Week 35

Every time I land
I wonder if the song
playing on my headphones
is the last song I'll ever listen to.

I wonder if people will ever find my poems,
especially the unpublished ones,
the ones I started
but never finished
because I never knew what to say.
Now I know what to say
at this edge between life and death,
"I'm sorry, I should have done more
but I think I loved enough,
maybe it was a little
but it was enough.
Lord, have mercy.".

But the plane lands
and it's summer
so the brakes work just fine,
nothing slides,
and I'm alive,
my last thoughts forgotten
to be remembered again
the next time my heart drops.

Week 34

My hand was shiny
underneath the cabin lights
in the aeroplane in the middle of the sky.
The familiar nausea eats away at me,
as if distance,
real or imagined
is the reason
that people break up.

The first boy,
well he never swam across the Atlantic
so we slowly talked over a great
insurmountable distance
until our whispers faded,
or his did anyway.

The next boy, he got distracted
by a kangaroo,
or anything that hopped really.

This last one,
he felt real.
I knew he was just visiting
but he promised to stay.
Alas, words were the only thing he left behind,
along with a boxed bottle of whiskey
and a signature in a book.

So this is why I'm scared
of flying away from you.
You're going to forget
that I'm prettier in person,
funnier too.
I'll wait and see,
hold out hope,
for you,
for me
but I am fully prepared for you to leave.
But for now you are mine
even as I sit in this aeroplane in the middle of the sky.

Week 33

There is a careful shared fear
in the economy class
when an airplane takes us up.
Even us more experienced fliers
feel it.
It's as if we make a shared promise
to live and die together,
a group of strangers
now forever connected
by recycled air.
It makes sense that death
connects us
bonds us
ties up and leaves us
to fend for ourselves
in a metal box in the air.
At the end of the journey,
we land, grateful to be alive
even if nothing waits for us
on the other side.

Week 32

Sometimes
The world holds little surprises.
Like the way the sun breaks through
The clouds,
Or the way the breeze blows her hair in the wind.
Like the way my cat tentatively
Walks under the bridge of my legs,
Curling his tail up
Leaving his scent behind.

It's nice smelling your scent on my sheets,
On my shirt,
On my wrist.
For so long
My room remained stark
And clean,
Smelling of laundry
And old regrets.

I am not afraid of you.
You and your beautiful nose.
There is a quiet strength,
A sense of belief and change
Growing,
Rooting.
Maybe one day this sapling
Will become a giant tree
Providing shade for generations to come.
But for now
Little surprises are all I need,
Your scent on my bedsheets,
My little cat purring beside me.

Week 31

I'm trying to write
And the block rises up again,
Victorious and proud.
I don't want to wait
For inspiration again,
I don't want to be buried
Under those dark depths
That depression took me to
That made beautiful words fly out
From within my throat,
Guttural and pure
The command I held onto rhythm
And sound,
Unparalleled.
And now I'm stuck,
Locked into place
By apathy,
By being happy.
There is a lot that is poetic
In the way he feels me smile
When he kisses my cheek,
I just seem to have trouble capturing it.

Week 30

I just realized I hate blank pages.
I'm sitting and staring at one right now.
The page, pure
and pristine.

He is a blank page,
I am not.
I come with pre-written instructions,
fill in the blank
with the answers erased
and written in again,
and erased.
The etchings remain
and if you close enough
you can make out the words.
It comes out the way I hold myself,
the way my thumb presses against
the flesh of my palm,
the way my heart beats faster
when I think about my future
or lack thereof,
the way things always go slightly awry.

But he is starting to fill in the blanks
of my heart,
slowly and carefully,
writing in pen.
I let him be,
my beautiful white blank page,
one day maybe I'll come up with a title,
the beginning, the end,
and the middle.