Promise: A Poem

September 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day.
If you are struggling with depression, this is for you.
Be kind to yourself. Talk to someone. Stay alive.
And if you need help right now, text START to 741-741, the Crisis Text Line.

Promise

I see you standing there.
You’re by yourself, head bowed
As though the world is tied to your shoulders,
And maybe it is.

You think you’re on your own,
But I promise I’m here.
You are not alone.

You are so close to the cliff’s edge,
And you wonder if anyone would care,
If anyone would even notice?
I promise I would, and my heart would break
Into so many pieces that they could not be counted.

Please take one step back,
And breathe.
Breathe the fresh air into your lungs,
That is the feeling of life.

You are living.

Take another step back,
It’s okay, I promise, can’t you feel your heart beating?
That is life, and so are you.

You are not alone, I’m here,
Take my hand and hold on as tightly as you can,
Don’t worry if you break my fingers, I don’t care.

Just please hold on.

Your bowed shoulders are shaking,
The weight more than you can bear,
So give me half the burden, I don’t mind.

You want to go back to the edge,
But I refuse to let you go.

Please don’t go.

You think that your crying will shake me away,
But it won’t.
You can cry all you want, I don’t mind,
I’ll cry with you.
And you can wipe your eyes on my shirt when you’re done.

You keep looking back over your shoulder,
The edge is still there, it is clawing at you.
I’ll stand between you and the darkness,
I’ll beat it back with a stick, with my bare hands,
I’ll catch you by your ankles if you fall,
And I will pull you back.

You are life.
You are life.
You are life.

I know you are scared, and you want to leave,
But please, please stay.

I know it’s hard, and it hurts,
But please don’t go.
I see you, I am here,
I’ll hold your hand, I promise.

You are not alone.

 

 

©The Wild Poesy, 2012-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

Corner: A Poem

Corner

There are some days
When all I want is a corner,
A place guarded on most sides,
Angular but safe,
A place to stand or crouch,
To be solitary and quiet.

A corner where nothing is crooked,
Where the walls are smooth and cold to the touch,
The floor swept free of cobwebs,
With light from a window, perhaps.

All I want is a small place without anything,
Where I can read books
Or write poems,
And sometimes just cry into my hands
Because I want to.

There are some days
When all I want is a place to be alone
On purpose.

 

 

©The Wild Poesy, 2012-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

Flowers: A Poem

Flowers

The days have come,
These harsh hours built upon the strife
That covers the floors, the walls,
Blaring out at us from newspapers
Whose headlines are full of words that children are told not to say.

Hatred is spewing from mouths
Like coughed-up worms,
Demons pouring from throats and hovering in the air
Around our heads and ears,
Not a moment can pass without another vulgarity taking flight.

And the faceless voices scream at us,
At women who walk down the street in high heels,
At men in clean uniforms,
At black-skinned children who will soon be angels.

And these voices cower in their bodies,
Shoving down their own fears,
Their hatred using old faults as a ladder to climb to the lips
And get free.

The days have come
When eyes fall out to be replaced by screens
That flash with flawed images,
The damaged girls are painted over with pretty words
And the boys who dare to cry are shoved under beds,
And they grow up in the abominable world
Believing the deafening noises
That taunt from all sides.

And grief is given more often than flowers.
Have we forgotten the flowers?

And still we wonder why the children don’t play outside –
There are enough monsters in their heads.
The doubts grow daily like weeds,
Seeds sown in schools and through TVs,
You are small, you are weak, you are ugly, you are stupid, you are wrong.

You are nothing.

And in the haze of smoke and lost hope
There are not enough good words to break through,
Not enough voices raised to say sorry.
We are failing more with each day
And the trees are cut down to make newspapers to print hate,
And the flowers are dying.

And my throat is dry from disuse, maybe yours is, too.
But I’ll go out and find fading roses to fill up a glass
And I’ll say sorry, and tell you
That you are big, you are strong, you are radiant, you are brilliant, you are right.

Y o u.  A r e.  E v e r y t h i n g.

The women in high heels, dancing in the street,
The men in their uniforms who smile under their hats,
The children, black and white and all, playing freeze tag,
But none are frozen because they all want to un-freeze.
They are everything.

And you are everything.
You are life and you are loved.

And there are still enough flowers to make crowns.

 

 

©The Wild Poesy, 2012-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

Petrichor: A Moment of Thursday

Poetry is music, but the reverse is also true.
Listen to this, and it will make your Thursday better.
I promise.

 

Your hands hang limp at your sides,
Feeling as empty as can be felt,
Fingers shifting in the air,
Still recalling,
As though dreaming of a tune
Upon stuck piano keys.
No breath of air moves as your hands move,
Not as quiet,
Not with such slow breathless grace,
The subtle sweep and fall they make,
Absent, a waltz in the wind.
But more often now they still,
Halfway through motion.
And your fingernails are ragged and dirty
From anxious teeth
And gripping flowers too tightly,
Too close.
Now as they sway,
Your fingers shake, quivering,
When they reach out,
As though to catch wavering handfuls of fireflies,
But only blank space is there
To clutch at, baffled numbed hands.
And the old flowers you once held,
The crumpled ones on the floor
By your feet,
Still are clustered together by your hold,
Tangled stems crushed into each other,
Clung to, as though for dear life.
The petals move in the air
As faintly as your fingers,
The slightest flutter against floorboards,
Some abstract dance
That no one else can see.

 

Listen here: Keaton Henson’s “Petrichor”

I Will Not Eat the Darkness: A Moment of Thursday

Poetry is music, but the reverse is also true.
Listen to this, and it will make your Thursday better.
I promise.

 

The summer dusk,
Falling close and airless on our shoulders,
Tucks its ragged edges into the grass roots,
Settling in for the night.
The jaded sky hangs overhead
And we hug our knees,
Sweat coating our skin and dampening our clothes
While we stare into the trees.
Not a bough moves,
Each leaf is paralyzed,
Save the tiniest rustles of insect feet
That traverse the thin veins of their green faces.
Flowers, which typically dip and sway themselves to sleep,
Droop in the heat,
Immobile slumbering, ill-at-ease,
Their thin fronds and petals drying moment by moment.
We, too, can hardly bear to sit here,
The grass prickling our clammy skin,
But we remain passive,
Too uncomfortable to move our sweat-slicked limbs,
To push the limp hair back from our empty eyes,
To stretch our bare feet out, dirty from the day.
The stagnation is appealing, somehow,
So that we cannot leave it,
Cannot break it,
As though some harsh spell of stillness has been cast.
The light continues to weaken,
The sun fading into the horizon like an anchor.
The world is hushed and we dare not speak,
But in the dark we see the first firefly,
The small flare sent out to break open the night,
And now the slightest breeze wakens us all.

 

Listen here:
Over The Rhine’s “I Will Not Eat the Darkness”

Early Morning Range: A Moment of Thursday

Poetry is music, but the reverse is also true.
Listen to this, and it will make your Thursday better.
I promise.

When you are so tired you can’t sleep,
Recall the plains,
Apt-named.
Perpetual swaths of dirty earth
Lashed and beaten by rain and sun,
Flattened like worn-out laundry,
The interminable fields of century.
When you are so tired you cannot stand to sit still,
Recall the plains.
The wind reigns king,
Pushing and pulling all things to its will, deigning and decreeing.
The wheat stands and bows,
And someday you will learn.
When you are so tired you cannot hold yourself together,
Your fingers clawing at your own ribs to stay in one piece,
Recall the plains.
They are broken and still exist,
And so do you.
The wheat, endless, is not brown
But golden,
Like your hair in the sun.
The expanse of empty sky is the same in your eyes
As they stare without seeing
In this state of weariness complete.
When you are so tired you cannot give up,
Recall the plains.
The earth has given up to sky,
And thin stalks of grain, despite all, grow.
And so do you.
Lay out your burden,
Give it up.
When you are so tired you can’t feel,
Recall the plains,
Ceaseless sweep of susurrus grass.
If you look deep enough into the fields,
You will find the loveliest of flowers,
Roses wild and full of thorns that bite,
Drawing forth crimson drops from your hands and knees,
A pain you can feel.
When you are so tired you can’t sleep,
Recall the plains.
In their dead appearance they must be tired, too,
The wheat and grass and roses,
All worn.
Barren whispers curl on the tails of wind,
Cawing with the bleak voice of crows,
A keening elegy to the earth, pallid plains.
But still, within, they are alive.
And so are you.

 

Listen here:
George Winston’s “Early Morning Range”

Ides of March: A Moment of Thursday

Poetry is music, but the reverse is also true.
Listen to this, and it will make your Thursday better.
I promise.

 

The musty suitcase smell of indoor summers
Fills up whole corridors of memory.
Wallpapered halls with floors warping
So a marble would travel unhindered
To certain corners
Which you well know.

The warp-wood doors each opening,
Creaking,
Disclosing the secret lives of each year of youth,
Distinct personalities of each summer.

The peach-painted room,
Quiet rumpled bedclothes and wilted sunflowers,
Sand filling the chinks between floorboards,
A small cotton dress hung on the wall to air
That you can’t remember wearing.

The room of windows and nothing else,
Full up with empty light,
The bare floors nonetheless inviting,
There for the stretching out upon,
Nothing of care or grace,
Simple and wooden,
The bare elegance of artless repose.

The room of grey,
Perfect-made bed and ordered desk,
Papers stacked trimly aside an ink-black typewriter.
Clean paper, waiting for the words,
The worn-out shoes kicked against the baseboard
After long walks full of thoughts
And no speaking.

The room you haven’t seen yet,
The door at the far end of the hall.
A light shines from the thin gap beneath the door,
And sometimes you lay flat-out,
Your shoulders pressed into the floor dust,
Your neck craned like a heron
To get a glimpse.

The shadows of something are visible,
Variegated patterns that shift and alter
Like trees mottling grass
Or stars spilled onto dark velvet
Or marbles wobbling down a dim hallway.

Listen here:
Hanneke Cassel’s “Ides of March”

Goodbye Eilis: A Moment of Thursday

Poetry is music, but the reverse is also true.
Listen to this, and it will make your Thursday better.
I promise.

The weariness of day brimming in your shoulders
So all you can do is stretch out on the grass,
Though you know the rain is coming.
The air, fresh on your face,
Smells like liberty and fresh-turned earth,
Swaying your hair into a waltz
Across your face.
And you blink in the wind that lashes tears into your eyes,
Though you feel no sadness, you let them fall,
Some rain to wash off the dust of routine,
To wipe the grime from the window-glass.
The first drops fall from the clouds,
Peaceful, without hurry,
Beading up and resting on the grass where they land,
Rolling, vanishing into the dirt.
Slow trails slip down the leaves of the live oak not far away.
And then,
With little notice, the sky is opened,
Like a gate swung wide before caged wild horses,
And all the heavens rush forth,
A veritable flood.
And you breathe it all in
And out
And in.
Your aching limbs lying gracelessly
Are drenched and seem to come alive,
Arms stretching up aimlessly
To feel the dead air wash into existence,
Movement everywhere —
From the brown shoes of grass
To the green hats waving free in the hands of the oak,
Like saying hello or goodbye
(There’s little difference now).
So whatever trickling droplets escaped your eyelids
Are now lost,
The storm wipes off all trace,
And no one will know.

(Note: The film that features this song is stellar and one of my favorites.)

Listen here:
Michael Brook’s “Goodbye Eilis” (from “Brooklyn”)

Tokka: A Moment of Thursday

Poetry is music, but the reverse is also true.
Listen to this, and it will make your Thursday better.
I promise.

Mystery,
Like the sound of footsteps in leaves
Dead and left over from winter,
Frozen and thawed,
Weakened time after time until they crumble to dust
At slightest touch.
Like trees stretching over your head,
Their arms full of new buds that you won’t see
Until they fall under your shoes,
And then you’ll hardly notice them –
But now they hold your eye,
Waving like hands at the point of each bough and twig.
Like the path,
Nearly hidden in a blanket of coarse loam
And the overgrowth of wild hedges,
Swept-earth dirt smooth with age,
This track has known few feet
That did not belong to deer or mice,
And has been here longer than your memory serves.
Mystery,
Like the chirp of a robin you can never see,
But who, no doubt, is watching.
The murmurs of vines follow you
As you wander further.

(Note: Because of the minute length and general magic, I often listen to this song on a loop.)

Listen here:
Agnes Obel’s “Tokka”

Dvorák: A Moment of Thursday

A moment of Thursday.

Take a moment of Thursday to listen to this piece of music and do nothing.

Stare out of a window, let your eyes glaze over.

Be swept into the rippling leaves of trees that have been coaxed to dance in the wind.

Become lost. (I did.)

Do not read these words while you listen, please.
These words are thin and paltry in comparison to this immaculacy.

Do not read anything.

Just listen.

The trees, I think, understand this music, and any music.
The trees know things we do not.

Or perhaps we know, but have forgotten.

There is no time for good music in the scramble of modern life.

If you cannot find 12 minutes of uninterrupted time to listen to this music, do not even bother.

But if you can scrape together a mere 12 minutes, please:

Listen to this.

Hear this.

There is a difference.

The trees will dance in perfect time to every rise and fall of note, I promise.

The trees know.

We are learning, remembering.

Poetry is music, but the reverse is also true.

Listen to this, and it will make your Thursday better.

I promise.

Listen here:
Dvorák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”