24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
The atrocity of being shut out
feels like the burning wind in my asthma lungs.
When I’m playing tag in the third grade and the bully boy asks me if asthma is contagious
That’s what it feels like to be shut out
That my nature is inconvenient and
My peers have fear of catching me
(although I’m doing the chasing)
In either place, I won’t open my mouth
Even if it’s the only way I can breathe
@ angel rosen
You really had
to be there.
When stars collide,
the resulting dust
and collected mites,
formed us.
Imagine the lines between
the loved
and the hated.
Imagine them crossed,
and blurred.
This is the beginning.
Right before the end,
it began.
Hating spiders,
and loving a man
whose arms are everywhere.
He weaves webs of silken words,
and you are trapped between the lines.
He whispers into your ear,
as his tongue caresses
each word,
and they slip in,
one thrilling word
after another.
It’s a visual,
you had to be there.
Your self promises
versus your virtue.
Ahhh, but the words;
the words wrapped round
my spine,
and I could not move.
It is the glory of time,
that for the most part,
we will always have
tomorrow.
Don’t tell me what I don’t know
You are not in my head
Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do
Until I try it
Don’t tell me that I can’t see what’s going on
You are not my eyes
Don’t tell me what I can hear
You are not my ears
And I can’t read your lips from the back of your head
While you walk away, still talking
I etch my soul in the sky,
As, I need a rebirth,
Energy stretches into purple highs,
As, I ask within “Earth”,
Do I Exist?
Then, answers replied “Nothing Lives”
So I ask again “Why?”
“Is it up to the heavens and sky on who lives or dies?”
Then, I reply “Why Try!”
When all we are going to do is die,
I surrender and sigh,
The sky replies “Earths design was to give you a reason to shine in a human life,
But humans destroy life, so we take life,
So I reply “If I die, what happens then”
The sky replies “Life is designed to fly even when you die”,
“So nothing lives”,
So, I ask again “If we try, fly, and not sigh about life, then how is life designed in the sky”,
A gentle reply “Seek the purple high in the sky, find life, and fly”
And I reply “I get it, if we all fly, then no one dies and everyone lives”,
The sky replies “Life is etched in the sky, so no matter if you die”
“You will always try and fly” I reply “I exist when I fly”
Then the sky replies “Then, you exist”
Consider this a rough draft. An hour was not enough.
After Grandpa Died
We found the newspaper clipping in his wallet,
yellowed, creased, from a time when
mixed race women of African descent were called
mulatto wenches.
The story?
Three women sold?
How does this figure into Grandpa’s story?
I always thought one of them was his mother,
but the look on your face makes me think
of another possibility:
his half sisters?
I’d always heard his mother was an Indian,
but I never met her,
never found her name on the Dawes’ Roll.
Maybe I should let it go,
make up my own story like you suggested.
But I have a story–
Grandpa, on the porch whittling
Me, careful to avoid his spit can,
singing along with him as he picked his guitar
or played his fiddle
How he loved my beautiful grandma
and cornbread and buttermilk in a bowl.
And…
the clipping in his wallet.
time to refresh, breathe through a homemade squeezed watermelonrich in red with white seeds,
be careful not to swallow any seeds.
May grow a watermelon tree inside. As the myth is told to children.
watermelon…a heavy fruit
yet like the 90% water we containthis fruit is practically water disguised in a heavy weighted ball.
A refreshing and an aromatic way to stay cool
this summer.
A cat will continue to chase a red dot,
Even though he can never catch it,
Even though it’s not tangible,
Just because it brings him joy.
The Treasure
It was in the soft moonlight
in the after hours of her job
where he came by her office
and said his ‘good morning’
even though it was still dark
she wanted him to be honest
because she knew this one thing
he thought of her as his treasure island
while she thought of him as her treasure
@ Renee Avard-Furlow
June 13 2015