Category: Poetry

Mindfulness, Poetry, Things I Can

6. Things I Can Manage: This

smirkpretty

Even if he nudges at every edge,
carrying his dinner to the counter to eat
alone, back turned,
before coming over to wreck the card game you’ve set up
then filling up a squirt gun you didn’t even know he owned
just so he can get you in the face
and grinning
as he says he’d like to kill you
for real
so he could get all your money
to buy himself an Xbox

Even it’s 9:54 pm and the bed contains
sketch paper, markers, silly putty, pokemon cards, library books,
and a kid not anywhere close to sleep

Even if you know the student
you dismissed from university today
and the other one with the conduct hearing tomorrow
are having much worse nights than you

Even if the dog keeps knocking her bone
under the couch and digging
at a bamboo floor
that might be the sole selling point
of this, the lone asset in an estate
from which he’d be lucky
to wring an Xbox

Even if you know the bone
is just a surrogate for the play
or walk she really needs
and your back creaks and your stomach churns
and you haven’t finished the letter to your grandmother
you started last week or called
to thank your girlfriend,
lover, or any of the circle
of angels who’ve kept you
off the cliff
for a decade
or two

Even if you don’t have one ounce
of energy left

You draw
a drop
from somewhere

Even if
thin air

and write

This:

Tonight, the sickle cuts a cool, slender tear
in the bruised night.

Later,
the boy in the back seat says
“I can see the full moon.”

This is the first time
in months
you know
what the sky holds.
The first time
you’ve remembered
to look.

“Isn’t it a crescent?” You ask.

His face fogs the glass.
“I can see the whole dark thing.”

You tell him the earth
casts shadows. “A little sun gets past,” you say.

It always does.

Even if we imagine ourselves so big.
Even if we forget to look up.
 

Poetry, Things I Can

5. Things I Can Describe: Depression Confines

smirkpretty

The opposite of depression is not happiness.
It isn’t pleasure
or energy, balance or peace.
No, not even peace
although it is tempting to scurry
there to escape
the dull clang
inside that may as well be
everywhere.

Trapped
in an MRI machine,
some patients experience such panic
they choose the tumor
instead. Imagine a knowledge
of that loathsome confinement
so intimate
its hug
becomes a welcome touch.

Try this:
Rise with this contraption
riveted to your skin. Shamble
through the day wide
awake. See only what the pinhole
lets in, taste through shavings
of pennies and polyethylene.
Hear voices
distorted to poison and reach
through jointed alloy to grip
or work or gather or play, pushing
hard to feel
even a remote approxmiation
of anything
as it truly is.

The opposite of depression is not mindfulness
or presence. It is not kindness or waking
from a bad dream
although it must seem like the sun
could at any minute pierce
the seams
and let outside in
if only there was
a sun.

 

Poetry

Licking

smirkpretty

He dips, smacks
fist against bag,
growl and clash,
Joe Strummer splits
seams, drop
ceiling shrieks
in protest against
shuddering brace and groaning
beam, crimson everlast
swinging, spine
hunched, gloves up, slits
for eyes, he spits
as bristling
lips clench
jagged like razors
ragged like teeth
wet with stink
slick heat
bell at 3
he scowls, steps
back, steeps
in his own steam, salt
licking his neck
 

Poetry, Relationships

#2

smirkpretty

Before the tip even reaches
the scrap he’s set on the bar,
the pencil hums
a Cartesian chord
like a tuning fork
loose in his grip and streaks
two thick axes
across the plane. Pivoting now
at the corners, the silver
gray lead cuts those dicey
little circles
with their arrows
and Ts that come to mean
us
in the abstract.

Attraction
is a scatterplot at odds with offers,
men churning up a quixotic cloud
that claims a rarified horizon
well beyond
the gals who
know in their bones
the laws of gravity
and let their feet dance along
the trendline
until closing time.
 

Poetry

f/stop

smirkpretty

What leaks through
threads binding its skin
to frame is the name
that won’t stay
put (much like its
shape). We want it
solid, close,
so we soften
focus and blur delicate
latticework
into plane and pretend
it was never constituent
fiber, cell, part
of another before
(much like
everything), it was
always only
this and pray
the seams we don’t see
hold.