24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
“We need…”
The scariest opening of any conversation
Right up there with, “You know I love you, right?”
“We need…”, though?
It’s the gradual ascension on the rails
To that roller coaster, you swore to yourself you’d never go on
We need to talk.
We need to take a break.
We need counseling.
We need a lawyer.
We need…
The freedom to express our truth
We need…
The courage to face our darkness
We need…
An unconditional love of self
We need…
The vision to see the bigger picture
We need…
Acceptance of what is beyond our control
We need you Jesus Every day
We Need you Jesus every step of the way
We need you Jesus as our Guide
We need you Jesus by our side
We Need him in the Morning
We need him in the evening
We need you to be our guide
We need you to carry the ride
We need you to abide
We need peace in our life
We need to pray more often
Thank you Lord for keeping us
Thank you Lord for everything.
We need Jesus more than ever
as we go through our stormy weathers
Stars twinkle shut.
Red and pinks shoot across the darkened sky.
Morning awakes.
The baritone bellow of the bull frog
breaks the morning silence.
Gently waves roll onto shore.
Morning awakes.
A warm wind passes through the bull rushes
and they shake a morning greeting.
Morning awakes.
Reds, pinks and now blues accent the sky.
Billowy clouds hang low and smile a welcome
To the new day.
Morning is here.
Copyright 2015, by Ingrid Exner
I walk around with your words echoing in my mind,
I walk around with our unfinished story
reverberating in my head.
You are more broken
than I could have thought –
your scars fill pages of my diary,
words upon words
I poured out through my tears.
I wrote you a letter
and spilled my hateful heart
all over its pages –
and I forgive you now.
In my head, I’ve already written our end –
happier than you ever could have been.
my butt, big, small, medium… I don’t know its size because I need to first know who I’m comparing it to, although every living thing that becomes eye view seems to change from stranger to competition in a matter of seconds, I know how to accept others and yet I don’t know how to accept without anything good or bad being reason enough to change my self thoughts. I just want it to bounce around or maybe I want it to push through the tightest of jeans. You would think I had a thing for women the way I’m looking at them, so scared of how things will change for me when they are facing back side and I have to look to see, insecure and trying to heal me…
A stake in my chest
When I thought I was made of steel,
I cling to the last thing that made me happy
So that I may fall with a smile on my face.
Even if I am bloody,
Sore, weak, with my wounds weeping,
My heart will stop beating,
But my soul will never stop breathing.
Formaldehyde in shabby cluster, a tap on the cigarette
as a conductor would call attention from his stand.
Air so still, our glasses linear on the diner table, in a
duel to death, and I am so afraid of my veins speaking
to yours in this mutual silence, I contrive my tendons
from being interlocked, not just in their own hinges,
but with yours.
(She, a stare from eye to eye, captivating my
captive pulse, pendulum pupils swaying down to her
knees, angled sharp.) Headlined above the curtain pole,
a candid light leaning its flicker on the distance between,
shoelace to colored shoelace, and still life passerby,
in motive: never wasting a goddamn.
Sober sun sunken beneath a dance club flare, a
florid scab across the street, me enjoying the printer
ink shore devouring the lit pools, rippled with clamor.
Knuckles popping like bubble gum snaps, and cracking
your neck as if preparing for a gallows in a diner.
There were tendrils of fog, unscathed in the street,
a concrete miasma stifled, lacking current, the curious
fumes less deliberate than the smoke you bellow
away from me.
And in conversation, I am similar to the anatomy of fog
enveloping all your sparse remarks, your thin
postcard comments. I wouldn’t call either of us hesitant.
Somehow, I’ve begun to adore the manhole cover shade about your eyes,
like sagging dollar store bags, and how you carry all you see in those jaded sockets.
Even how our dreamless, empty lifestyles are massaged by dry coffeehouse
“dates,” I’ve learned to love how easily I am filled by such
metallic, civilized warmth.
(We had no necessity for words, in moments such as these,
no apocalyptic mindset, no inhuman sense of perfection–
just the joyful movement made by she and I, the parking
of the car anywhere.) I wanted nothing but the distance
in between where we each sat, and not you. Not you.
We plan, yet we fail …
We toil, yet we are lacking …
We love, yet we are hurt …
We care, yet we are taken for granted …
Life is unfair, yet beautiful.
Good and bad they said both comes in threes …
The difference lies in how we take both …
With open heart and an open mind …
Or with a complaining and misgiving soul …
Be thankful everyday for the things we have …
Because others don’t have the things we are thankful about.