Tag Archives: poetry

I’m From

I’m from “work hard and you’ll succeed,”
from purple mountains and thumb sticks,
from haystacks and mutnicks,
from Pokémon and Power Rangers,
from picture books and Animorphs.
I’m from the smell of brine salt and cattails,
from catfish and rainbow trout,
from sagebrush, scrub oaks and aspens,
from glacial lakes and star-choked skies.
I’m from analog signals and black and white screens,
from libraries and late nights.
I’m from tackle football in the snow and Hatchet.
I’m from “Country Road” and “Lose Yourself,”
from aleternative, punk rock, and post hardcore.
I’m from wooden playgrounds and DOS,
from prison-pipeline gangs and Sunday School.
I’m from Y2K, September 11th,
and first generation Xbox controllers.
I’m from Hobbiton and Hogwarts,
I’m from $1.00 Big Macs and Fufu Berry Soda,
from Blindside, Smith and Edwards,
and Western Family.
I’m from public schools
and Mrs. Felt’s AP English Class.
I’m from Robert Frost and Harper Lee,
from my best friend’s living room,
and even from the Bible Belt.
I’m from these and a thousand other places,
and I still visit them sometimes
in poetry
and in my mind.

Mythology

We set my phone’s alarm ahead
then said our prayers and went to bed.
The beeping woke me from my sleep
when the event was at its peak.
I thought that dreaming changed your mind,
but if it had you were too kind
to tell me so, and so we crept
past the room where Ayden slept,
unlocked the door with with quiet hands,
and gazed up at the bloodred sands
a quarter of a million miles away:
the wolf-god Hati’s ancient prey.

From the starry depths of Mimir’s sky,
in the cloud of myth it hides behind,
God’s single, crimson-shrouded eye
rolled over the world, cold and blind.

Timeless

When I lay here with you 
like this
I feel as if we’re boulders
touching in a mountain stream,
and time rushes onward 
all around us,
fast with a Spingtime thaw
or slow with slushy frost—
now choked with leaves 
and broken sticks
now thundering by 
in seething foam.
The seasons blur before us
and wash the world
downstream
around us,
but here we are
like boulders:
languid,
immovable,
and timeless.

Sagebrush Kings

The sagebrush kings
with bony crowns
patrol the mountainside,
pacing well-worn paths
and pausing periodically to watch.
Ears high,
eyes straining,
nostrils wide,
they keep their silent vigil.
A sound,
a movement,
an unfamiliar smell
is an invitation to a war
that they can never win.
A huff calls the retreat
into their scrub oak strongholds
where they’ve ruled
for countless seasons
and forged their gaudy diadems
on an anvil made of caution.

Conquered Mountains

There’s clarity that comes with height
when we pace the top of the world
where only the wind
and the deer live.
We place ourselves above civilization,
which looks both physically better 
and fundamentally worse
the farther away you move from it.
The tar-filed cracks in broken pavement,
the gray, oppressive clouds of smog,
the constant noise of our machines
fade as you climb until
the world is laid out before you 
in distant, unobtainable perfection,
and it’s hard to know why
no one else down there can see 
with perfect clarity 
the obvious solutions we have found
to humanity’s most persistent demons 
when we’ve climbed and conquered mountains. 

Sailing

I love falling asleep with the windows open
when it’s warm outside and the breeze
is playing with the leaves.
It stirs the grass, the blinds,
the chimes we bought in Nassau,
and my mind. It carries a scent as it sighs
through the trees and into my room—
a green scent that never sleeps,
but tumbles, ageless, from one tree to another,
from one town to another, from one end of the earth
to the other. It cannot be seen,
and so engages only my other senses:
smell and sound and something
deeper, something primeval,
like the force that drives migrations.
It calls me like the ocean calls a mariner.
I lay in bed and wonder where the breeze began,
where it goes, and what it does in between.
But then I remember;
I already know what it does in between.
It stirs the leaves, the grass, the chimes—
imbues them with its scent and is, in turn, imbued.
It stirs me as I lay in bed,
and, slowly, I drift away with it.