Tag: poetry

Posted on

Things

Things are good
Things are tragic
Things are desperate
Things can’t feel
Things are nice
I can love them but they don’t love me

Things fall apart
Things are beautiful
Things are reassembled endlessly
Things won’t hurt me
Things can be controlled
You can buy things
You can be kept warm and safe by things
Things won’t abandon you

Things are ugly
Things don’t look you in the eye
In the grocery store
And you can’t look back at them
Because you are ashamed
To see the look in their eyes
That tells you that you deserve the shame
Or nothing
So you never look at anyone

And pad your life with things
And push people away
Because things can’t be destroyed, only broken
Things are your life to the exclusion of hurt
Things are where you lie awake at night
Things are there when you come home
And there your things are
You hug your things
You cry into their soft fur
You can give your warmth to things
And they will return that warmth
But they are not warm, themselves
So if you pour your heart into things
You might not get love
Decide now, between things and a world

Buy things
Fuck myself with things but not feel it
Minimize risk with things
Defend myself with things
Tell things what I need
They won’t tell me
Drive into the desert in things
Show the world who I am with things
Automate things
Someday soon, things will be able to care for me

I go home and choose things
Sort things
Wrap myself in a blanket of things
Go to sleep with things
Things will be fine
Things will be normal
Sleep

Posted on

You Have 30 Days To Buy a Subaru Or Risk Being Able to Find Your Car In a Parking Lot

The weather is like it was the summer we moved here
Not really summer
I tell her

I say to the ghost of her in my bedroom
Truthfully
Wet and cold
Green and lush

The west opens before us
Jill driving our BMW at 100 miles an hour
Out of Nebraska
Welcome to Colorful Colorado

Eight years ago
Most of our marriage
We break into our own house
Celebrate the crime with Illegal Pete’s

I wait for the train on the Sixteenth Street Mall
Wondering if this will be a good life for us
Staring into a future
It looks back with tears in its eyes

Summer begins
Not really summer
I tell her
Without you

Posted on

Manifest

Let me feel the breadth and depth of life
Seeing the path laid before me by my own spirit
Unafraid of the darkness
The moon glittering on the hills and streams

Let me yearn for freedom but not power
Awake in the days when life proves my worth
A scent of sweet pea blossoms glowing in the evening
Smoke rolling in from distant mountain fires

Let me be settled in a time and place of my choosing
A home full of love and joy
A garden of sunlight to bask in
Passion cooking on the stove, a hug and a kiss the fountain of days to come

Let me breathe life into others and they into me
Listening to their stories and joining their path for a time
Divergence becoming a gift, knowing we may never see one another again
Taking their stories with me and spreading them like seeds

Let me cast spells into the lake of time
A rose in my right hand
The iridule of a mussel shell between thumb and forefinger
Intent of my heart to wind a cosmic spring

Let me cast forth my power into the night of the universe
Unearthed and desolate
A span of iron forged in the cores of ten billion suns
Harmonic foam scintillating with the radiation of me

Posted on

Journey

Copyright (c) 2014 by Nicholas Roy, all rights reserved

I set out across the land
Knowing not where I would stop
Settling with unease each night along the way
A route through brambled undertuff
The stars to light my way

The heat of days
The salt-crust red of skin
Dust and callus hands beridged

I found along my arc through deepest steamcrossed plain
A field girded round with wire rusted, barbed in vain
No longer were the cattle bound within its mesh
Flesh had long ago made way for sun bleached scaffolding
The beat of many rays

The rhythm found
I trudged along
Not asking what to seek

The time would come when I laid down
To rest of that was sure
Parameters for marking home
Elusive as the dew

Thirst of days
No water found
Heat and ache and nothing new

Then one night, under the stars
I cast my thoughts adrift
Found peace in looking up at them
Felt rain within my chest

Posted on

Nearly Winter In State College

Golden hued white against the gradient halfblue
Comet tails of the anthropocene
Jets arc up out of Baltimore and DC
The glint of their skins lost in the crystalline winter southern sky
Over the Appalachians
Altitude so great as to become an abstraction
Passengers plying their way to Chicago, Denver or Los Angeles
Christmas presents wrapped and boxed in the hold
And on earth, at my kitchen table
I look out on the snow-covered lawns, breathing deeply
Banana bread and coffee fill the air

Posted on

Different Soil

The land heaves to meet the sky
An arch of sandstone and limestone
Washed away by a quarter billion years’ rain

Among the scarred hilltops and ridged remnants
In a green valley in the wilds of Penn’s Woods
I sense the transience of my position

Where I come from I was certain
Of many things which are just as untrue
The words, clinging to the heels of my feet as I tread Iowa Avenue’s sidewalk

As you breathe, there, you feel them
Words pass through the membrane of your lungs
Dissolve in the blood and cross a barrier to saturate your being

Breathing here, the oxygen is the same
Knowledge and wisdom flow through the valley
But I miss the words

Posted on

A Shift

The world still looked the same, but it was different
He walked from the gym, back to where he parked his car
There were still cars here, and people, dirt and beauty
He could smell the bar-b-que cooking down the street

It was the same old world, but the underpinnings of it had been replaced in the night
Everyone was talking to themselves – no, they were talking to thin air
But the thin air was everyone else

The old rules faded into the background, burning away like ground fog at 6 o’clock on a sunny spring morning

The guts of the plane had been changed while the plane was in flight
The re-tooling of the world system had taken place before anything could have been done

At every point on the curve, it looks like the curve is going straight up from here
But things still seem pretty normal