Going With The Tides
A Haiku Pair
Loneliness sometimes
lingers like cold in your bones
and damp in your soul,
even when the tides
that washed it up have long since
moved to other shores.
The Inaccuracies of Poetry
The Inaccuracies of Poetry
(a Haiku)
It wasn’t the whole
truth, but half-lies can be more
honest anyway.
Letting The Sunshine In
Their makeshift curtains are visible from the path
And my windows are stark in comparison
Too high to show into my soul
Where my bare windows make more sense:
That heat pooling in at 4 in the afternoon
Falls directly on my sorrows
And is the only thing that reminds me of home.
On the Distribution of One’s Heart
On the Distribution of One’s Heart
(A Haiku Quintet)
I had given my
heart to someone who
didn’t
didn’t
know how to hold it.
Instead, they cradled
it like an adolescent
with a stranger’s
child:
child:
awkward and uneasy,
with a fear of falling
head first and snapping.
I gave my heart to
someone who didn’t
quite want
quite want
it and was surprised
when they gave it back.
They said to keep it
safe, but
safe, but
their fingers left
bruises.
bruises.
Chennette
I was born like a chennette:
My green mother-
sliced open down the middle,
And me- squeezed out.
Pink, sticky, sour.
Drowning
Drowning
(A Haiku Pair)
(A Haiku Pair)
I am drowning. You
have oversaturated
me, but I need it.
You overwhelm me.
I gasp for air but choking
never felt so good.
Going The Distance
Have you ever gone through your personal poetry archives and stumbled upon an old piece that, at the time of writing, you were convinced was absolutely awful, but now that you’ve given it some space, it turns out it wasn’t too bad after all? This piece is one of them. It’s almost a year old and no longer personally relevant, but I hope you like it.
Distance pulls heartstrings taut
While memory taunts
Sighs go unanswered
Empty promises fill
Where your touch should be.
Silence breeds disquiet:
I quietly wonder
If it’ll be worth it in the end.
The Sea
The waves sang the same siren song that had lulled me to sleep as a child
and I swore that this time I fathomed them
I tasted the subtle warmth of the salt in the air
And I let the openness of the water trick me into thinking I could grasp her
But as the grey of dusk fell away into night
the dark of the sea stopped revealing the secrets of her depths
It was then that I learned the truth
We never stop fearing the unknown
Anthology
I would write you everyday.
Poems and scribbles and notes,
Until you learned
The unevenness of my hand
The habits of my penmanship
The chaos of my scrawl.
In a world of dying paper and ink
They would save every scrap
Torn from the back of notebooks
Jotted down on well-folded receipts
They would compile anthologies of my sweet
nothings
nothings
Until children who had long forgotten pens and lined paper
Would press their fingers into the ink and
indentations
indentations
And know this is what devotion feels like.
For The Moth That Lived and Died In My Bathroom
And his wings, folded
shut in death, concealed that he
had been beautiful