Filed under: Pensation | Tags: campfire, crickets, nature, splinters, sun, thistles, tree, underwear
I want to smell like a campfire…and taste like one, too
I want to crunchle the pestering old sand in my teeth
to be a stethoscope to God’s pulsing crickets beating
escape from florescent Folsom
and strip it down
strip down
I need splinters under my fingernails, and
bugbites on my knuckles
itching, snitching, scratching
delightfully impossible to appease
Ode to thistles in my underwear
Thou art far more comfortable than a stare
From people with pedantic poles up there
Could I please lick a tree?
Could it become a part of me?
If I eat a tree, could I maybe see
the view from up on top?
There’s a peek-a-boo of blue!
¡Achoo!
(I stared right at the sun)
I’m sweating, but nature makes chaffing fun.
My! My writing’s just begun…
But I can’t sit here for too much longer
‘ cause
even versus incandescent, I’m pretty sure the sun’s still stronger.
And I need stronger
need so much stronger
the need is so much stronger today in the air
than I ever noticed while stuffed in there.
I’d rather have a sliver in my eye-lid
Than the tinted Plexiglas windows – do you know what they did?
For years, they mulishly hid
My sun from me.
Out here I may burn, but at least I can be!
Filed under: Pensation | Tags: circus, cream puffs, elegy, grandma, grandpa, heritage
On Sundays my dreams deflate, a little,
Like saccharine, precarious cream puffs
Getting massacred by a three-ton sigh,
Or a careless hippo’s clod
Or a toddler unaware
Or a callous stop to stare
Who doesn’t like my hair
So there’s no sense sulking there
Anymore
Didn’t there used to be something magical?
Something magical about Sundays?
Something magical about
Anything?
My Great-Gramma, before she disappeared, said there used to be
something magical
My Great-Grampa said the same thing before he left,
Staring at me through the photos,
tucked away on pages in Tupperware
With his marathon eyes big as cream puffs
Looking into my sprint eyes,
deflated as forgotten soufflés.I don’t have a front porch, Grampa.
Our rocking chair took up too much space.
My mother doesn’t make fried chicken.
Fried chicken’s unhealthy anyway.
The weather’s never right for a pot-luck in the park.
A Sunday drive’s not efficient.
We’re usually too tired or busy to breathe.
And I have too much work to do.
Too much work with all my assigned learning.
Assigned curiosity.
Prescribed life.
So we sit.
In separate rooms.
So we can focus better.
And we wish we could watch a circus.
Maybe on Monday, or Tuesday.
But by then, the cream puff’s too far past the 5-second rule.
My whole life is a 5-second rule…
Don’t look just
rush to pick it all up.
Now.
Maybe next week
Maybe then we
won’t massacre the magic.
Yeah.
Maybe next week.
I know a Mrs. Whose sight is so small
Some days I’m not sure she has any at all.
She only likes words if they’re skinny and tall,
If they’re not from the book then they’re not words at all.
She sighs with malevolence, burning a hole
Right through my scuffed papers, on down to my…heart
You see, I switched words there, to drive Mrs. Mad
She scoffs at my adverbs and follows the fad
I know I can’t write, but that’s alright with me
No thanks to that Mrs., I’m just glad I can be.
Filed under: Pensation | Tags: catharsis, joy, outside of boxes, satisfaction guaranteed, sticky dreams, stretching, system, time to feel
It seems like joy’s become a product,
Post the posters with the edict:
Once I’ve finished all my tasks,
And once I’ve done just what they ask,
Then I’ll have my time for me,
And Satisfaction’s guaranteed.
‘Cause that’s the system that we’ve built;
We build these fences made of guilt.
We pride ourselves on all our structure
and then we just forget each other.
So how, then, can we learn or grow,
if we can’t see that we don’t know?
We choke on what we tell ourselves,
So we build more. This time it’s shelves.
A place to place our sticky dreams
and stuff away what our soul screams.
‘Cause longings don’t fit in the mold
or mesh with what we’ve all been told.
And then, with sticky dreams aside,
I get to rest, enjoy the ride.
That is until a moment’s passed,
for then I’ll race or I’ll be last.
(Last at what, I’m not quite sure)
We all just race toward cheap allure.
We know the rules, they’re strict and plain.
But does anybody know my name?
The system’s safe, the path is clear.
Then why to I feel mounting fear?
It doesn’t matter. Run the race.
For heaven’s sake, just keep the pace!
But what if where this clear path leads
is nowhere that I want to be?
Living in a box for life
may succeed to block out strife,
but what’s the point of being here
if we can never shed a tear?
So maybe I was wrong to think
that fences make my problems shrink.
I’ve realized and won’t forget
that sticky dreams don’t fit on shelves.
They belong outside of desperate boxes
where they can pull us, where they can stretch us,
torture us in time.
no fence equals no safety net
no safety net means scars
but when the crimson hands of dawn
pet our faces and when the pain in someone else’s eye
cuts through to our heart, we remember, then, that pain will heal
at least we took the time to feel
