A Poem for Myself 

"I'm not in the mood to write a poem,"
he thought,
staring at the blank page.

Instead, he considered his life, and where the desire to create came from in the first place.

He remembered that time he'd been out on the ocean, in a boat with his grandfather, jigging
for fish.
He thought of all that blackness beneath, recalled how he'd began to feel staring down into that deep space, how he'd imagined figures and shapes, and monsters spreading sinister tentacles ever upward, and sleek, black leviathans gliding just below his feet, barely avoiding the wooden planks of the boat, mere inches away.

He remembered the time his great-grandmother died, how he'd only met her a few times. He recalled that they hadn't let him go to the funeral; instead, he'd dreamed of the wake. A little boy, standing at the end of a narrow space, gazing at the coffin through a corridor of plastic chairs. And how his great-grandmother had sat up, just for him, putting her withered finger to her lips as if to say, 'I'm still alive, and it's our little secret.'

He remembered loving a girl so much, not knowing what it meant, and learning that you could
love a thing that couldn't love you back, no matter how hard you felt.

He remembered leaving home and creating a new home from scratch, amidst the confusion of
adolescent hierarchy.

 He remembered wanting things, to dance and sing, and falling short.

"I don't know where the poems even come from,"
he thought,
staring at the white space.

 He was afraid of the water.
He was afraid of ghosts.
He was afraid of loving too hard.
He was afraid of not having a home.
He was afraid of falling short.

 And yet he swam, and he looked into the shadows, and he found someone to love so hard, and he
made a home and he rarely fell short in things that mattered.

Because you have to create your world, no matter the materials supplied.

And then he wrote a poem.

Honor Thief

The worst poem I ever stole
was from the battered goodbye of an ending friendship
they sounded like larks in the night: out of place but clear

 The best poem I never stole
was the brittle song of neighbors coupling
tapping against the near-translucent hotel wall

Hostile Turnover

So I'm leaning and it amazes me the degree to which we falter when we try to stand alone.
(The difficulty of the poet is the struggle of all men, to capture that which others let pass by.)
And when the rain is torrid, a torrent of torn sheets of dampened plastic.
That's when solace finds us 'neath the curtain of our lives.
The noise can drift, the thoughts can sigh, the heart can slow, the mind can die.
The wind can do its worst, for we're protected from inside.

 The storm can blow and hiss and rake.
And time can cover all we make.
And love can show which hand to take.
And nightmares roll for goodness' sake.

 Calamities are oaths we break.
Extremities of pride we fake.

 Slaking thirst, and aching tones that cull the weeds and snap the bones that lead us to our somber homes, our sullen steps besmirch our tombs, and when the gold bell finally drones...

 ...we covet what we once had known,

 we worry that we've spent our lives in drudgery and calloused norms, without the spark we
glimpsed that time when something wicked passed us by.

 When something worthy winked its way
beyond our twinkling, white-blind gaze.

 How life fills up.

 How it spills over.

 To think we fail to drink it slower.