Category: poetry

Tonight

even the crickets are silent

as if they felt the earth

quake from rifle shots

each one landing louder than the last.

Only the echoes of my footsteps on the pavement

cut through the night sky

a row of houses holding their breath

waiting hoping praying

for anything, something

to happen.

As if you can blink away the guns

hide in cookie cutter neighborhoods

until things die down

until someone else solves the problem

until another shot pierces through your window.

A decade ago I had a different blog and website, which I neglected in my hiatus from the arts. Unfortunately, I never saved my posts before I let go of the domain. I know, I regret it a bit. Ok, a lot. But today I was able to find some work I saved on my laptop!

Back then I traveled to DC three to four times a week. I spent the majority of the day in my car, on the train, thinking, dreaming. So I started what I called the Commuter Series, a series of writing inspired by a commute, written or conceived while on a commute, written about commuting (a movement and migration of bodies) whether by car, by bus, by train, by plane, by my own feet.

Here is arguably the best work to come out of the series, a poem called A deep love poem:

You've turned into a favorite poem of mine. 
I used to recite you on train rides
Not for practice
But like a cloud looming over my head
You were always there. 
I thought if I repeated you enough times
I’d rhyme my way to a resolution.
With every attempt at memorization
The words would ease the discomfort in my chest
But the pain was still mine and mine alone
And you weren't going anywhere. 
 
So I gathered my courage and told the world about you.
As the room sighed and ached with me
The microphone leading the way
I saw you slip away
Just as quickly as the time
You ran your fingers down my arm as if to catch me
But didn’t hold my hand.
  
Now you’re no longer mine
You’re no longer you.
Just a poem.
A deep love poem
A bittersweet poem
A clichéd heartbreak comfort poem
Shaped by an audience to fit their story.

armed with truths, we are the new guards of our future
friends and brethren, we govern with a purpose
in this world, we are formidable, independent populations
our towns, though distant, have no boundaries
we are free
present and divine
connected by common trials, rights, and laws
a people invested in justice and consent
a people absolute in their pursuit of happiness
but the powers of the earth and oppression
cause dangers of unparalleled allegiance and invasion
reducing liberty to swarms of bodies without life
a long train of repeated injuries

we are instruments of opinion
of tyranny
of honor and obstruction
may we not be deaf to the voice of justice
and protect and pledge
that we are
a free people

*Found poem: when you take words that resonate with you from another piece of literature and create a poem from those words. This is the poem I “found” in the Declaration of Independence.