May Free Form Poetry

“Revolving through the stars”

-after Kenji Miyazawa

The boy next to me, star kissed,

sits quietly, amidst the Milky Ways,

his gaze locked on the window of the train car.

The boy next to me sits, silently amazed. 

We talk and laugh about the sights:

The northern lights, 

the brightest whites, 

The softest nights.

The most bizarre things got on and off,

Ex et endo the collection of stars:

A man who carves herons into candy bars and

Children sharing apples in a tramcar.

Really, it was an anticlimactic adventure.

The boy whose presence had started to erode 

Disappeared at that lactic crossroad.

Oh, that night on the galactic railroad.

Before, I always wondered how humans exist

When life and people bare teeth and fists

But seeing him, surrounded by the mist, 

I felt I must persist.

“To An Old Friend”

Tonight, I drove past your old house and heard the familiar hum of planes landing,

The bleating horns of the busy road and the silence that hangs heavier than all 

The blue paint was peeling away, the robin blue fading to a paler shade

Dry grass shot up in moonlit patches, and rusted car parts lingered by the garage

Those beaters your dad fixed to the music burned into our memories ashes in a heap somewhere

Your bedroom window was open, and there crept out a ghost of you and me.

Again, our adolescence was luminescent as we sprinted down the street at midnight

Our flip flops hit the ground with heavy, disjointed rhythm and arms extended in pretend flight 

A shoe got free–it didn’t matter whose– and we rolled on the asphalt in drunken mirth

Sure, my head was racing but your bracing freedom slowed it, and I sank into the pavement too

Under the hazy whir of gas station lights, we damned the wasted years we’d spent apart.

This night is the same. But that steady voice of yours carries a strange hollowness.

“Reminders”

Lilacs and lavender remind me

Of the fragility of life

Livid fingers and plum-colored eyes 

Force me to know it

Viridescent, verdant fields become that 

Place I return to when all else is lost

Where is it that all is lost 

If I have all that I need?

Moving images in that amber hue remind me

Of the persistence of love

An ill-working mind and unknowing pain

Force me to believe it 

Oceans of time and patience—

It only continues to grow 

Skies of endless wonder,

Growing through and through 

Where is it that all is lost 

If I have all that I need?

Smiles of friends and family show me 

the beauty of life

Know that it is all fleeting

Know that all of it is beautiful

“The Race”

Heart pumping, adrenaline racing

Eyes on the prize and feet itching to go

To run

To make it to the finish line for which we fought so hard

To run

All the preparation

All the work

Everything

Led

Up

To this

The race

We worked for this

We cried for this

Made and lost friends along the way

The race

It seems like we only started yesterday

A lifetime of trials

This is for the people we lost along the way

The friends we can no longer talk to

The ones we’re sad to leave

This is for us in all of our glory

Past, present, future

We made it, it’s the home stretch

Standing there under the baking sun

This is for the people in the crowds

Cheering a song like they always have

Be it good or bad, it’s our song 

We’re almost there

If we don’t win, we try again

This is our time to race

I feel my feet itching, the track warm against my hands

On your mark

Get set

GO

The crack of the pistol, the smell of shoes

And we’re off, we’re running

Free as a bird and we’re almost there

And hey

Thanks for the run.

“Physics”

The pendulum swings in and out of my wits,

A block of unknown mass is attached to it.

Where will this block go?

Nobody shall know.

Will it be able to swing for its whole life?

Its periods suggest it does not have enough spife.

The length of its string and the weight of gravity,

If I were on that pendulum I’d certainly say “weee!”

What about the spring that oscillates like so,

When I see it in a problem, it brings me woe.

For once, the uniform rods can have no mass,

I will be free from physics, finally, at last.

I’m sorry, Sir Isaac Newton, for I hate your laws,

But that might just be one of my flaws.

The incomplete formula sheet,

It doesn’t hold what you seek.

Maybe the real physics was the friends we made along the way.

“ghost orchid”

Hidden deep in swamps of shade,


Where mist and memory softly fade,


The ghost orchid sways alone--


A bloom of bone, a breath, a moan.

It clings to air, to dream, to tree,


A fleeting sign we barely see,


Unrooted, pale as whispered lore,


A spirit sealed in floral spore.

It haunts the hush of humid night,

A phantom kissed by silver light–


Then vanishes with morning's call,


As if it never bloomed at all.

—

Rolling in the mind numbing hills of mine

To swallow the world out of words

Of an ache of all I might find to like 

Or curl into calling slumber to hide 

In ringing taverns the wish for an abyss 

In the midst of minds from which to relish 

A morning awakening with sight cast aside  

In medieval air my soul to surrender. 

“Words in Between”

An uncomfortable silence fills the space where our words should fit, so 

I’ll just talk then  

And say something like  

A wave always seems the biggest when you’re right under it and   

I can sound like some philosopher who  

Probably wrote better things than  

A random jumble of words that I speak into space  

You know that there’s probably over a million grains of sand all from here until the shore? Yeah and 

I can ask you a million questions too because I was thinking of what I’d ask you yesterday and  

The day before that just in case there wasn’t an uncomfortable silence between us but  

Luckily there isn’t! Yeah. Oh   

No! I spilled some of my drink on my shirt but  

It’s okay because it’ll come out in the wash anyway right? Right and  

I don’t understand any of this but  

You seem like you do, so  

You can explain it. But tell me,  

Do I talk too much like the way a lot of ink can bleed out of a pen when you write  

Because I like  

You stare at the seagulls flying above us and  I’ll just say things until the silence ends