What say you

When you feel so alone
That even sorrow walks away
And you’re left to ache in hollow bone
Soul heavier than clay

Turn your face toward the rain
See each drop that falls
Insistent on its arcing path
In Silence through it all

The Loudness comes when raindrops die
Fall, a final splatter, cry
The Loudness crawls into your flesh
A barrage as loud as inner death

The demons march as heavily
On iron roofs as on your feet
Their silver tongues lash every light
And make the day-sky dreary night.

Wait beyond the first descent
The liquid screams as grasses dent.
Pay first — your attentions to the clouds —
Before the inner roaring debt.

But did you know

But did you know my eyelids flicker

In class when I remember your kiss

My heartbeat skips a bit and slips

Into memories sweet that exist

On the fringe of love and the edge of despair

Because memories mean you are no longer there

But the love pushes back and I remind myself of

The calming rhythm of your heartbeat in my ear.

An unrequested love poem

It’s moments when I’m doing homework way too late at night, and worship music is playing softly in the background,

And I glancingly think about how I’m not having lunch with you tomorrow because it’s a Wednesday, not a Tuesday or a Thursday,

And there’s this twinge inside and the Thought just rudely pushes past my mental barriers,

Announcing itself and settling and sending its inky self-assured fingers into my heart, where I feel its strength resonate

And I drop my pen and look up and out the dark frosted window in shock, looking for who said those words which pronounced themselves so clearly in my mind, 

but there is only my worn reflection staring back, like the words echoed defiantly out of some faded inner conscious where poems are born and die. 

“I love him.”

So I shake myself and write some shadowy half-formed unfair sentiment about this gripping proclamation

And then I wearily lift a thermometer to my ear and check my temperature once more 

before continuing to copy down my calculus homework from the textbook, unburdened. 

Bruised and blue

Someday the world will crack open wide
The flame-lakes will surface from the inside
And those of evil and sick power-pride
Will scream in the fires their own hearts designed.

The only thing that settles my heart
A-quake with rage at rape and hurt
Is the knowledge that evil (someday!) will curl up and die.
And those who turn not from it will eternally writhe
Left only to their own fitting demise.

Forgiveness is a thing more lofty than I
Thank God I’m not god
Else I
Would smite everyone, everywhere
In their err.

(Oh, how I burn tonight at injustice, knowing full well the depths it roosts in my own flesh. Lord, forgive the damned and make well the weak. Give us hearts that beat instead of beat. )