Memories

January 3, 2010

Clinginess, anger, hurt, sadness, bitterness
It will all fade

in that order

My memory goes quickly
Already a neutral feeling as replaced the anger that
has sat on my breast
My fingers no longer impulsively reach for your speed-dial.
Your cold shoulder doesn’t
freeze over my heart.
Darling, I will be a new person
Just for you.

My emotions
when they run dry,
Will you still love me?

xoxo

May 18, 2008

who wants to be the
pretty smelling flower
suffocating in a pot of fertilizer?
not me
i’d rather be that weed
hanging off the edge of a rocky cliff
blown away with the wind

July 12, 2007

My eyes are strained and tired
But still I search
for the Unhappy ones-
Or rather, the ones that make me unhappy.
Confounded, flawed, imperfect things.
It gives me strange satisfaction to see them
Cut off from the roots of potential
Starved from the tree of forgiveness,
And never again associated with me.
So I cut and I cut
Until I realize,
I have no more.

***

Sure, the hospital has its charm.

There’s that grouchy old doctor
Who yells at all the nurses
And never smiles
Who one day, out of the blue,
Buys me a Dr. Pepper.

There’s that oxygen saturation
Going down, down, down.
We are all worried
But jiggle him, shake him, wake him up
And relief; it goes up, up, up.

There’s that darn elevator that’s always full
The surgeon is waiting, impatiently
The patient is waiting, scared
Alas, another elevator comes
And the person who has waited thirty minutes
on the floor above you steps out–you first.

And there’s that poor old lady
Sick to her stomach, in pain, and cold.
Bring her a blanket
And her smile–it’s warm.

But most of all,
There’s that great moment
The moment you lose all expectation
Of a returned smile
Of a kind gesture
Of any return for that matter
And still,
You see the charm.

***

Failure,
I have never before been so grateful to you.
You have angered me before
And thrown away my favorite dream
Without even asking me, I might add.
You have snuck up on me,
Scaring the living daylights out of me.
But don’t worry, I have recovered.
You have pulled my hair, in stress,
Like a bratty little brother,
And I am all the older for it.
But today, you have me enchanted.
You have grown up.
Who would have known you to be capable
Of having that strength
Of subtly using your mischief
To open for me
That door of destiny.

***

I’m the type of person who likes to move forward.
I like to feel the wind in my face
To feel the burn in my legs
And see glow of the rising sun in front of me.
I like to look for milestones to chart my journey
To pause momentarily to appreciate the present
But quickly squint, again, at the speck in the horizon
And keep moving–forward.
I like the roads to be straight
But also unique.
I’ll travel the dirt, the gravel, and the cobblestone
And if there is a turn or two,
I’d still like to see the horizon
At the end of every turn.
I like to feel the physics of momentum
To accelerate and simply glide–effortless
Yet if a pebble should trip me
I’d still like to thank it
For giving me a new start.
I am a forward person.
But despite my rush to get to the end,
Despite the thrill of the chase, I might say,
There are moments where I feel tired.
These are the moments I am happy to look back
And I find myself in a good enough mood to tell my shadow
Good job.

February 18, 2006

It is the queerest feeling

When you find yourself trapped

Between present and past.

When you are lead unwillingly back to places

You thought you had airbrushed out of your history

It is a bittersweet moment

But you tell yourself it couldn’t have been

Though you’re inclined to believe once more

It could have been.

And the lonely bear that sits upon the drawer untouched

Watches stoically

As you shut away for one last time

That single dried rose.

January 26, 2006

A Sonnet

Tonight I see a shooting star

Some say it is bad luck

A ghost whose enmity I struck

But I bask in its memoir

Morning creeps with graying roots

Foreshadowing fury from above

But upon the morning buds lies dew

A godsend out of love

And teatime arrives with afternoon

Amidst an air of arresting humdrum

A shrill reminder in fine tune

Beating against my eardrum

Although up to its neck in hot water it seems

A teakettle, continues to sing.

January 12, 2006

Heritage–

I run from you two times in my life:

Day and night.

The color yellow staining my future

The ominous cloud of black

Enshrouding and obscuring

My present and past

Did you know children are colorblind?

Life is so much simpler that way.

Back to the day when Pocahontas book bags

Still complemented Cinderella sandals

And Mulan lunch boxes

Not having to worry about the discordant clashing

Of unmatched colors

But sooner or later

All of us will bear glasses

Or mirrors through which we will be forced to see

The truth our mothers bore and hid from us

Tints of a true identity

The jarring, ineffable truth

That fairytales lie.

Different, that’s what we are

So much that no matter what we do

No matter how many fences of our neighbors we tear down

No matter how many chains to the past we break

No matter how many pictures of bloody crime we burn

The Berlin Wall lives on.

- -

They jam the taste of the rainbow

Into one fun-sized package

I separate them all into neat orderly rows

Red with red

Yellow with yellow

Green with green

In the end, I only eat the yellow.

There was a time

I wanted to have a halo of gold

But in a scorching land

This colorful homeland of mine

Bleached ashen white

I figured I’d best be more practical

And so I call for the comfort of an old acquaintance

The roots that never left me

When I myself poisoned them with peroxide

Turning from the sooty hand it offered

My faithful cloud of black

Enshroud me

Protect me

For if you forgive me,

I promise to embrace you with all my heart

Two times in my life:

Day and night.

Friday October 7, 2005

It’s been so long since you’ve tried to touch the sky,

swinging back and forth,

rain dripping from your hair and from the tip of your nose

into your mouth.

When was the last time you played in the dirt, and

slid effortlessly down a blue plastic slide,

landing unexpectedly with a thump

on a pile of damp, earthly smelling woodchips?

And you try to remember

since when did your life’s great goal shift

from making it all the way across the monkey bars

to laboring at piles and piles of indecipherable textbooks,

striving to get into a “good college”?

When did things begin to change?

You don’t remember.

You can only sit at your desk

trying to grasp at those last graying memories.

You can only wonder at the beauty and simplicity

of those golden childhood years.

September 18th, 2005

I’ve always wanted to be able to just close my eyes and walk in one direction forever and ever but when I try to I always find my eyes fluttering open after a mere five steps and then I look around me and see that I have miles of nothingness and nothing to run into so I close my eyes again and I walk but somehow I find myself once again scoping out the horizon for possible obstructions or even people looking at me and of course it turns out I am all alone with nothing blocking my path and I start to wonder why moving forward or moving at all is so hard especially since there is nothing stopping me but then I realize that there is and that if I could only let go of that something then I could move on and open my eyes to find myself at the horizon but as much as I try it never happens and I’m stuck in this vicious cycle, this nothingness, knowing that I could be free.

***

And the sun poured in from the glass window in a thick column of whiteness; it was so beautiful I wanted to take a picture of it, but to do so would have been inappropriate. I coughed and turned away. There is a terribleness in how humans find excitement and even elation in the smokes of destruction. But from a teakettle’s point of view, I suppose, beauty can be found in most everything.