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everypoemanepitaph · 4 years

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Object Permanence

Have you noticed how

we leave people behind,

stuck in stasis,

suspended in the rooms and spaces

we walk through and then walk out of?

Your old teachers

rest in silent classrooms.

Your pharmacist

stands behind the counter,

straightening his white coat,

waiting for your monthly visit.

The woman who asked you for directions

is still walking

across the leaf-littered bridge,

framed by autumn’s dying embers,

in the park next to your house.

In your college dorm room

it is still 2008

and your roommate’s

hunched over her desk,

toying with her bellybutton ring

and talking, on a flip phone,

to the boy she hasn’t lied to yet.

In your childhood home

it is always 1999

and your dad –

hair more pepper than salt,

cheeks reddened from the wine

that hasn’t flooded his mind yet,

hasn’t drowned months of memories

and left high water markers

of dementia

in its wake –

your dad is dancing with your mom

to “Auld Lang Syne” and laughing,

ringing in a new year

that sparkles full of promise

and will never fall to dust.

#poem #poetry #original poem #My writing #my poetry #my poems #nostalgia #time

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everypoemanepitaph · 4 years

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All Things Great and Self-Reliant

At the center

of the pedestrian bridge

I pause my smartwatch

to take in the view,

Autumn’s desperate fists

clinging to the last few not-bare trees,

the smatterings of stubborn early frost,

the stilled, sepia silence of it all,

and then the Heavens open up,

the river’s surface springing to life,

droplet patters bouncing off of slate, of concrete.

I stand alone, witnessing this shower -

its swell, its sudden ending - and

find myself thinking of wedding planning,

how our officiant, in our first meeting,

asked “Are you religious?”

How I must have spat my “no” at him,

so young and proud of my denial

of the mass hysteria of idol worship,

my refusal to kneel, subservient,

before a hypocritical false prophet

and drone out hymns of peace and brotherhood

from a book dripping with blood.

“No,” and he countered with a question:

“Do you believe in anything, at all,

larger than yourself?”

I hear that question again

in the damp hush of the valley

as the water stills to mud-green glass.

Birds burst from the bank,

beating wings against the water,

diving under, under, bowing heads.

All of this, I think -

the ducks, the trees,

Autumn’s thin and clinging fingers,

Winter’s premature hello,

and, most of all, the rain -

all of this is larger.

It exists for reasons so much greater,

ancient and unknowable,

than me and my enjoyment.

It just happened, that I ran

into the middle of it all

this dim November afternoon.

Perhaps that question should be asked

of priests, of devotees, church-goers.

When you get caught in the rain,

do you believe it falls for you?

A gift, perhaps, that He took time

to send down just for you?

Or his way of making you humble

with wet and soggy clothes,

challenging you to survive a storm?

Is it a message for you

from your grandpa, up in Heaven?

If everything happens for a reason

and you, you are that reason,

then do you picture your own face

when you look skyward?

Do you hear your own voice answer

when you pray?

I believe in rainfall,

in the ripples that bring fish

closer to the surface

so that birds can feed.

I believe in yellow leaves

dropping silently from branches,

letting go

without anyone to witness

their descent into the ground.

I believe Winter doesn’t need a god

to create its perfect crystals:

snowflakes start as simple dust.

I believe we are so lucky

to know the touch of rain’s cool fingers

on our fragile, upturned faces,

to find ourselves alive in beauty

so much larger than us all.

#poetry #poem #Poems #my writing #my poetry #original poetry #nature #religion #religionisbullshit #natureismyreligion

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everypoemanepitaph · 4 years

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Alarm

There was a fire in your house today

and you don’t know it yet.

You arrive home, weary and snow-laden,

and the stinging stench of smoke

greets you at the door.

You split and take off running,

him to the basement –

thudding down the stairs

like a corpse falling, stiff and heavy –

you from first floor room to room,

expecting flames round every corner.

On this first pass

all you notice is not-fire,

the quiet absence of tragedy

draped like sheer fabric across every room.

Nothing.

You meet back in the kitchen

and his eyes are wild,

those of deer who’ve heard a shot

but cannot spy the rifle.

“Feel the walls,” he says

and you imagine bones ablaze,

secret, hidden embers

lying in wait, whispering,

as your hands sweep over plaster.

On this second pass,

you see what would ignite and die:

the records, the piano, the books and bookshelves,

the clothes, birth certificates, diplomas.

Everything you could not carry out

when the disease burns through the skin

and out into the open air.

But no walls are warm.

Back to the kitchen.

Search again, outlets and appliances,

check everything,

even the cold heat lamp

that stopped working weeks ago,

the one you didn’t think to unplug since it was broken.

The one concealing a ring of cinders beneath it.

Your mind pieces it together:

the malfunctioning smart socket,

the afternoon’s power outage,

the reset timer, back alive.

You touch the charred circle

and it crackles and collapses

(as your house would’ve)

beneath your careless fingers

as the lamp swings in your hand

like a church’s incense burner

(forgive us our thoughtlessness

and lead us not into the fire)

On the third pass, and the sixth, and tenth,

all you see

is all you’d lose –

the dog, the cat, the photographs,

the piano, notebooks, love and home –

and all the hidden spaces

where death could wait so patiently

to turn your world to ash

some snowy afternoon.

After all, anything organic is combustible.

Even human bones break down in fire

and someday, yes, I will tell them

“give me to the flames”

but just my broken body,

not the piano, not the poems,

and not today.

#poetry #my poetry #my writing #poem #fire

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everypoemanepitaph · 4 years

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“Sometimes suffering is just suffering. It doesn’t make you stronger. It doesn’t build character. It only hurts.”

— Kate Jacobs // Comfort Food

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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“I have spent years just like Spider-Man, convinced the best way to protect the people who loved me was to leap from a tall building.”

— Brenna Twohy, from Swallowtail

#Button Poetry

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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#writing

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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Mary Oliver, from In Blackwater Woods

#poetry #mary oliver

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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“I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it. And I remembered. I would not be the person I am without the authors who made me what I am—the special ones, the wise ones, sometimes just the ones who got there first. It’s not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It’s the most important thing there is.”

— Neil Gaiman, “Newberry Medal Acceptance Speech”

#neil gaiman #fiction

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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“Choose to spend your whole life telling secrets you owe no one to everyone, until there isn’t anyone who can insult you by calling you what you are: you holy blinking star.”

— Andrea Gibson, "Your Life"

#Button Poetry

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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“My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.” –Neil Gaiman

#stories #neil gaiman

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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“I’ve never been very good at small talk. I’m always too busy wondering where interesting scars come from.”

— Guante, “Small Talk”

#button poetry

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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“And every day, I write back to the letters you never wrote.”

— @etoile-filantes

#poetry

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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“If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself.”

— Rick Riordan; The Lightning Thief

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

Dead Poets Society (1989) dir. Peter Weir.

#dead poets society #poetry

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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““The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again.””

— - A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (via katiesclassicbooks)

#poetry

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everypoemanepitaph · 5 years

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“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.” - Albert Camus

#philosophy #camus #literature

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