Poeta

this is the science fiction story that I wrote last year and then submitted to the scholastic competition:

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I’m not sure I like the 365 poetry project because

1. I have no energy for it/I haven’t been keeping up with it
2. Everything I’ve been producing sounds tired/like everything else I’ve ever written, continuing along themes I’ve been trying to abandon and yeah I’m just currently in a rut where I’m not happy with anything I produce, even if it’s inspired. 

I’m caught in the teeth of your zipper
but you still make my day.  

You steal the lipstick from my mouth,
rubbing off my mask as I paint yours.

You read me your tired poetry
and hear my shopping list of complaints.

Your teeth are my white picket fence:
guarding everything I’m supposed to want.

I turn on the late night news:
it was a trainwreck of a tornado day.

When your thoughts are caught in the rain
don’t let them drip on the carpet.
Trace steam patterns on the windowpane
when your thoughts are caught in the rain.
Take something to numb the pain,
watch the floodgates, meet the prophet.  
When your thoughts are caught in the rain
don’t let them drip on the carpet.

they made me with two eyes and two arms and two lungs
they didn’t want my body parts to be lonely
but they weren’t paying attention and they skipped a stitch in my spine
and on my DNA they stamped
stubbornness, insincerity and a profound lack of empathy

at birth they prescribed me
twelve years of school
college
a mediocre job
a husband, three children
and death

I absorbed what they wanted me to absorb
and when my thoughts were caught in the rain
and dripped all over the carpet
they punished me.

Sometimes I worry about all the things that I’ve done
but then I remember
it’s just what kind of robot I was made to be
and cogs aren’t made fit to order

skin and bones

i’ll plant seeds in your lungs

so flowers can grow

I washed you off my skin
and forgot your ghost on my sheets

A flood couldn’t clean my conscience
Tsunami thoughts predicted

The good times are dead,
The bad times are alive - I
mourn all the times past. 

What came first?
Was it darkness?
Is darkness something,
or is it the absence of something?

I don’t believe in heaven.
Well then what comes after?
Darkness.
Doesn’t the idea of darkness scare you?
The idea of forever scares me.

Do you ever fly in your dreams?
Yes. It feels like being in the ocean,
suspended between the bulge and nuzzle of the sea.
I think the universe is humming a melody
but it’s always been there, so we can’t hear it.

Is the universe an accordion?
Expanding and contracting with the rise and fall of your chest,
each breath lasting billions of years.
Or is it eternal, unborn, undying?
Does the universe extend forever, or is there an end somewhere?
The idea of forever scares me.

Fireworks baptized our terpsichorean town

In a warm rain that marked the end of our torrential year

It wasn’t the end of the world (yet)

***

A novel with 365 blank pages

Taped together, zooming through the typewriter

in a continuous roll 4,000 feet long

How will you write your life?

***

I’m not sure if new beginnings

can be marked on a calendar