Check out this poet!
My awesome poet friend Cynthia Ruby is kicking ass and taking names! Check out her site, where she talks about her debut poetry book. She is a very talented poet and you should buy her book today!
A new poem
I don’t have a title yet, but this is a new poem that I’ve been working on. Enjoy!
Untitled
To my fellow anxiety experts, to those whose veins are powered by adrenaline – laced rocket fuel. You worriers at nothing and fight or flight pros. I salute you.
We are the children evolution forgot, who still see predators on the horizon and prepare for long nights hidden in the trees. Our eyes see in more shades of shit that can go wrong than any other creature. Rituals play through our daily routine like Morse code as we tap out s.o.s. on bathroom stall doors where we hide until we can work up the nerve to face social challenges.
Is it history or brain chemistry that has brought you into the fold? It doesn’t matter, the results still end in the labored breathing, racing heart, and weak limbs of the panic attacks that remind us we are alive. We, who are never caught unaware, because we’ve seen all the possible permutations of how fucked up this situation can get, so just try to come at us with something new.
To you, my dears, who can’t quiet the voice at night that asks for the fiftieth time if you left the lights on, or whose memory is so damn perfect that it can replay in perfect detail every mistake you ever made–sleep is for the weak anyway. There is no rest for the wicked, the righteous don’t need it, and no matter which camp you imagine yourself in, caffeine is your friend, just like those patient people who ride out the storm with you, who never make you feel inferior because they realize the rest of the world, including inanimate objects and your own brain, does that plenty as it is. Take a chance if you think you’ve found people like this. It’s worth it.
To my heroes, who wake up each day and try to face the world with an open heart anyway, despite the constant reminders of inadequacy and regret and fear, you are titans. Don’t let anyone, yourself included, tell you otherwise. You are brave in a way others cannot understand, but I do.
Video of Aftermath!
My good friend Vitale at Red Barn Productions made this video for me. Subscribe to his channel, because he’s awesome.
Audio: Aftermath
This poem took me a long time to get the nerve up to post. I hope you enjoy it or find some sort of truth in it. If you want the text version, click here.
Aftermath
No one will ever love me like she did.
The thought sucker punches me at 10:30 on a Sunny Tuesday morning. No one will ever love me like she did. It’s true, and I hate myself. The telltale part of my heart that she molded into a plaything jitterbugs inside my chest, tries its best to cardiac arrest me back into subservience. I greet my tears like grieving friends. Shhhh, it’s ok. I know, but it will get better. It does get better. I eventually stop thinking in terms of permanent endings.
There is no strength in this. No nobility in using the people I love as human shields while I steal away with what I can carry before she regains her power. Bravery is for those who still have options. My only option was to run, to rebuild my world out of the odds and ends I managed to salvage.
No one will ever love me like she did. moody and manic, she had two sides, and my very actions would decide whether the day would be jekyll or hyde. On good days, I would see the fairy tale where i was allowed to be her everything if I measured up. I now measure acquaintances against her template to see if the pattern of our future friendship calls for the inches within an embrace, or the yards that will keep them at arm’s length. If they remind me of her, I always choose yards.
There is no beauty in this, no poetry in paranoia, no art in razor-blade deep memories you can’t forget. Ink and paint and fire runs through these veins, but she is no longer the canvas I bleed my inspiration onto, so I make masterpieces in my arteries instead to remind myself that I am priceless and beautiful.
No one will ever love me like she did, with the intensity of the honeymoon side of abuse, of mind-blowing, post fight sex, of tell me again how I deserve this, of why do you treat me like this when all i want to do is please you? She loved me until I needed to be knocked back down to manageable, swallowed into smallness and cast into darkness where she was the only light.
But there is no light here, there is no light here, there is no truth in her balled up fists and my desire for her to just get it over with. Beat me, because i cant stand the words, and the threats, and the lies, and the manipulation anymore. Oh yes, no one will ever love me like she did, because i love myself too much to let them.
Audio – If I Knew Mountains
Another day, another poem. Here is the audio track for my reading of it. If you want the text version, click here.
If I Knew Mountains
If I knew mountains, I would load up my pallet with blue, grey, white, and just a touch of green, grab an oversized canvas and paint a peaceful valley scene. I’d make mountains with sweeps of my pallet knife, and because Bob Ross would approve, happy little trees would spring to life. Around one gnarled, peaceful tree would be a path leading to a secret just for me, because it is, after all, my world. This private little path would wind up and around to a narrow pass, stony ground to represent the straight and narrow path of life with all its pitfalls and strife, fallings, scrapings and starting anew.
Yeah, if I knew mountains, that’s what I’d do.
If I knew oceans, I would write a song, a haunting melody that only belongs on the waves at night as the calm breeze blows, a minor chord for ebbings, a major one for flows because the ocean is a metaphor – everything returns, no matter how far it goes. A storm on the horizon would crescendo into a crash as winds grew bold and lightning crashed. The staccato rain would be the beat of a new harmony as the ocean greets the rain’s cacophony to combine as one and continue traveling.
If I knew oceans, that’s how I’d sing.
But I know plains as far as the eye can see, so it is the poet’s life for me. Rhymed couplets represent pioneers, men and women, who faced their fears to start a life in a strangely beautiful waste, to taste the harvest hard-won from a soil that’s rarely is kind to anyone. For the plains are howling, hungry, and vast, where heroes and monsters whisper from the past.
So yes, I’m a poet, and I write of arid plains and dust, and other places may be more beautiful and just. But while oceans may be deep and mountains may be high, us flatlander poets, we reach for the sky.
Click here for the audio track for this poem.
Cornpone
Another poem that I love to perform. I will be recording it soon, so look for it on my site. I will also link it here.
Cornpone
I see where the conversation is going already.
A West Texas girl surrounded by people of more…northern orientation.
All gentlemen in the loosest possible sense of the word, start talking to me,
and out of courtesy I ask “How ya’ll doing today?” Then comes the inevitable comment.
“Ya’ll? No way! Well, howdy ma’am!”
I can feel the sarcasm dripping from their smile-bared teeth.
I bear their guffaws and jeers with the patience only a
woman who has better manners than her peers can possess,
but I must confess, a part of me screams to overcome my usual alacrity and tell them
exactly why I am so proud of this voice that holds my heritage and home.
There are some who label anyone with a drawl as lazy or dumb, but
I am numb to such accusations. My accent runs deep as this hard clay soil,
Each inch earned in toil in sun and wind and lack of water. My father
worked the land till his brown-stained hands ached,
legs quaked, back was bent, and yet,
he knew there was more work to be done. You see,
he was focused on the rewards of such strife, and
through that, my young life was molded by his example.
My accent is grounded in the roots that still dig deep,
because my daddy knew what he sowed he reaped.
My dialect sprouted from pure hospitality.
These words you dismiss sneeringly hold more humility,
love and virtue than you could muster in a month of Sundays.
In many ways, my dialect is based on friends and family.
“Supper” is any meal meant to be shared,
“Young ‘uns” are any children meant to be spared
the hard lessons in life until they come of age,
and “Ya’ll”, the word that draws so much ridicule
is meant to make sure all feel welcome,
and acts as a sentiment of inclusion.
This accent is a memory, a geneology of vagabonds.
It comes from the deep baritone of my Pappaw,
singing softly as I helped him peel off his work boots,
gritty with the dirt and oil from the fields where he
gave his health and youth to support a family.
The nasally twang of my Mammaw’s wisdom. She shared
her hearth magic with me that made a house a home.
My own plain-spoken, clear tones come from my great-grandmother,
proud and dark and beautiful,
unbending in the face of four children to feed, no husband and little income.
The slow, dulcet way I talk comes from a little tent where her family lived and thrived, where children grew to be adults, adults to parents to grandparents. Where children learned the
preciousness in life to the tune of a southern song.
Family
He is my brother,
Though all his mind sees are dividing lines of blue and red
like a pair of 3D glasses with half the picture.
And even though the side of the aisle on which I sit is enough to separate his heart from me
he is my brother.
Even while I see in terms of caring for the flotsam society throws against the curb,
and he sees a society inexorably pushing him out of his way of life, we are family.
Politics have divided us, and there is no salvation for us armchair social commentators,
always giving discourses on what’s wrong, but offering no solutions,
minds arrested to immobility by the seemingly insurmountable odds around us.
Every politician lies, but I guess the left sounds sweeter to me, and the right to him,
even though the polarization of our leaders have led to inaction on the scale of catastrophe.
The people they are meant to protect and care for go hungry,
while prisoners are caged in record numbers.
And even though our approach is different, our desire is the same.
Something’s gotta change.
I know millimeters separate us, and it seems like miles,
but he is still my brother.
She is my sister,
and once I thought I could tell her anything. It turns out I was wrong.
As she sends words like a lash to counteract the battery-acid truth I just confessed
I wish I could take it back. I wish I could pretend that her god was mine
and that the Bible did not view women as less than men,
because she is my sister.
But I don’t hear truth from pulpits, nor peace from protesters outside
family planning and gay churches. There is no room for individuality in the house of God
and I can’t sip the wine for fear of the poisons it leaks into my spirit,
clouding my eyes and making me see the world in terms of us and them.
She is my sister, and she fears for my soul, a worry I never wanted for anyone who loves me
and now I have convinced her that something she can’t touch but loves
is going someplace she can’t see, but fears.
I can’t make myself believe.
Her arms are wide and welcoming, but not long enough to drag me back to
the countenance of a god who thinks I’m weak and a sinner,
unworthy of salvation except through scraped knees and swollen tongue,
voice raspy from confessions of things I do not see as sins.
Still, if I could somehow separate want from logic, I would do it
for my sister.
We are all family,
and I promise you that regardless of appearance, race, sex, religion, orientation, political views, pizza topping preference, or age, you are accepted.
I may not understand your view, and we will argue, but we are all family
and that’s what we do.
So if you find yourself labeled outcast, or lonely, or just in need of a hug,
please find me. I will take you in arms accustomed to holding on way too tight.
I will tell you that you are family
and leave it at that.
For Avery – Text version
Here is the text version of my poem, “For Avery”. If you want the audio version, click here.
For Avery
I can’t promise you flowers.
Water has become a valuable resource, and using it to nourish luxuries like roses may soon be a thing of the past. I can promise you beauty, because i will scrape alleyways and storefronts for it, dust it off and bring it to you.
You. will. Learn. To. Appreciate. Beauty.
I can’t promise everyone will see the beautiful in you or, in seeing it, not try to steal it away through abuse, rape, ridicule, or injustice. I can promise you I will protect that beauty with every fiber of my being. No matter which God you worship, which gender or race you love, or how controversial your life choices may be, I will love you. I met you in my dreams before you were born, and from your first breath onward you have never disappointed me.
I can’t promise you answers, because I don’t always have them.
I can promise you knowledge and truth to the best of my ability at any time you ask.
And if I don’t know the answer, we’ll Google it so that we can learn together and fight against the ignorance that is so prevalent in the world.
I can promise that you will educate me.
I can’t promise you a bright future, because certainty isn’t what it used to be.
The best of us seem to be giving up,
And I can’t promise I won’t give up,
But I promise I will fight the desire to do so.
I don’t want to be a bad memory or a day set aside for sorrow,
And I promise there will be times where you are my inspiration for struggling on.
Oh my little saint-in-waiting, I wish I could give you candles enough to burn prayers for the whole world, but our bees are dying,
and prayers don’t travel as high as they used to.
Maybe through some deft spiritual engineering you can learn how to mainline miracles to masses so that we can reset our social compasses to healthy,
but right now battles are fought in our own backyard and no one knows the win condition.
You have been born into a time where people are deaf to cries of help, numb to the bars of cages that squeeze in on their skin on a daily basis and I’m sorry it turned out this way.
I will change it if i can.
I can’t promise you that change will be easy, but I can promise you I will try.
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