Tag: poetry

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Bones

The smallest bones,
they say,
are in the ears.
It’s fact, scientific,
backed by reason
and research
and reality.

But I would argue
the smallest bones,
the finest,
slightest,
most fragile bones
aren’t really bones at all,
but are the most seemingly breakable
non-bone bones
holding ourselves together.
The structure within us
linking us piece
by
piece
to each other,
one another,
lover to lover,
beloved to beloved.

The bones of our beings.

Orchestrating our lives,
these tiny bones
learn to swell and collapse
with the tides of the universe.
They bend
and they mend
and they transcend what we think
we know
but never really knew, did we?

But they do not snap.
They are resilient little bones,
resilient little fragile feathery bones
and though they may feel bruised
and cracked
and shattered
and like dust in our chests sometimes,
consuming our lungs,
ceasing our breath,
they never are truly
broken.
They’re just growing with the swells
and the collapses
of the tides,
learning to change
and make themselves new again.

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An Elegy for Alex Trebek’s Mustache

It’s been over ten years, and I still miss you.
You were my Old Faithful,
having stuck around for thirty years
only to be so easily discarded.

You were my constant.
I’d see you nightly,
an upper lip pillow tickling the philtrum
of your humanly wearer,
as the questions were asked
for the corresponding answers.

How Mr. Jeopardy himself
could be so cruel!
Taking away from me the thing I knew best,
better than the Daily Doubles
and much better than the final questions,
theme song playing,
a carousel of knowledge
that I one day hoped to be a passenger for.

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To You, Sir, Politely.

I would like to think

that everything happens for a reason.

Yes, that is a cliché, but

it’s what I tell myself to get me through

 

the worst of circumstances,

the oddest of them, too.

It’s a coping tactic I’ve developed

after every heartache, every downfall.

 

So when you cut me off

on the highway going well under

the speed suggestion of fifty five miles per hour,

needless to say I justified your action.

 

His children are sick, I think.

They are sitting in the backseat,

and if the car reaches a speed

over forty miles an hour

 

they will vomit and ruin the upholstery.

And you must have just gotten

the upholstery redone, a fine cream color

that would be just no good

 

with infected splotches of child sickness,

angrily staining the seats

in a rainbow of preservatives

and corn syrupy sweetness.

 

So it pains me to say

that once I was able to, safely,

guide my car around yours,

and I looked into your back seat

 

I found nothing more than

a few empty water bottles,

no illness-ridden seven year-olds.

And you were on your phone, sir,

 

something prohibited by law

I might add, politely.

It may have been this fact

that caused me to break my own peace treaty.

 

I apologize for my fist of rage

directed at the hand that held

your iPhone 4s,

for the unkind words I spoke

 

in the confines of my vehicle,

my use of the word “moron”,

the shake of my head.

None of which you are aware,

 

as you were having a conversation

most likely with your dying mother,

who you were on your way to visit.

And so I glide my car

 

back into the lane ahead of you,

reevaluating the last thirty seconds,

switching off my right turn signal,

saying a prayer for your mother’s health.

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A Bouquet of Flowers for my Mother on her Wedding Day

I pick them myself.

Wildflowers, all in purples and blues,

tied together with a sheer white ribbon.

I find them in the back of a garden,

hidden behind an abandoned house.

 

I gather the stems in my hand,

kiss each petal of each flower,

of sixteen individual flowers, hundreds of petals,

daisies and dahlias, and finally one single sunflower.

A spotlight in a mass of melancholy.

 

She won’t know who I am,

anonymous on the late June day,

fifteen years before I am to be born.

But here I am, waiting for this moment,

to hand them to her, our knuckles touching

briefly, but only briefly.

She’ll smile at me, a crease in her forehead

as she tries to recall my face, my name.

I am familiar, she knows, but how?

I’ll say nothing, just hand them to her,

include with them a note.

She’ll whisper a Thanks, and I’ll be off.

I’m sorry, the note will say.

For what? she’ll want to know,

what is this stranger sorry for?

But I am gone.

 

She’ll get it later, thirty six years later,

how I will let her down

and how she will lift me back up again.

And she’ll remember the girl

with the purple bouquet, barely,

but she’ll remember.