Category: Existential Poetry

  • Feverish

    Feverish

    I thought I was cured—
    that the squirming feeling in my stomach had stopped—

    that it went to sleep along with the anxious
    breath my lungs hide when I hear about a new house
    bought, this marriage sealed, this baby
    born—I wish
    my years

    would feel less like dreamed decades and more real—
    that somehow my shredded apartment would be

    a home,
    but I’m still ill,

    and get cold chills
    when I see those tall sharp buildings and endless roads—
    when I hear the clattering teeth of the talking human being

    on stage, their words wet and thick with
    the smothering future and
    the market value of things
    and the career trajectories of
    people and the hard work involved…the vacation
    plans and
    retirement plans and
    insurance plans and
    health plans and
    plans of plans and
    plans and—I’m sick,

    and my stomach is churning again,
    but the schematics of my life refuse
    to burn in the incinerator

    no matter how high I turn up the flames.

  • Ruin

    Ruin

    Atop the fields that served as home
    for the fragile flower of my love,

    I stand as a ruined tower, dark
    brooding, remembering
    beauty’s smile—

    now faded,

    washed away by tides of time
    along the edges of stony days.

    High in my night’s sorrow,
    I bear witness to cruel sight:
    the unraveling of those sacred seams
    that hold together the horizon.

    Each loosened strand,
    a kingdom felled;
    each thread undone,
    a country rent;
    a good child born,
    one man dead.

    Leaves of every near and distant tree
    lie like effigies of loss—

    I, unable to bear
    the sight of a fraying world,
    turn my gaze away from its grey peaks—

    and to the blue stars
    I pray; they so full
    of light, and joyful with eternity

    —or so it seems,
    to the short lived.

    Consider
    the countless stars that have dawned
    and died
    before the glow of our very Sun;

    our Sun, alone and frightened in black deep space,
    silenced and numbed
    by explosions lived—explosions gone.

    Light itself gutted—sprinkling

    as ashes of death,
    coalescing into my stone body;

    a body that every day,
    burdened by the overwhelming weight
    of loss,

      sinks
    deeper into ground,
    to be forgotten,
    like my love.

  • Birth of a Moth

    Birth of a Moth

    Within the chrysalis,
    what once was known as
    I
    dissolves.

    Particles of refracted light,
    memories—

                A bus ride lined with blurry faces;
                a smiling silhouette—

    all rays,
    dying in a dimming den.

    “Who am I now,” asks
    who?

    Legs a decayed milky dew.

    An eye afloat
    on flowing time, observing Eternity feast,
    hours consumed.

    Nothing then
    everything.

    Pain ruptures darkness,
    a light seeping like sap, filling
    space.

    An abdomen churning,
    a thorax curling,
    first memories wake.

    Silky remembrances harden
    into delineations and limitations.

    Welcome nascent
    I.

    Mind
    thinks the first brightness
    while its temples burn and split.

    More pain, then breath,
    and through muscles rip
    petals—

    Petals? What are petals?

    No. These are wings.
    They open—air at once seeps in.

    A current
    called yearning
    carries me

    towards flower or flame.

  • Great Heart

    Great Heart

    In a way, it feels like I’m reaching
    to grasp the Sun
    as though it were a bead of my own blood.

    Amber skies in tranquil hours
    pass me by—or rather
    I pass them in my haste.

    There’s work to do, obligations to keep,
    my feet smoke with exhaust
    and air is just something I breathe,
    not taste.

    There’s no time—and yet
    there’s so much of it.

    The people of this world
    are like fishes in a plastic bag
    submerged in the sea,
    capable of feeling the currents
    flowing just behind
    the thin obscuring membrane
    we call priorities.

    But whose owns these priorities?
    Where did they come from?

    A man is bound to his family,
    a mother to her children’s needs,

    but outside of nature’s dictations,
    to what, truly, am I devoting myself to?

    Ideas, large like economies and governments.

    Ideas are the iron frames
    that support our anthills,
    and we all march, dutifully,
    believing in the power of their ore.

    But again, who mined the minerals?
    Who assigned them value?

    Is fool’s gold fool’s gold
    without the entire artifice of a society?

    We rush for gold because we believe in it,
    and our walls don’t collapse
    because we believe our frames to be true.

    This is the ache in me, however:
    I see the walls.

    I am unable to deny
    that they do keep me warm,
    warding off the claws and beaks and teeth
    of gales and storms—

    but for some reason
    my eyes do not just stop
    and rest on their hard surfaces,

    they also see right through them,
    and bathe in bold bleeding rays.

    And though I rush to the offices
    of my life, imprisoning instincts
    in duties, I am
    slowed, just enough, to notice
    the breadth of this natural wonder
    called Life.

    My priorities are transparent,
    simply unable to hide this incredible sea,
    and try as I might to love the ideas
    given to me,

    the great pulsing Heart in the sky
    bleeds its vibrant vitality
    through my pleading fingers.