Thank you to Deborah Edgeley of Ink Pantry for publishing my poems.

Awakened From Beginning to End

As an infant with booties and cowl,
I strove to overcome the barriers
making me unable to stand on my own.

I searched for an antidote
to a crippling childhood,
a pitiful position for one
harboring such intense fantasies.

A young adult’s silent silhouette,
the impact of being lost
within a catacomb of sheets in any given hotel.

The reluctant glee of parenthood,
trying to carefully carry so much more than I should.

Today is the farthest in time I’ve ever come.
I feel that any minute, fatigue will set in,
and produce that moment when agelessness fails me.

It’s in the Bones

We are predisposed while in the womb
to act a certain way.
From our first toddling steps,
through the measured time of our lives,
ancestral memories, long prepared,
by the earliest civilizations,
sensibilities first given forward,
then curving back again and again,
are willing to inform us
of some brand of zealotry.

We collectively embrace a trend
toward devotion to the arts.
We’re still shining cardinal features,
ready to be summoned.
Accepting widespread patterns
for the shaping of our cultures,
in the hopes that all this will become
a prelude to a single tradition.

The Echo in my Old Necklace

A necklace chain adorned with links of gold streaks,
interspersed with beads representing the wax and wane of memory,
interwoven threads of recorded thought
belonging to earlier days.

A necklace pumped full of memories,
this particular jewelry’s unceasing watch,
whispering echoes into halls of the mind
directly dictated to my heart.
Those visions I do not wish to share.
And the ones I hoped would keep me aware.

What falls back is the truth,
that we’re no longer friends,
a wealth of past hurts.
I remember the real version of last time on the road home.
Rejection was my only antidote to delusion.

Startling thoughts about what might as well have been just yesterday,
starting to silence over time.
Someday perhaps no thoughts of those days will remain.
I wonder when I’ll know
that they will not return.