Tag Archives: poetry

A Ditty for the “Oh God So Close to the Weekend…” Day

24 Jan

grumpy cat latte art

A Ditty for the Last of the Week Days

There was not enough coffee for my coffee cup.

There was not enough coffee to fill the cup up.

I overestimated what was left

in that most beautiful French press carafe

and now my caffeination is dangerously low

and my motivation center is synapsing quite slow

so you all got a half-crazed dump of a ditty

which I hope you’ve laughed at, even if it’s not witty.

Oh god, why isn’t it the weekend yet?

Note: Why the hell do I think of the weekend as “relief?” I usually have to get up several hours earlier…

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Talk

21 Jan

isolation

Talk

I want someone to talk to me.

I rant and rave, tweet and type

and make all the noises I can think to

in this world of ours.

I even say some words out loud.

But usually,

my only responder is silence.

I am tired of having conversations

with shrugged shoulders as my partner.

I wish that you would make some noises too.

At least then while we are lovemaking,

I will feel like it matters that I am there with you, a person.

Instead of just my shadow in the dark.

Or, at least in the afternoon,

you could say hello when I walk into the room,

or tell you something.

But there is no one to talk to me.

My words only sit across from silence still.

And so I will fill this table with my laptop screen,

and seek to douse this loneliness in the chatter

of a world out there having its own conversation.

I go online to have the world talk at me,

so that maybe all the buzz will help me feel okay.

I wish someone would talk to me.

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Insomniac Poetry

16 Jan

day night idea brain

Happy Thursday, my lovely readers. So, I’ve been scribbling about in the Twittersphere a fair amount recently – the 140 character limit on writing a meaningful blurb/poem is a provocative challenge, and it’s nice to be able to throw shorter thoughts like haikus or couplets or quotes out to the world of internet readers without having to scrounge up something as official as a blog post to do it.

Anyhoo. As many of you might know, the sleeping and I, we don’t exactly have the smoothest of relationships. “Oh, what’s that? You’re done with work and writing for the day and want to get an adequate amount of shut-eye? Then how about I fill your brain with ALL THESE THINGS YOU MUST CYCLICALLY THINK ABOUT IT!!!” *cue maniacal laughter*

Yup. My circadian rhythms and I really need to have a peace summit or something one of these days.

But, seeing as right as I’m trying to fall asleep is apparently one of times that I mind-spew poetry and the beginnings of other writings, I’ve decided that rather than futilely wait until morning to write down the 1% that I’ll have remembered from what I thought of just before slipping off into dreamland, sure, I’ll just postpone my going to bed for another five minutes or so (*cough cough two hours cough cough*) and jot down those haikus my brain is generating like there’s no tomorrow through a couple to half a dozen tweets or so.

Yeah, pretty sure most of my Twitter activity logs between 11 pm and 3 am. Woooo sleep disorders.

But, one writer’s sleep issues is another reader’s free poetry! So, in case you haven’t stumbled upon it already and also happen to be awake and trawling the virtual world for verse at two in the morning (or, you know, wanna check for updates that will still exist in their digital entry in my Tweet feed at a more reasonable hour…), just wanted to give y’all a heads up that you can find the poetry (mostly haikus) that I write late at night under the hashtag #insomniacpoetry. Oh yeah, my whatever-the-fuck-you-call-a-twitter-“at”-username (handle? I think that’s the term the UI folks picked…) is @MicealaShocklee.

Just because, here are a couple of insomniac poems I’ve written over the weeks past:

Haikus for Quiet Sleep

Silence is the best

kind of poetry for an

insomniac’s night.

 

Darkness is the best

kind of poetry for an

insomniac’s mind.

 

Haiku for Words That Won’t Let Me Sleep

A cacophony

of overlapping phrases

circles in my brain.

 

unnamed poem

I can’t sleep and my heart’s a bit bruised,

so I’ll write poetry.

 

Sometimes in life, we make such substitutions.

 

Lovely readers, here’s to all our waking dreams.

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a couple of poems about flowers

13 Jan

flowers

 

Clarity, Inebriation

I want to get the world drunk on flowers,

high on the intoxicating air of a clear spring day

when the scent of a world starting again

out of the rubble of winter

inundates you with the triumph of a million

petals opening up from their buds

and waving at you as the breeze bounces by.

I want smiles to bloom and blossom

and heads to spin from the beauty of it all.

 

Poem for a Lover

Bring me a bouquet of wildflowers,

for then I will know

that you have gone and seen the world.

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Haiku for Profanity

8 Jan

Here’s a blip of a poem (also known as a haiku) for a pleasant bump as you roll through hump day:

credit to some wonderful artist out there whom I could only find a mention of as "Lauren the cartoon goddess"

credit to some wonderful artist out there whom I could only find a mention of as “Lauren the cartoon goddess”

A Haiku in Defense of Profanity

Can there be beauty

in this grunge disgruntlement?

Dirty, not unclean.

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A Resolution

31 Dec

I’m not really one for the whole “New Year’s Resolution” thing. As someone who’s gone through years and years and more goddamn years of recovery, I’ve seen through myself that change is usually not something that happens through one grand turn around, one definitive pivot. It is a slow, gradual, back and forth of deciding and un-deciding and re-deciding over and over again, until somehow, as each sand grain of nearly unnoticeable tremorous choice has slipped through the infinitesimally small bottleneck of the hourglass of our life, we look up and realize all of a sudden – it’s over. I’ve done it. The sand has all passed through now. And in the struggle of the moment, I didn’t even notice.

It is the second-by-second way we live our life that matters. Sure, change can begin with some grand declaration, but a proclamation is not the same as an action. And as history has shown in coups and diets, monumental momentary revolutions rarely last. Change requires more upkeep than that.

And so with all that in mind, I’ve written my hope for the world as turn the page 2014. A hope not so much for resolution, but for recovery.

possibility

2014

My wish this year, as we turn the page once more,
is that we will embrace a new language for these further pages,
to write a story no longer of the old deadbeat rhythm and rhyme
we have clattered with and clod along, year after year,
but instead a story the sound of which is strange in the ears of life,
the new noise of decisions spoken in a different tongue,
To build the world, not break it.
To grow new life, not gore it.
To turn hope into happening
and loss into learning.
To realize that the chance to change
is not tomorrow but all the yesterdays that were today,
and that with every second the breath of possibility whispers,
“Now.”

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You are no string of Christmas lights.

16 Dec

I’ve battled depression. I’ve battled eating disorders. I’ve battled abuse and bullying and cruelty from people who said they loved me. And for years, I thought that if only I could figure out what had gone wrong with me, what flaw it was that had broken through my skin and left such a gaping hole, then I could remove it, fix it, and everything wouldn’t hurt so more.

I never could do it.

But that was because there was no master flaw in me.

And then today, I was hanging Christmas lights.

tangled christmas lights

You are no string of Christmas lights

You are no string of Christmas lights, honey,
with your wires all tangled and one loose light
that if you could only find and twist back into place,
you wouldn’t be so broken anymore.

There is no one loose gauge to you,
no link bumped out of place,
there is no one thing wrong for you to fix
and suddenly be restored to your former glory.

That’s not the way that people shine.

You’re so much more than the current running through your veins,
you are not just the lights you show.
And how you feel is not a glitch,
because there’s nothing wrong at all.

How you feel is how you think
and how you act
and how you blink
when somebody tries to poke you in the eye –
if you jerk back, if you don’t move, or
if you just all out slap them in the face.

There’s more decision than reflex there.

You are not missing one part that should shine.
You are not mere plastic decoration.
You have not failed, because perfection was never a requirement.
You are no mere string of Christmas lights, honey.

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Fetal Position

8 Dec

Fetal Position

There is a safety to curling up,

pulling into a ball so that you resemble

a rock, the immoveable things of the earth.

 

They call it the fetal position.

But is it really so vulnerable,

when you are curled into yourself

and tucked away, safe inside a mother

whose very body protects you from the world?

You are untouchable then, in a way.

With a life between you and everything else.

 

There’s a safety there,

knowing that somebody else

has wrapped you as completely as ever

a human can be, all curled up into

the shape of a rock, fetal position.

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A Line of Paint

6 Dec

Because of my hesitant sort of love affair with using paint as a medium.

paint mug rings - edited

A Line of Paint

There is something

about the glide of a brush across a canvas,

the smooth glide of creation

where there was nothing before.

An indelible mark easily smudged

by the mere wipe of a rag corner

changeable, as easily a glaring retribution

as a wet, glistening line

where your mind has kissed the canvas

and run its tongue along the bare back

where possibility lay.

The sensual embodiment of a thought

in the mere stroke of a hand,

The shiver down a spine of bristles under paint –

that’s a touch that’s hard to prepare for,

that leaves you burnt and angry when you can’t do it right.

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Cell Phone Towers

1 Dec

Just some wistful dystopian poetry for you all that popped into my head during what’s passing for my “this morning.”

cell phone tower

Cell Phone Towers

We live our lives of drinking reheated coffee while we get up too early or sleep in too late.
We are anchored to our reality by the tether of cell phone wires plugged into wall outlets,
letting us know when we are about to lose connection to the functionality we have made of ourselves,
when we will lose our place as one more cog in the great spinning wheel
we have made of this earth, one large machine run by the breath of its inhabitants.
I do not rue the network we have defined ourself as, not entirely,
for there’s something to it, being able to have at least the merest scrap of you,
in the sound of your voice while you are in China and I am in Belize,
but I wonder if perhaps there would not be so much distance,
if we’d focused more on how to climb tree branches instead of success ladders.
Maybe we wouldn’t be drinking so much reheated coffee,
and maybe my perfume would be the smell of you, instead of this odor to mask the loneliness.

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