What if our cleaner lines were gobbled-up by my pen?
What if I sketched our imperfect borders into nothing?
What if I created perfection; a blank slate?
What if I swallowed the wrong words instead?
What if I said the right thing and you stayed?
***
My final poem of the year, written for the final Real Toads prompt ever: PLAY IT AGAIN! with REAL TOADS, hosted by Kerry O’Connor. I chose to write to Kerry’s LET’S FIND OUR POETIC VOICE prompt and then – as a tip of the hat – to erase, clean, or “un-write my voice”, as many of the wonderful prompts here directly contributed to my poetic voice growing and stretching in ways I never imagined possible.
Thank you to everyone at Real Toads – both the hosts and the contributors – for all of your efforts, encouragement, and support. I know this isn’t goodbye, so I’ll see you all out there next year.
Approaching winter solstice,
dawn is a selfish lover
refusing to yield our time –
stubborn purple shawl – to Sol’s
feeble glare; nature is still,
unsure of beginning as
humanity’s headlamps speed
through, splitting tapestry in
two in the name of progress,
civilization’s ego,
harsh budgetary deadlines,
missing blissful, seemingly
fickle metamorphic dance
of dew into mist into
diamond dust. The disturbance
is a series of ripples;
dawn creeps along on her own
terms, and I love her all the
more for it. I wait with her.
Some speed off into the day,
fixated on what comes next.
Others linger in the night,
trapped by fate no longer seen.
Stay here with us for a while.
Let your eyes adjust to her.
See how her shadow shimmers?
Unhurried, yet still fleeting.
Past problems hold no power.
Next year’s light won’t reach us yet,
but today’s sunrise soon will.
I wish you’d too embrace her,
in her splendid stubbornness.
Her wonders are apparent.
You need only to wait here,
and see her stir for yourself.
***
“True intimacy is a state in which nothing exists between two people; no space, no inhibitions and no lies.” – Ranata Suzuki
Have you ever had pure intimacy?
Not to be confused with lingering,
humid summer passion,
it is timid, pallid winter sun
kissing ice crystals with fleeting beauty,
arriving at low angles on high latitudes,
vulnerable, rarely intense enough
to accompany morning tea,
breaking fast after breakfast as lovers
franticly throw open south-facing curtains
capturing as much tenuous warmth
as time and nature allows.
Ever leaned into a winter sunset?
It ignites frosty edges of clouds,
embracing with fiery shadows,
but then it is barely there,
gone in a ghostly cirrus whisper,
leaving Mercury in retrograde as lovers
shrouded in twilight wonder
if it ever existed at all.
***
Sure, whenever I complete a form
that’s nosey enough to ask,
I check the corresponding square,
but I’m just some random guy
born into a reddish-brown shell, and
there’s no option for human doing his best,
given the tattered incomplete playbook
passed down for generations.
Everything I learned about being black
I learned from others, from momma’s
early-warning games that life’s not fair,
the playing field isn’t level,
and the rules are different for folks
who look and sound like us; that the
difficulty settings are disproportionately
skewed; that there are folks who hate me
at first sight, before I could even begin
to hope to win them over
with a smile and a silly joke.
Being black can be tricky, but
what can I definitively
tell you about being black?
You’re better off asking one of my
blood relatives who are black and proud;
I don’t know if I’m not black enough
or not proud enough, but by all accounts,
and my admission, it’s probably both.
I’m amused by the idea of claiming pride
in something I had no control over;
it’s not like I achieved anything; it’s not
like I’m one of the best blacks like Barack
or Beyoncé or K-Dot; I’m just some dude
who popped out of his momma with
reddish-brown skin, a fear of
creepy-crawlies, and a love of words.
Being black can be bemusing, but what
can I honestly tell you about being black?
To be honest, I don’t think about it
very much these days, not unless
circumstances compel me to.
I’m certainly not doing it right,
just ask anybody with the
privilege of voicing opinion;
I don’t speak the language well enough
for anyone; if I’m confident, I’m too uppity;
if I’m insecure, I need to be saved
from my own ignorance; if I’m silent,
I’m one of the sneaky ones; if I’m loud,
I’m one of the angry ones; if I’m
actually angry, I’m a threat
that needs to be stopped by any means
that will most likely withstand
judicial scrutiny.
Being black can be maddening, but
what can I unequivocally
tell you about being black?
It would seem that I’m unqualified
to say for absolute certain.
My chest rises and falls to its own cadence.
I smile big smiles, laugh belly-laughs, and
dream dreams like any other common human.
Tears well in my eyes, and I weep
openly during sappy love stories,
or when a vigilante is acquitted
by his peers for murdering one of my peers.
(Granted, we’re all peers, but my neglecting
to use first-person singular possessive here
could be perceived as not black enough.
Refer to “being black can be tricky” above.)
I have irrational fears of spiders and zombies,
and a hyper-rational fear of meeting
the wrong policeman in a dark alley
after fitting the description.
You know the description;
it’s always the same description.
Being black can be terrifying.
But what can I fearlessly
tell you about being black?
It can be tricky, bemusing,
maddening, terrifying,
all these things at once,
and sometimes, when I’m alone,
staring at the stars above
on the blackest night,
as starlight takes eons to reach
where blackness has already been,
waiting indifferently for it,
it is an absence of all these things,
for when the cosmos
overpowers my brown eyes
with overwhelming proof
of my own individual insignificance,
that is when the truth speaks to me,
that being black is human,
and is but one of many facets
of our collective humanity.
***
Trigger warning: The video below contains satirical graphic gun violence.
Inspired by dVerse dVerse Poetics: On Shades of Black, hosted by anmol(alias HA). Other writers contributed to the prompt here. I know this one’s in dire need of editing, but I may leave it as is, as it came from an honest thread of thought.
Grasp that lightning if you must;
harvest it, gorge yourself upon it,
repurpose it to power your safe haven,
getaway vehicle, or doomsday device,
whichever you choose;
I’m not qualified to judge.
Ask my mother.
She knows. She knew
way back when I was 16 years old
that I wasn’t shit
and my grudge-fueled quest
to prove her wrong succeeded
at proving her both absolutely wrong
and unequivocally right like an
accidental Schrodinger’s cat experiment.
Inability to forgive
converted my potential into kinetic,
driving my momentum
into achievements I never imagined for myself,
and it also left me lifeless,
dead-eyed,
inside an unremarkable box,
waiting to be discovered by wiser forces.
Forgiveness is for old folks
who no longer have the energy for grudges;
many of whom are gathering
their remaining momentum
in a last-ditch effort of
getting into heaven.
Suddenly
the meaning of The Lord’s Prayer
crystallizes before them,
and they’re angling for a slice of salvation pie.
I don’t know much about forgiveness,
but I do know how it feels to run out of steam,
finding myself alone with regret. Nowadays,
I find both grudges and forgiveness
equally inert.
All that matters now lie within
taking accurate readings
and observing what is.
***
Floating behind me,
a sea of blue, an immense sphere
comprising all that I know,
adore and despise,
breathe and asphyxiate,
drink and drown.
Ahead, you glisten, in quiet peril
reflecting light, juxtaposed in endless black,
after reporting a problem, drifting away,
brave smile in your voice
unintelligible
at this growing distance.
“You’re too late,” you said,
while still in range,
the warmth in your voice
transcending the void,
inexplicably soothing
my chilly fingers
and frosty extremities.
“Oh shit,” I said,
profanely breaking protocol
as the aspect of you
slowly shrank to a point of light.
“I’m sorry,” I offered to the magnets
within the transmitter mic,
a vain effort to overrule
our physical plane.
“It’s ok,” you said tenderly,
reassuring neither of us,
us both ignoring the
depleting oxygen alarms.
“I’m on to my next waypoint.
We’ll have to rendezvous
at the next target window,”
you declare as if our time were not
fleeting, finite,
our fates fixed.
You disappeared beyond the thin blue line,
leaving me to contend with the enormity
of the pale blue light and
an hour of radio silence,
floating above our northern hemisphere,
tilting away, towards winter.
“You free?” your voice vibrated
into my anxious receiver
after a maddeningly long silence
as your glimmer emerged
from the far-side,
rising to rival Venus-glow
and moondust.
“Yes,” I replied quickly,
maneuvering towards a
rendezvous altitude.
“I’m listening. I’m here.”
Then everything went null,
no heat, no cold,
not even light or shadow or grey,
leaving us clasping onto nothing.
***
The Real Truth (Or Why Nobody Asks Me to Deliver Toasts at Weddings or Family Feasts)
And what
do any of you
know of Truth?
None of you would know it
not even if it rose in the east,
set in the west,
and pelted you with harmful UV rays
as you lean into his warmth,
grinning like a slow-cooked idiot.
Slowly he rises,
bringing light, warmth,
and terminal cancer,
the indifferent promise
of life and death.
We’ll sing in praise of the former
screening the latter
with sweetly scented chemicals
that lead to a sweeter-scented
terminal cancer.
Life, like the sun
which nourishes and imperils us,
is a massively limited,
egregiously finite
string of things that don’t matter,
and the only constant is
its inevitable return to the lifeless void;
this inevitability is not to be
praised nor condemned, for
to try is to embrace the lie,
not that it matters how infinity is received,
for it will be visited upon you inevitably
and nothing you leave behind,
not even progeny, not even monuments,
not even this truthful tribute will matter,
for none of it will outlast the inevitability.
Life is a lie, death is the Truth,
and I know of no one, good or evil,
who has faced this Truth
with grace and equanimity
who has ever lived to tell the tale.
Now stop wasting everyone’s time
and let us enjoy this bountiful harvest
grown in the light of Truth.
***
Hephaestus’ Waste & Cosmic Rubble 