24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
Hard Days Ahead
World now is a hard place to live/
Vanished has the courtesy from man to man/
Law and order is a forgotten word/
Gun toting goons crush young buds under their feet/
War rages on unabated in civilized world
Thorns abound and where are the roses?
Collapsing are the family values
Harshness is ruling the roost
Tenderness isn’t legal tender anymore
He has few words
but many sounds.
His toy cars crash and smash,
and the honk honk honk of his bus
is the best around.
He can growl
and he can hiss
you know what it is
just by this.
He slurps and he burps
he taps and he claps.
When bedtime comes
he tippy taps out of his room
to give you a smoosh on the cheek
then he laughs
and runs back to fall asleep
exhausted.
God loves gas stations
there’s one on every corner here
a discarded chick tract looks up from
a shiny, rainbow pool of oil
mad at the world still.
Sign says to turn the car off during fueling
sherriff on the sticker points to remind
but as hot as it is
we’re leaving ours on and risking it.
To exercise empathy
Exert extra care
Nice choices of kindness
Doing what’s fair
Even when it’s difficult timing
Remembering to always care
Never saying never
Even when the action is not returned
Show your best understanding self
So your name will always be honored
Sometimes I feel like I’m dying outside of your walls.
I’m not giving up on you but maybe I need a minute to find myself.
Because you got me feeling crazy over you.
I was praying for you for my whole life. I just didn’t know it.
My heart was a hardened dead thing until you beat it to life.
If I scream it to the world would you finally hear the words inside?
And I wonder if you see the words stuck in my eyes.
They say everything I can’t bring from my lips.
It’s another night unraveling the seams from these dreams.
I’m writing you into these books maybe you won’t read.
You’re part of my story.
You bled yourself in between every line until you were brought to life.
I poured every ounce of myself out to try to make you smile.
I lit myself on fire to try to defrost your defenses.
I made myself the joke just to hear you laugh.
Now here I am with nothing left.
Contemplating your missing shadow with something akin to tenderness.
Got stuck in your games and missed every step I was supposed to make.
Untitled
I experience what other people call ‘god’ in a different way.
God is tucked away in the mundane.
They shine through every inch of nature’s beauty that I see every day.
God will dance from start to star
as my eyes adjust to the night sky.
One star turns to 10 turns to 100 to whole galaxies of stars.
God whispers secrets into the cool air
of the first spring day I open all the windows in my home.
Fresh air becomes part of every corner.
I tell the world my secrets while protected
by the silence of a fresh two feet of snow.
The silence of the world around me is loud enough to
drown out my words as my breath meets the December air.
Mushrooms making their home on fallen trees gain sustenance
from feeding the cycle of life and death.
I make sure to thank God for the satiation of
gulps of water when I wake up at 3am.
How can you not see God in tree canopies?
We give them gifts of carbon dioxide from our lungs and
they say ‘thank you’ with oxygen from theirs.
The glimmer of true happiness in someone’s eyes
and the rare sightings of the Aurora Borealis from my hometown
tie for the biggest miracles I’ve seen performed.
Tides kiss the shore at the direction of the moon-
How can that not be the Divine?
My prayers look like leaving flowers where I find them
purely because they are beautiful and someone else needs to see the beauty.
Religious texts are composed of
every sunrise I have not seen.
I will never see every form God takes but I am going to try.
What about the future?
Will it look like in “Dune”?
Will it be better or worse?
Feel free to express yourselves, my pupils!
There is tenderness in her breasts
As her just born suckles; elixir of life
The two pink lines had completely unsettled her, then
She had not been sure at all
They had assured her it would be all right
She looked with wonder at the little bundle
That was with sure-shot precision and right,
Claiming her body and her heart
Her gurgling sounds felt like a lullaby
A strange calm made home in her
A warmth pilfered in, tenderness filled her every pore
And suddenly, she was never so sure!!
Put a Sock(et) in It!
The mere sight of spark
plug sockets
irks me to my core.
****A lune poem is an Americanized version of a haiku, featuring a syllabic count of 5/3/5. And as irrational and illogical and utterly ridiculous as it sounds, I really do shudder and cringe and roll my eyes in annoyance at the sight of spark plug sockets. Go figure!****
Though darkness closes in
Don’t go into the light
where there is only afterlife
There is no magic apparition,
no transportation beam
to ease our way
no wizard nor angel
no Superman to the rescue
Turn around
and see what shines brightest
in the darkness
It’s your light
Let it glow!
It’s your life
Let it live