Depression

depression is all dagger no point

all fang no bite

well not enough to break the skin

despair leaves me dull and out of joint

hammering the door day and night

don't let it in

vampire at the threshold that needs no invitation

no banal immortality

just incessant vituperation

fake and flat and fat again

a man akin to a problematic mannequin

disassemble send it back

hang the flack on the rack

or set him up out back for target practice

before he tries to shove his treatise down your tractus

either everything is meaningless

or impossible and beautiful and meaningful 

just needing less

me

in it

when i'm circling the drain
i know it’s just my brain

but to say it’s only in my head

still means no escaping the dread

and fear of failure that’s invested

i’m infested

pickled in cortisol and digested

will it spread

yes

making me worth

less

it’s not a way of thinking it’s an end

it’s a fight to keep afloat

and too easy to descend

Looming Abyss

air conditioner white noise static

i think i hear voices

monsters in the attic
don't panic

but i have limited choices

anxiety depression behavior erratic

wish i could be an adroit droid

set on automatic

but i can’t

inner voice says no one wants to hear

another middle-aged rant

if i give into the fear

need a brain transplant

take a breather drink a beer

so i can be a human being not an ant

Nietzsche said

stare into the abyss it stares back

fighting monsters in my head

and what i lack

that i’ll never be enough is what I dread

better weave the best I got and not look back

so the best of me survives me when I’m dead 

Adventure, Part 1

in the sea see a shiny silver fish with an orange scale

swimming with a calm blonde mom wearing chain mail

who picks up a sword with an orange cord trailing

kicks off the bottom to a surface ship sailing

failing to flag down the captain of the ship

the woman shakes the sword 

magic radar goes blip

blip

drawn by the sound and the flashing vorpal sword

drop anchor, launch a raft, bring the woman on board

examining and questioning the orange cord’s source

the captain recommends that boat change course ...

My Favorite Color

in my first memory

big hot christmas lights

red green blue

but best were

Orange

and the salty pastry-smelling

(don’t eat it)

play doh my brother used

to make a sesame street ernie for me

and dancing up the alphabet block step pyramid

the S was

Orange

the fruit and its coiling rind

the sugary barrel drinks

the sherbet

Ihe ices

creamsicle summers

sugar sweet and sticky

my favorite t-shirt

and the setting sunlight

Orange

hillside maples changing leaves

smells of nutmeg and cinnamon

the pumpkin field

stickers with the black cat

in front of the moon

even that magic word

halloween

Orange

the feeling of love

in my chest for my children

and wife

and my hope for the future

the best things in life are

Orange

Deconstruction

My toddler dumped 

the puzzle pieces onto the floor,

and started with the eyes,

the easily identifiable face,

of his favorite cartoon train 

engine.

He tried ways of fitting them together –

ways I would no longer try –

unafraid of making mistakes,

uncolonized by methodology, or

standards of correctness.

In a word: inefficient.

 

But he turns the pieces this way and that

and succeeds in the goal

of assembling the picture 

like the one on the box.

The puzzle complete,

he smiles and says, “Destructo!”

breaking it into pieces again with great joy.

“Let’s do it again,” he says, 

and does

a little faster.

Seeing immediately

the way it should be done,

and realizing that the speed 

of alleged progress

is the enemy of originality,

watching him struggle,

and patient enough to let him,

my only wish

is that the pieces could fit

in different ways,

so we could build 

a new kind of engine,

One that could never

drive us 

ever forward

on the rails.

Half My Life

I was seven

when my mortality 

first occurred to me.

Lying in the dark after bedtime,

I envisioned my funeral

with no one graveside,

because my parents were old,

and my siblings were old,

and when they inevitably died before me,

I would be alone.

Now I have lived six times that span,

more than half my life by the statisticians' count,

and only now do I see the value of time

rapidly running through the glass.

This is how regrets are born,

but I refuse them.

I have lived sometimes well,

and feel saddened I lived a mostly 

dull life -

not that at times it didn't shine.

Any harm I have done is repaid

in stumbles, and failures, and 

humbling reprisals.

There is a kind of balance now,

in place of joy,

and sometimes in the night 

I awaken, anxious

about the end.

I am no tragic figure;

no hero save in games I play.

I can still chew my food

and locomote,

at times even run.

The continents slide slowly

over the skin of the earth,

and the planets make their way 

in their orbits,

and the sun that crossed its zenith

is still warm on my shoulders,

and the road ahead is still long,

if predictably paved and graded.

So forward.

When It Was Still New

Late August evening light

gilded green leaves

scattered shifting patterns

in the grass cool shade

Gentle hands push

hair from a smooth tanned cheek

lips brush lips

eyes open met in smiles

A haze of golden light

around the old gravel road 

through the high shining grass

even midges, mosquitos, gnats 

shone ethereal

In among the small thick trees

ignored by property lines

the small brown wooden house

the neighborhood children built

of scraps

They once held hands

smooth and warm with sweat

smelling of sunscreen and lotion

when it was still new to love

Off Season

Off season, Myrtle Beach. 

I went for a walk alone 

to a diner with an ocean view.

A shaggy haired, 

bearded, beach bum 

in ripped jean shorts,

a brown, tattered wool sweater,

and broken sandals,

followed close behind me.

My waitress took me to my table,
while the hostess tried to throw him out.

My waitress spoke up

and got him a table too

next to mine.

Got him some coffee, and dinner rolls.

She took my order 

and said, “If he bothers you, 

let me know.

He doesn’t have to stay.

I just feel bad for him.

See him around sometimes.

Sleeps on the beach.”

As she walked away, 

he followed her with his gaze. 

He turned to me and rolled his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m schizophrenic and sometimes I hear angels.

Do you believe?”

“I did. But not anymore.”

“You should,” he said.

“I’m sorry. 

I know I’m crazy.

Angels know engines.

They saved my life once, you know.”

“How?”

“I was on a bus in Mexico. 

We were coming down 

out of the mountains

on this narrow, kinda-windy road,

when the engine caught on fire.

There was a lot of smoke

and the driver couldn’t see,

so he was swerving all over.

And that’s when the angels,

they said, don’t fear,

and in my mind,

they took apart the engine

and put it back together

while it was running.

We finally got to a place 

where we could pull off the road,

and everybody got out, but

by that time, the engine was fine,

you know?

The driver lifted the hood and 

there was still some smoke,

but he just kinda shook his head.

When he got back in 

the bus started right up.”

He turned away abruptly

when the waitress brought me a salad

and a cup of coffee.

She leaned in, and I could see

the black hairs growing 

from her mole.

She whispered, “Is he bothering you?”

“No.” I said. “He’s okay.”

She leaned back and smiled.

“You let me know if you

need anything else.”

“I could use some angels,” I said.

The waitress shook her head

“Can’t help you there.”

The man laughed.

“You’re crazy, man,” he said.

Sacrilege

Myths control masses
like a Ghostbuster toaster,

ectoplasm-blasted

schism cracked chasm.

Lasting iconoclastic sarcasm.

Smash stained glass

in case of caustic flashes.

Morse coded messages

three dots, three dashes -

Three dots

from a flaking Teflon pan

on a steak,

then the plaque in the brain

and the ache.

Paroxysm Sunday

at church, shaking hands.

That resurrected

in the mind of a man

religion.

Didn’t see it was bleak

when a minor miracle was

a parking lot reflected

sunlight backlit,

infected pigeon

with a twig in its beak.

Catechism dumper.

Alabama slammer.

Hammered Bible-thumper

burning crosses, sheet bleaching

ham-handed, ham-fisted preaching,

Cryptic cryptid in a chrysalis:

Christ pissed, betrayed,

kissed,

whipped, crowned,

nailed, impaled,

missed.

After dark,
dad awash in wine,

alcohol mist

shrouded.

Third day bender-blind,

pissed pants reek.

Sweaty kiddo in the trailer park,

bruise on his cheek,

shouted,

“Jesus in a juice box,

rolled away the foil,

kicked off his birkenstocks,

washed his feet in oil.”

Holy, holy, holy

shit.

Fuck this human toil.

Week One

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

~Ludwig Wittgenstein

In the first week I managed eleven posts. This post and my poem today will make thirteen.

What have I learned so far?

1. A minimum of one poem a day worth of creative output along with my other endeavors is achievable.

2. Forcing myself to put ideas together into a poem inspires me to work on other creative projects such as D&D adventures, short stories, and nonfiction pieces.

3. I feel awakened to, and on the look-out for, creative inspiration everywhere.

4. My inner critic is a real asshole.

I definitely started to lag a bit in the last two days, but I realized that the lag was not from a lack of motivation, but rather a fear of failure fueled by my inner critic.

But “fear of failure” is not quite right either. It was fully the asshole bully in my brain telling me, “Well, that’s not good enough. Are you really going to post that? So, we’re just phoning it in now? This is a little bit ‘Hallmark’, no? No one is going to read this shit. Too depressing. Too hopeful. Too short.” Blah blah blah …

Turning that voice off and just writing and condensing without overthinking it is much, much harder than I thought.

In terms of readership, the blog has 99 hits. Thank you to my friends who continue to share the links on their social media. I might look into getting on Facebook or Twitter, just to have another platform to encourage readership.

Also, I strongly encourage people to post comments on the poems here. Please engage with the material even if it's just to say you liked it, or didn't get it, or whatever.

Into the next week!

Be good to each other.

~MS

The Lie of i

That i,

the lone one alone,

individual,

knows it is a lie.

i knows it is fractured

fragmented and fragile.

Its ruse of opinion

a mantle of hot winds, 

the agile riot of thoughts 

it claims it owns, 

cling to no framework – 

all props, no bones.

No matter the matter to which it clings,

it tries to distract

with tangible things

and tales of uniqueness

that when prodded 

have molting wings.

Beneath trembles the i.

It’s just a scaredy little guy,

afraid of dislike,

afraid to die.

It claims it is,

and at its heart,

unified (but on paper,

or screen, at least 

two 

parts).

A faction of fractions;

a fiction in friction;

an idea with Capital

given social traction

to blindly reconcile the contradiction.

Mostly just a metaphor 

for what we’re told to be.

That i

the lone one alone,

individual,

instead of We.

At The Edge of The Storm

frightful evening into morning

cell phone brightens belting warning

after warning

while the wind of oceans yawning

through the maple’s branches

celebrates and sways and dances

dawning into rainy day dye

making brown, and green, and gray

for the life earth then

daintily sip, sip, sips from the sky

at the edge of a storm

that deigns to pass us by

trending seaward, northward, eastward

crashes forward and then 

shoreward trains its mellow eye

Shoreward

In dreams, upon a rocky shoal I walk.
My inner mountebank’s incessant talk

evaporates my hope and steals the salt.

That summer season cures the heart of fault.

So, when my tears are made of water pure,
which can dilute a poison but not cure

the foul corruption draining will from me,

I scan the strand for counter chemistry.

All through the search my doubt assaults the strand,

my senses sharp worn smooth by searing sand.

But slow, the rogue’s discards come back to hand.

Despite the rising surf, I stand. I stand.

The sunset paints and makes the sky a sail,

and on the sea from shore, in light, a trail.

Nerd Haiku

             I.

I'm no hero, yet

thwart evil weekly with friends;

Dungeons and Dragons.

            II.

What is that foul stench

in this dark dungeon chamber?

Rogues: silent, deadly.

           III.

What treasure lies

behind this suspicious door?

A new character.

Doors 1

I lived in Queens, New York for a short time. It was there, on a street off of Jamaica Avenue that I saw the first door outside of a movie or illustration that made me think, This doesn't belong here.

There in the middle of a residential block was a squat brick building with a tree growing out front. On either side of the old stone steps were high flowering plants and vines. At the top of the steps was a rickety, gray, wooden door, uneven in its frame and an inch off it's threshold. Poking out underneath was a folded corner of black tarp.

I was mesmerized. It was the strangest cross between urban poverty and a fairy tale I had ever seen. I took a picture of it, but now, sadly, I'm not sure where that picture is.

The significance of doors, doorways, windows, portals, and thresholds is everywhere in our stories and those of our predecessors. Since that first experience in Queens, I have loved photographing them and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

Here are a few recent photos I captured while in upstate New York.

When I was in graduate school, I went to a house party. The house was split into three apartments - two downstairs, separated by a small entry hallway, and one large loft apartment upstairs. All the occupants knew each other, and were close friends, so the whole house was open for the gathering that night.

The three people that lived there all had radically different tastes and were from different walks of life. One was a college English professor who also loved music and played in a band; One was a college graduate student and Teaching Assistant, and the woman who lived upstairs was a retired lawyer who now smoked large quantities of pot, practiced yoga and gave free legal advice.

I wandered between those three apartments that night experiencing something like euphoria as the very texture of space changed from apartment to apartment to apartment. 

One loud with boisterous college students, drinking, playing pop music, and hooking up.

Cross the threshold into the hallway, then through the next door.

One quiet with a large group of grad students and professors sitting on couches, passing joints and pipes, and occasionally commenting of the film playing on a large flat screen television in the living room. In the adjoining kitchen, whispered conversations by candlelight between four poets and a student about the nature of language and subjectivity.

Cross the threshold into the hallway, through the next door and upstairs.

A smoky blanket of incense in the air. The smell of pot and patchouli and people dancing to Bill Withers, Sam Cooke, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, and Curtis Mayfield.

Three radically different spaces, containing many completely different states of being. All I did was pass through some doorways.

Have you ever walked through a door into a room and forgot why you went there in the first place? It's because you crossed a threshold and your brain did a reset to adjust to the new environment.

On the other hand, if you're lucky enough to be fully present and aware when you pass through a doorway into a new space, it can be like interdimensional travel or traveling in time. Try it out the next time you visit a strange place.

In the meantime, be good to each other.

~MS

Mom's Scars

panicked screaming, 
heavy thumps followed by glass shattered 
a neighbor called it in

the police came faster than before

and dragged her raging from the house

heels through the jagged shards of broken ashtray 
onto the porch in smears of blood

I didn’t call them I swear to god

they handcuffed the man’s bruised fists behind him

he didn't resist

you bitch, you fucking bitch

drunken, red eyes rolling,

a running gash along the forearm

from a suicide threat

three children

two girls holding hands with a boy of five

emerged behind the rest

and stood crying together on the 

yellowed lawn

but the police said the woman was hysterical

shut the fuck up you stupid bitch

slammed her head in the cruiser door

the children saw her finally relent

from the eyebrow gash

a cascade of red painting the eye shut

an officer led her to the grass where her children hugged her and cried

and the police took their father away

so there was peace

for those two days

Rules For A-Poem-A-Day

I have so far been successful in my goal of writing a poem a day ... but then, it's only been two days so ... I'm not going to throw any parties or anything.

I can see how this is going to be a challenge, in part because my critical side is already looking over those previous poems and proposing changes ... A LOT of changes. But that's not the point.

In my opening post I said I would write a poem a day, so here are some rules I am going to follow in this quest to force myself to be creative without overthinking it:

1. Spelling Errors/Utilitarian Edits

I will go back to change the improper spelling of a word in a poem I have published here. Otherwise, once it's published, it's done, warts and all.

For the "utilitarian edit" part: Changing font style or size for ease of readability seems like a good thing to do, so let me know in the comments if something is hard to read. 

Also, I just realized that - to keep me honest - I am either going to go back and put "Poem-A-Day" in parenthesis of the titles of the poems that count toward this project, or apply a "Poem-A-Day" label of some kind ... probably a label.

PS - If you didn't know, you can click on labels under the "Labels" tab to the right to get posts with only a specific label applied. It's a way for Blogs to have an index, and that's something I probably feel a little too enthusiastic about.

2. No Previously Written or Published Poems

You deserve poetry fresh-squeezed from my brain (it tastes better) AND copy-pasting some old thing I wrote years ago would defeat the purpose of this project. 

So, even if I post two poems in a day because I'm feeling inspired, that second poem doesn't count toward the next day. It's just an extra poem. Extra awful or maybe extra good poetry for you! 

Each day is a fresh start and a new poem with a midnight deadline for posting.

3. No Days Off

Even if it's just a few lines, I have to publish a new poem, one that I consider to be complete, by midnight each day. 

The only reason I would not post is if there is a serious technology error, but since Blogger is pretty awesome about even letting me access, compose and post from my phone, I doubt that will be an issue ... unless I drop my phone in a toilet, or throw it in the ocean ... you know, normal stuff. 

In any case, if a day did come that I didn't post a poem, be sure that soon after there would be many mea culpas and probably some incriminating photos that you could use to threaten me in the future ... or something. 

Well, I think that's it for now. 

Be good to each other.

~MS

We Forgot Our Mr. Rogers

It only took twenty years to forget our Mr. Rogers.
We forgot to be good neighbors
and that when we get mad
we can choose to stop.

Remember,
he told us that it's good to stop
when we're doing something wrong,
and good to know that we
can make that choice.

And now, when
the whole world seems mad,
it's good to know
we can make that choice.

Just remember:

We can stop any time.
We can stop any time.
We can stop any time.
We can stop any time.

Another Night

In the hospital waiting room
my father dozed
in a wheelchair, wrapped in a stained white sheet
to stave off the cold
blasting down from above.

My mother complained
about the wait,
the white noise,
the nurse's questions,
my father's stubbornness.

Six feet across from us
sat a woman with a bruise healing under one eye, 
and a very small girl
in a pink dress,
her tiny arm in a yellow sling.

The girl was solemn.
She turned to the woman and said,
"It's gonna be night-night time?"

The woman squinted out the window.
The glass and hoods of parked cars threw back hot white sunlight
that punched through the haze of the summer day.
"Silly," she said. "It's the middle of the afternoon."

The girl looked at my father,
then at her bruised arm,
then at her feet, and whispered,
"It's night-night time all day long."

Morning

Eyes cracked when morning broke
and spilled its viscous vicious yolk
on my pallid face before I begin
benign, well at least anodyne,
ready again to take it on the chin.

Glassy-eyed anxious stomach churning
first thirst purpose unquenched and burning
feet scuffing a cold wooden floor
to play again against a dim despair
the way it wends its course, the snake,
the force of will it takes 
to make it through the door.

What Am I Doing Here?

For starters, minimally, I am going to try to write at least one poem a day. The goal is to turn off my over-critical ego, write, and post by midnight.

In addition to the poetry, I might do some other stuff: prose, photos, drawings ... things that bring me a sense of fulfillment, and hopefully things that you like to look at, but crossover there is not guaranteed.

I'm looking forward to hearing thoughts and engaging with my readers/viewers, but please be kind to each other. I will delete assholes ... unless they're funny.

Next post will likely be a poem.

Be awesome.

~MS