You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Poem’ category.
the wait, the long wait
a weather-borne tragedy
oh my sweet defeat
but then among clouds:
helicoptors are the best
the timer reset
through the mist and fog
a clearing among giants
I stand on my feet
we begin at last
but, dear air, where did you go?
lethargy, no, no!
veggie lasagna
yak cheese, lemon tea, dal bhat
hard-boiled egg, no jam
step one, breathe two, puff
first steps are good for the soul
monsoon rain, go ‘way
up the mountains go
as the fog clears, higher still
to the atmosphere
benign mountain slope
here I am from whence I’ve come
the future is up
I’d forgotten how hard blogs are. There’s a story to tell and I keep thinking it’s about Nepal. I should be writing about Nepal. I am supposed to be writing The Nepal Story, after all. So, why can I not write about Nepal?
Dramatic sigh.
I was once told by my mentor to trust my instincts when piecing a narrative together, meaning I shouldn’t be so arrogant as to think I can manhandle an experience if I don’t let it unfold. My story hasn’t even unfolded yet. I want to write a redemption story that hasn’t happened, so it’s no wonder I can’t write about it. Truth be told, mine is probably not a redemption story anyway. Deep down, I know Nepal as a requisite transformative experience will be dark because, when reduced to its smallest divisible parts, Nepal is all in my head.
And there’s a writer in there, too, who refuses to shut the hell up.
From a distance, a shadowed mirage is waving at me like a summer heat reflection on hot pavement and this passage comes back to me:
Despite our best intentions, we forget the dead.
Do they forget us? Jane Summer, “Erebus”
So. Leigh “Bindo” Binder*, if you refuse to die, I’ll just have to kill you off in a mediocre poem that’s an apology as much as a lament.
Sleeping Beauty
When the stem drooped and the petals died,
I slept
Sleeping beauty sleep
I awoke to gold
Light too bright
You offered me a dim corner
You and I shared caramelized melancholy
Like cotton candy
Adolescent sweetness, the things that grew in our heads
Restless dreams like your cigarette smoke
From a few thousand miles away
Choke me awake
Weighed together like stone
Bound and pull down like some English great, we weren’t built for this life
But mostly: Have we lived our eternity?
*Leigh Binder was a friend and fellow writer, who died two years ago leaving only his writing and YouTube videos (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-43KL2khFHhJ-LmRqA-y2A) to haunt me.
I’m dead with dying
There is an eye I refuse to catch
I was born with knowing
I look and I listen and I discern
I know
You’ve caught my eye
I’m not God
But I know
Tell me everything
The bile and the filth and the worst, pour it
All that will be left will be left behind
Listen to my knowing
Let me catch your eye
My knowing is a reflection
There’s no dream I can’t decipher
I simply know
You tell me what’s the matter
And that’s what’s the matter
A reflection
through kinder eyes than you can’t bear to see
This is my knowing
I was born in January
I am dead with dying
There’s an eye I refuse to catch
It’s the eye of a child
Who won’t let me see
Something terrible happened
Something awful and humiliating
Something that drained my blood from my face my screams from my throat my heart from my chest and
Something that puddled my potty down my leg and between my toes
Something terrible
And I don’t know
Something terrible
And I don’t know
Hollow now
I won’t catch my blue eye that eyes me in the mirror
I was a child born dead with knowing
It was January
It was cold something terrible
Something terrible
And I don’t know
There was a time when you mattered
The last bloom
On the Rose of Sharon
Of
The
Season
In which your spirit did not survive
Another fall
Falls near
As the sky
Or a petal from a poppy
Or a child of God
Did you really believe that?
That there was a time when it mattered
The way beauty fell away to reveal something more beautiful and terrible but toxic
But time
It mattered
Because it was yours
The lost blossom
there are no promises that can be kept
by gift we live by right we die
grace is optional
except when it’s not
the grace to bear grief
is sometimes always never
the only prayer there is
in these hot, breathless last days, it’d do us to get on with the praying
sooner than later
That’s the hardest part
Picking through the rubble to find scraps of once-yellow note pad paper written and abruptly, rudely, ended:
Toilet paper
Apples
Erasers
8 batteries
Trash bags
Birthday card for —
The hardest heart catches itself before it does what it made to do: lie or die. (And flower and a cake for –)
Again with the ending. Before the card, there was snow. Glowing snow but the ice was better. You’d sprayed painted it gold and silver and a tie dye of the other primary colors , which ran and pooled at our feet. The flakes and shards died a hued death.
Still the ending.standing at the top of a great mound that once was not a welcome to the White Ones.
They welcome you. The hardest part, you accept.
When the petals died and the stem drooped,
I slept
Sleeping beauty sleep
I awoke to gold
Light too bright
You offered me a dim corner
When you drooped and died,
Gold was gilded with light
There is no sleeping beauty sleep now
Noises in the wall
Like chatter
Or the clatter of chains
It wasn’t haunted before I forgot garbage day
Once then twice
The wall absorbed the trash
There are things I would rather not see
Things I left to rot
It’s doing its best
Salvaging the broken and discarded
Whoever is in the walls, making do with my junk,
Must be paying penance
For a word alone
It was a coyote
Or a lone wolf
Something savage
It lurked in the shadows
Of dead land
It shouldered the shoulder of interstates and crops
Its scraggly coat
And lowered head
Darting as if in surprise
but no
It was something sage
Something undomesticated
or worse
Something formerly domesticated
Something vengeful
Something worse than rogue
Something savage
Ramblings of a Medicated Lady: Words of Woe by Loria Taylor 
Your Sympathies: