Poems

Some of my poems I’ve written. It’s an off-and-on thing.

What Home is

Home is where you make it. Making something “home” means adding your touch wherever you go, while simultaneously accepting that place as part of yourself. Whether that be a physical place or a people, home is where you become part of something, and that something becomes part of you. When it begins to feel farmilar, when you start identifying memories with a place, when it becomes a setting in your story, or the people that make that home start to become characters in your life, and eventually, when parting with it is like parting with a piece of yourself, or closing a bittersweet chapter of a story, that’s when you know you made a home. And that’s how you know you can keep making more homes, more stories, and more memories.

That’s one of the first things my husband said to me, “Coffee is a wonderful thing-” Now we enjoy coffee together every morning and make every day our home. He is part of my home, and everyday is an adventure right in our own town- and even when we move soon, we’ll make new memories and live new stories to tell. I left my old home to be with him, and we keep pressing on to make more memories and grow together as God writes each day for us.

It’s Loud

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Portrait of Glenn

This was a poem I wrote in High School during that creative writing class. The prompt was just this painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Then, I eventually did this painting later. Of my poem. Just think it was cool to write a poem off another artwork, then another piece off of that poem.

This was my pastel on canvas after the poem was written. I think I did it about a month later. This is also my first pastel piece.

Loud
Loud to me
It’s just clutter

Clutter that clatters
Crashes in my
mind – only mine

Bounce off the
walls of this canvas
Songs, beats- lies

Lies to the beat
Of this song that I hate
And only I know

I only know
Because only
I hear.

It sickens me
Alone
Alone with the

song only I know.
But it’s back in
my mind- cycle

Through my system.

out
get it out everywhere
Unhinge my jaw

Just to get it
known
someone to hear.

My eyes glow
With the song
I lost myself

My solid yellow eyes
Something’s wrong
Clearly wrong.

Make it clear
Expose the symptoms
It’s contagious

I refuse to die!
This sickness of a song
I show the signs

but they- they died.

Deaf- they were
Unable to hear the song
The song that made them sick

They held it in
It killed them
Killed them clean.

It’s trying to get me-
this ill literacy-
This- this killer lullaby

But I’ll never
Let it stay.
I spit it out.

Over and over-
Get it out.

 

 

A Ship to Sail Out

A Ship to Sail Out

There’s a deeper whoosh than a pencil
When I take my pen to my tablet.
There is an elegant completeness
In each invisible stroke-
A stroke only I know.

But even in my quiet uncertainty,
Each stroke sounds as sure
As the releasing of a sail on a ship.

The wind, that is, my latest creation-
I imagine, Is caught in my strokeless sail of a pen.
As I draw, the ocean air watches,
With the wind and my sail,
I’ll head out into the sea I call my tomorrow.

To Simply Be.

To Simply Be.

I’d like to gather the wings
Of many different birds.
The life that inhabits the sky,
Keeping their feathers to their kind.
Among this array of feathers
I could find myself admiring
The many forms of soaring
Gliding, and singing.

If I could find myself in the tangled jungle
Green, crawling with predators,
I could hear the distinct calls
Of the birds of paradise
And I would seek to acquire
The boldness stretched along their wingspan.
The colors, as loud as the trees
Despite the dangers of the places their nests claim
They take off in bright, fluorescent flight

As of the woodlands,
The desaturated sister of the jungle-
So silent my steps are careful not to disturb her-
I only know of the presence
Of the birds of prey.
In honor of these, I would request
the carefulness in each worthy swoop.
Silent, still, even in a killing catch
The balance they bring to their kingdom
When they take the life of the snake.

And even by my own nest,
The simple suburban neighborhood,
Where all four seasons pass by my window,
I love the mornings I hear my friends-
My neighborhood robins and such.
I would ask if they would lend me
A little lesson in humility.
I’d ask how to be truly pleasant,
To be a sweet compliment to those around me,
Because it shines through them when they sing.

While I’d never quite fully have these traits
In the way nature physically possesses them,
Each bird deeply and completely embodying
The qualities they have,
I watch them from the ground and let them teach me.
And I realize-
The only have one focus.
To Simply Be.