took her homework assignment
Very seriously
As we sat together in the kitchen
Eating toast
While she interviewed me
About my job
‘What do you do?’ the question
So do I tell her I used to be
A graphic designer,
But since we moved here
There wasn’t enough work
Or do I tell her i used to ne
An acupuncturist
But the recession meant
That i had to find another avenue
To put bread on the table
That pride can’t be eaten
Just swallowed
And that it tastes bitter
And that they taste bitter
‘I colour in houses’ I said
And it was the most true description
Of what I do
‘That’s the coolest thing in the world she beamed’
And it was, and it is
Because she made it so.
You have delved deep within me
Crafted to unearth myself
Sparkling words of wisdom
Shaping me in to a myriad lustrous butterfly
Games to Play
Hide and come seek
What’s in the closet
Come take a peek
It might be a monster
Or something more bleak
Or a hideous freak
That’ll make us all shriek
Inside Storybooks
Vertical Lines
are never boring
they lead to magical staircases
and porcelain vases
creating a whimsical vibe
of drifting imaginations
bouncing up winding staircases
to new world
Tantrums
Crying
No voice but pouts
Not just the adults
Warm weather outside
Cold weather inside
Icey hearts
Warmed hands
Not a bad day.
I help people for a living, by showing them the way.
Learn about diet, exercise and play.
Natural therapies like massage and more.
Herbs and supplements are part of the core.
Natural health isn’t just take a pill.
Change your life and learn to chill.
cw: none
The canary hates when the curtains are open –
it hates the light, the bright,
the thousand stars.
It hates what a clear-view window tells it,
what it wishes it could not see.
Ignorance is bliss:
hands that hurt are wrong,
and what it knows it cannot stop knowing.
It wishes:
close the curtains.
Leave it to its darkness and vellum,
leave it to its black-ink blood and poetry:
voiceless, wingless –
but now that it knows
if the curtains are closed
it would miss it.
Lightbulb
Ideas flash
I hear the beat of the streat underground like a beet
The tremor of bass beneath my feet
I carry the jacket of jackin and packin
shelltoes, cellphones, elcos, elbows, hellnos melrose, eggrolls deathrows.
Rolling in buckets a box full of fuckets
We couldnt play trumpets
And so we play glasspipes.
Melanin cinnamon hooked on the medicine all my bucks go to Exxon and Edison.
No carports just cardboards
No artforms, no elk.
No bayou, no no,
We hardly afford milk.
Look at what my circumstances built:
A brown man with white guilt.
American dreams fulfilled.
Give us your children
when you don’t know them anymore.
Give us the eye rolling masses
obsessed with making it new by remixing the old.
We’ll force them to read
and question everything they think they know –
since they think they know everything.
You’re welcome.
Give us the lost
who are seeing for the first time that they’ve
never actually seen many things clearly before.
Give us the self-absorbed, and we will show them where they intersect with their neighbors.
We’ll meet them in the process of becoming a bit more human.
Harness the abundance of energy and force the eye of the clever rogue toward the Good.
Give us the quiet pubescents
Who wear coats during heat waves
And shorts during snow storms.
Give us impulsive youth.
We’ll try to stay one step ahead of them, and
help them survive their teenage years.
Then we’ll march.
March to the homes of legislatures
who threaten our pay, who misuse your children’s funding,
and who make stupid laws that keep information from them.
We’ll beat down the doors of those who make this hard job
even harder.
We’ll march onto the sports field and support teenagers and their families.
We’ll march into our second jobs and pretend that we aren’t dog tired.
We’ll march to the store to buy the supplies we need to help the teenagers.
To wrangle them, we will study
make, process, plan, and
create
until we are sharp enough to be the
iron that sharpens iron.