24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
It’s quarter to nine
Jamaica curfew time
Music 🎶 a beat
People jammin in the street
Rum Bar shenanigans in style
Police sirens 🚨 sound the alarm
Bottles feet 👣 hands 🙌🏽 and knees buckle to Make an escape its curfew time
We love fun in the street
As we rock and drink to the reggae beat
Rum Bar shenanigans in full swing
Quarter to nine Jamaica 🇯🇲 curfew time.
Copyright © 2012 Roxann Lawrence (Poetessrock)
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had this weird aversion to groupings. Like pods or seeds.
The seeds inside of butternut squash for example give me the heebie-jeebies to behold. I thought it was an anomaly but my daughter said it isn’t-
other people have it.
I trace it back to childhood when there was a big spider under the kitchen table and my mother said we had to kill it and when we stepped on it all these baby spiders came flowing out.
But they tell me other people have it.
for the longest time I thought it was just me.
Death isn’t a stranger.
She’s right next to me and always has been.
I see her in the weepy eyed cat who cries for company at night at the Airbnb then runs away.
I saw her in my mothers bed last year. My mother asked to go with her.
She’s Wily that death; a bitch, a muse, blonde, brunette, redhead whatever you need. she’s loyal.
she’ll never leave; to me she rides a motorcycle into the night – her long silver curls blowing in the breeze.
She’s brazen, brash…ready.
Deliberate movement with chaos.
Karate inspired dance moves.
Choreographed in her head.
some wild floating dancers.
she’s an inspired child.
my granddaughter.
Wants to dance.
Jasey
Child
You are lovely with your abundance of rich green Rainforest surrounded by the wild ocean.
When juxtaposed with the desert, the desert loses and I don’t want to leave you.
And your flowers. My granddaughter said,
“I want to take a picture of the flowers then paint them.”
I said, “Me too.”
Species I’ve never seen – large and regally loud like a queen proudly donning her bejeweled crown.
Hawaii be my home.
Beautiful Jamaica 🇯🇲
My Island in the sun
Come let’s drink coconut Rum
Rivers and Beaches
Filled with delight
Reggae music 🎶 beating
It’s soca Night
Beautiful Jamaica 🇯🇲
My island in the sun
Come and let’s drink coconut Rum
Let me tell you about our food
It’s the best you can find in the world 🌎 make sure to enjoy belly bumping Ackee and Saltfish
Curry Goat and white rice
Our food make you feel nice
Beautiful Jamaica 🇯🇲
My island in the sun
Come and let’s drink coconut Rum 🍹
Our culture is so diverse
Mixed with white, Scottish , Indian , German Chinese you name them
We full of love, vibes and greatness
Beautiful Jamaica 🇯🇲
My Island in the sun
Come let’s drink coconut Rum
Our history is so unique
Just come to Jamaica 🇯🇲
You will see
How to enjoy the lush green trees
Bask in the sun ☀️
On the white sand beaches.
Beautiful Jamaica 🇯🇲
My Island in the sun
Come let’s drink coconut Rum
Copyright © Roxann Lawrence (Poetessrock)
December baby. A week before Christmas. My mother told me many years ago she and my father put me under the tree. I was their Christmas present.
In rural Pennsylvania in December – at least in years past it was a snowflake spectacle. Temperatures in The 30’s and 40’s were the norm, roadways were toboggan runs for how treacherous they potentially were.
I claim the period from my birthday through New Year’s day as my personal holiday. It is a period of time that I have through a significance of events from my very early babyhood come to bond with and identify with the butterflies in your stomach feeling.
Reality shift. My father decided to go out one New Year’s day. A New Year’s Day that was just two weeks beyond my first birthday. He did not return. The toboggan run got him and this was no ordinary accident. This was a series of events that very likely could have been avoided.
since he didn’t come back to explain himself the only recourse anyone has ever had has been to deduce what happened that day. Details will not be given here.
I have learned to turn this loss into positives over the years. I can hear trauma in a lot of detail. I’m comfortable with chaos.
I’m comfortable with reality turning on a dime.
I Believe and truly experience the concept of control to be an illusion.
This time of year – the time between December 19th and New Years Day is mine.
Pain dulls the senses.
On overload, we shut down; Going into survival mode, allowing only the most basic needs to have voice.
When this happens in succession…when there is rapidfire negative stimuli, this state becomes the new norm – “this too shall pass” becomes the new mantra.
Now our every day reality; our sense of joy and spontaneity is on hold while we wait for “this” to pass.
Don’t Wait!
Join with the pain, allow it to emerge in tiny increments from the fugue our defense mechanisms have mistakenly relegated it to.
This will, if done correctly, safely move us out of the waiting pattern back to the now which is actually the only place there is.
Dont wait!
The end of the line, the middle
of the road. Where am I going?
A townhouse this time. Two
to a room, three rooms per unit.
Space for a third in the master.
Home with Kris again. Free
to come and go as I please,
but I only want solitude and quiet
and time to read. The tub is nice
and oddly long. I soaked most days.
Three hours of groups before noon.
Lunch. Leisure time. Self reflection.
For me, knitting and napping and writing.
Checks all the boxes.
“Anything under 11 hours a week
is considered outpatient.”
Art therapy Friday morning first.
Music therapy Friday morning second.
I saved every piece of artwork
Sang every single Friday.
Half a dozen repressed memories
unwillingly excavated.
My mind is haunted because it it built
atop a burial mound of pain and crisis.
Trauma bonding— night terrors
have me talking in my sleep, and Kris’s
night terrors have her respond.
Hospitalization, residential, PHP (partial hospitalization), IOP(intensive outpatient).
Not for nothing.
I begged and beat and burned
my hair trying to make it what
I thought it should be.
I’ve begged and beaten and burned
myself trying to make me
what I thought I should be.
My hair will never be straight,
and neither will I, I suppose.