24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
To reach a part of you, you didn’t notice before, but with me you care. Soul searching through emotions of feelings you fear will appear the truth of our co-existence, but you’re reluctant to let go.Holding on to nothing.Emptiness, dwelling within a hollow home you clutch to a fantasy.Snatching your heart and your mind into a fatal mystery of remorsefulness. Let go. Let me go. Stop holding on to someone who deserve the tranquility and endearment away from you.
Poem By JGomez
Somewhere deep down in the essence of my being a secret fire dwells within
Flames ablaze with memories of greatness the stories of my kin
I never walk alone. Even as a child,I could feel it in my bones. Great grands, aunt’s uncle’s, cousins people I never knew and. Now since my parents are gone I feel them too
The boxes I put myself in are getting smaller.
As a child of seven summers,
when my bare feet knew the grasses well,
I was Odysseus at Troy,
carving a way through the enemy rhododendrons.
I spoke at the midnight hour on August fifteen,
I was fifteen then,
my voice rose high and clear,
my dreams torched the sky.
I loved this girl from the next neighbourhood,
pretty in peony pink hijab,
the youth did not know when to back down,
the youth did not know how not to love.
Now that the girl is gone,
the dreams have withered away;
and the child gave way a long ago
to the husk of a man that I have become.
Warm summer nights
With the warm sweet southern breeze.
Dancing around our hearts.
In a sweet warm embrace.
Grant me your sweet kisses on my lips.
Sweet smiles on my heart.
Sweet caress of your love.
Around my heart.
Warm summer nights.
Choose one of these images to write about. You don’t have to describe what is going on in the image (although you can if you want to). It is just the jumping off point.
That girl,
No you missed her,
That girl.
Too old to be sounding out “monkey”
Too old to spell it with a q.
Much too old to need her fingers to add.
Her clothes stink,
Her butt crack sticks out,
Her burgeoning body is more than naked
Seen through that threadbare shirt.
She yearns for a home she can’t imagine.
She doesn’t know
We don’t all watch our baby sisters till bedtime so
Stepdad can work on getting mom and grandma pregnant
Again.
So mom, when it isn’t her turn, can cook that
Meth, pay rent, and make her daughter’s rags smell like cat piss.
So grandma, when it isn’t her turn, can teach the girl about
Blowjobs and weed and how to shoot an ounce of vodka like a
Tired ugly hooker.
Somebody told her school would make it better so
There she is, sounding out “monkey” and spelling it with a “q”.
I give her string for her pants, a clean shirt for the stink, and say,
“M. O. N. K. E. Y.”
That boy in the corner rocking and groaning, staring at the online test?
The one who punched an aide last week for no reason?
His brain broke when he was 4.
There’s a word for it, something pithy and easy to say.
But living it?
He understands everything but
Can barely talk or make much eye contact or control his hands when he’s excited
(Sometimes the other boys remind him quietly to get his
Fingers out of his fly)
He can read and write and draw and count when he isn’t
Overwhelmed because his socks itch and the dust falling through the air
Glitters in a shaft of sunlight and Ricky is picking his nose in the back row and
Ericka is hugging herself and smelling her shirt and Sam has
Paper claws he’s hiding in his desk and the texture of his book is indented with inkless writing almost legible after all these years that might say Tine loves Alien and the memory of punching that lady who told him no eighteen times bites him like a
Fire ant up his pants.
So I take him someplace quiet and say I don’t care if he passes the test; I just want to see an honest try.
He says the only sentence I will ever hear from him:
“I love you.”
When he can’t see me, I cry.
This, this is my yearning for justice.
Home was an uncomplicated space—
a quiet verticality with room to stretch,
not a place for harshly phrased missives
nailed to the door, parting the lovely grain.
This new country is no promised land.
The natives are ill-mannered—
all teeth and lips, they cluster in throngs
with a great cacophony.
Was the mother land that bad?
Its ravages worse than this so-called peace?
We do not refuse the language out of pride—
it is simply too loud to think.
I would have thought it was pretty apparent by now
And our illuminated arch-backed
Railways
Don’t tell us why
And our gasping enclosures
New builds
Don’t tell us why
And our careful vigilantes
Men
Don’t tell us why
And our promised blowing clarity
Winds
Don’t tell us why
But Pablo Neruda
Tells us why
And we don’t so much as look at each other
Looking up to promises
And down to thoughts
Dressing to a flower-like predestination
Of private buffets
Harbouring immaterial desires for
Common diasporas
With these nobles all vanguished
Filling the jails and rehabs
When you’ve accepted your loved ones
Are victimised by some aristocrat’s invented necessity
And no it won’t do to pretend, bear out this, bitter as the stalk
Bitter as Freddy
Come with a strength of merciful project
Of fury set to justice
Courted, resorted
Forgiving, solitary crowd
Think again of train sets
Over brilliant cold welcoming hills
Or mournful priority
Or weighted footsteps
All clean for the strength of their
Rotten alcohol
Stretching your telescope for want of universal sight
You bar the land
And I can’t convey other
Than my vision aches,
But let me attest
A cherished assiduous tenderness
When your crutch becomes your bi-annual limb
The warmth of my life
The blood in my piss.
The French Revolution
Was where Dickens drew the line
And to the obviate
Top one hundred installers
Your great and central discourses
Don’t include me
And I hope they never do
Dear, they are your mistake
Words double round the fountain
One person’s invention
Is another person’s intervention
And seek no claim of higher permanence
Like climbing drainpipes
Nowhere
Nowhere
Charge with me
Hopeful, humble, provisional
Sure of disgrace
Charge
The gates of balmoral
For relief
For our time
Paradise lost they rumble through murky past
Ancient curse rains on troubled souls amassed
Creatures of magic mighty yet so weak
By day they hide under dusty robes meek
By night their stormy speech thunder-speak
Onward march dragon-kin into the mist
To defend sea and sky with crackling fist
Their tired Queen leads them to final glory
To rest in cloud kingdom of legendary story
It hurts to be… alive
The threat of dying gives life to living.
It hurts to feel happiness…
Your throat tightens.
You can’t breathe.
You can’t release…
The tension hightens.
Thoughts of the past rush in, building like a fever breaking.
Shortness of breath persists.
“Help!” I think I’m dying, but inactuality I’m living.
(Sometimes sadness feels like the cloak of death. In times like this we must battle to push beyond the cloud of meloncholy. It is a cloud in disguise as doubt, almost as dangerous as death itself.)
All rights reserved copyright(c)2017 Natasha Vanover