Poem-A-Day: Day 18

Winter Nights

The air smells cold
and the wind calls my name in frigid whisper.

My gloves are on,
but I still feel the sting
of the freeze
tingling fingers
and soul alike.

I take two steps
and numbing air tells me to take ten more.

The wind doesn’t know,
but it tries in vain
to intercept
my veins and thoughts
with a chilling desperation.

My feet are a burden
and I wonder if walking has turned to bitter conversation.

I lay down to death,
but it’s no less a yoke
than it is
some joking anxiousness
waiting to be heard.

The algid air winks
and reaches out to me with compassionate boreal grace.

Poem-A-Day: Day 17

The Some of All Fears

Somewhere
I left life in the lurch,
or it left me
something
that I just don’t understand.
Not fully,
I get the point
sometimes,
but not often enough really.
I tell myself
that I’m in the know,
when I’m really
face down in the shit.
I’m not sure
how I got there, but
somehow
I ended up cheek deep
in a mess.
Maybe there’s hope yet.
Someday
I’ll be your next,
best thing
since deciding to shower.
Or I’ll be the next,
prominent figurehead
in the field of poetry.
I’d be
somebody.

But as it stands,
I’m nobody,
just the next,
great poorhouse slave
working to live,
schooling to tell myself
that what I will amount to
is more
than another wasted space,
someplace
other than here.
I’d like to think,
but I can’t,
because I am no more,
than the same
someone
that sits next to you on the bus.

Somewhere,
life is laughing.

Poem-A-Day: Day 16

I’m Talking to the Man in the Mirror

This man
before me
looks strange
but familiar,
he’s charming
platonically speaking.

We begin speaking,
but this man
is too charming.
More than me,
and it’s unfamiliar.
The thoughts strange.

I shouldn’t feel strange
when we are speaking,
because I feel familiar
with how this man
presents himself to me.
We are both charming

each other. It’s reflectively charming
how the interaction is strangely
like something seen before. Me,
the one doing the speaking
to this attentive handsome man.
It’s not gay, but familiar.

Why should it seem so familiar?
Because we are both insanely charming?
From what place did this man 
come to me from? It’s strange
to question something like harmless speaking.
I feel like he knows me.

He touches on every aspect of me,
and the coincidences are beyond the familiar.
It’s like he’s dissecting me by speaking
to me in the most unthreatening, charming
way possible. His smiles match mine strangely.
Why am I attracted to this man?

And I before me is this mirror man,
who is fluently speaking a language beyond charming.
I am so familiar, because it isn’t strange.

Poem-A-Day: Day 15

Expand/Collapse

She stands
confused as always.
Always and never,
always never,
never was.

Like a blank sheet of paper
awaiting the next great
dialogue of modern moments
that would never happen.
Never and always,
never always,
always will.

It’s a transcendental moment of clarity
lost amongst the clarity of the night sky,
washed into the blackness
pockmarked by countless beauties
that hang like candelabras,
swaying with each upward glance
that happen to fall
at the end of every sentence.
Every and once,
every once,
once in a while.

It’s the feeling of surrender,
that tender slap not spoken
that goes without saying
for once in my life.
Once and every,
once every,
every day.

I stand,
like a simile,
painting suggestive pictures
of me
and you.

Poem-A-Day: Day 14

Sudden Stops

Two black marks
on the gray pavement;
tire tracks that fell just short
of inevitable ruin,
or remarkable, agonizing luck.
The cement median
is unscathed,
not fazed
by whatever may have transpired,
or almost…
I can look at these marks,
and put myself in place
of whatever may have happened,
if only because I am a dreamer,
and my dreams often suffer
the same inglorious demise.
It’s a bitter battle,
loving the friction
that keeps me held in place,
and the sudden
fear of realization
that takes me from it.

Poem-A-Day: Day 13

Sitting

I sit
blood purpling
on my fingertips
from working hard,
hardly working.
Slamming away at my mind,
punching,
berating,
debasing everything
by restating it in sentimental fashion
over worded,
and complicated.
It’s no wonder nobody ever understands
me.
The keys to my soul
laid out “qwerty,”
when it should read “dirty.”
A cesspool of life
that’s sharper than it appears,
cutting each examining hand,
rendering them bloody
and lost,
stumbling to figure
what just happened.
Nothing happened…
It’s no wonder
I sit.

Poem-A-Day: Day 12

Meditation’s Fifth

I want to get back
because it’s dark again…
it gets dark
every single day
around strangely changing similar times.
But I’m stupid to want,
because I embrace the dark
in some blissful reverie
that finds two eyes
staring back in contemptuous bewilderment.
So I get back,
and get down
with it.
I find myself
mesmerized by the mysterious quantitative
that surrounds entirety.
It’s something
more than the self-
destructive delight
that I find makes life oddly livable for now.