The (New & Improved) Poetry Barn and Eatery

A Poem’s Wants

.

A poem wants

to be a photograph

in the same way

a photograph wants

to be a painting

and a painting wants

to be a song that

wants to be a love letter

in the same way

a love letter wants

Idyllic like first love

And beating down like the summer sun

Waiting for a softer day

To introduce the marvel of creation

As yesteryear turns to hollow wine

Even bitter tears in sunset shine

And life is left behind, these days it seems

There's always these days

These avenues are always there unwalked

The halls are sunlit and hold our lives

It almost seems we won't leave

But we will breathe free one day, and leave all this behind

While the bird of morning weeps and yearns

Flying into the sunrise

Drunken with the bittersweet wine of parting

And memories, always the memories

But some will be true

And some will hold these days to light

Never from the corner of my eye will I forget you

People think the middle of the night belongs to poets. That we wake, touched by a breeze of ideas, and walk to the desk barefoot, pen hovering over paper like a divining rod.

I can tell you it doesn’t work that way. The hours between two and four are for the unfinished business of the body and the mind. They are for old debts, for vertebrae that complain in Morse code, for a sink that still smells faintly of onions.

Once, at a gallery opening, a man in a velvet jacket asked me what I dreamed of when the moon was high. He looked at me as though I ought to say a staircase spiraling out of the sea, or a woman standing in a doorway holding a golden lantern.

Instead I told him: the hum of the refrigerator is too loud in my apartment. He blinked, took a sip of his wine, and looked for someone with better material.

He didn’t know that the hum is my own heart in the quiet, counting off the years I meant to live differently. He didn’t know that every night, I see the half-packed suitcase on the top shelf of my closet and remember all the places I didn’t go.

Not connected to God,

Not connected to Love,

Not connected to Family,

Not connected to Church,

Not connected to Community,

Not connected to Work;

There is a kind of connection in all of this not-connecting

A connection to lack

lighter for this not knowing

empty, untethered

simultaneously free and damned

__🪶

.

i'm in my fat elvis stage

banana's on the counter and bacon in the fridge, peanut butter and bread waiting

side burns hanging off my fat fucking face

and you know i'm scared to sit on the shitter

Orion

Held up in the stars. A blur

Of colour, gradually

Forming, exposed.

How can something so beautiful,

Something so ecstatic and bursting

Be far? In our reach

Yet elusive.

Reach up to the sky,

Holding the ground still. We

Can reach you, Orion.

We’re here. So human.

I saw the moon, it looked so bright

I wrote a rhyme about the sight

But then came lawyers, what a fright-

taking your time...

both the easiest

and hardest

of the arts

to perform

and perfect

.

My dear friend, even if you do not name them, you carry universes inside. Which one do you want to dream first?

The one where your voice shapes stars? The one where your silence grows wings? Or the one where forgotten memories begin to remember you?

you name it process

we disagree as it is customary

growing sensations posing as findings emanate from rivulets and fountains inviting us to bathe therein

drowning may also be a ritual which you label process also but rightfully so

so let us gather behind Gare Saint-Lazare beneath the station clock to consider this

i'm not resisting intelligence. i'm resisting insulation.

there’s a difference.

I'm saying, when it comes to strangers, essays, problem-solving, drafting, even collaboration - tools are tools. but when someone looks me in the eye and says I love you… i want to feel the tremor in it. the uneven breath. -the risk.

intimacy isn’t just information transfer. It’s exposure.

If a machine smooths the sentence, it may also smooth the vulnerability. and sometimes the vulnerability is the whole point.

there should be some small friction- the long pause. the almost-wrong word. the sentence that starts brave, and ends uncertain.

it takes courage to say something without a safety net.

ah

the wonderful

life

scroll

scroll

👍 like

👍 like

scroll scroll

reblog

reblog

ah the great life

the wonderful

life

scroll scroll

reblog

Stillness is a slaughter

I am writhing, rootless

Fragile as the wind

The desperate leaves

On wizened trees

Shiver in the breeze

Tenderly indignant

This disheveled face

January wearing

November's makeup

Morning after mascara

My mind is

A silver sky

My hands are birds

best new years resolution:

don't be an asshole

.