unrequited feelings

Every Day

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Every day I try,
Every day I fail.
Every day I pry
At sealed jam-jars of fate
Till my fingers turn pale.

Every day I lie
Motionless in bed,
Circling thoughts of tasks so dry,
Inside my pillowed head.

Every day I try,
Every day I fall
Into thoughts of cries
Over bitter goodbyes,
And mental shadows brawl
Over unanswered calls.

Every day my arms too weak,
To grasp or change or mold,
Every day my mind too full,
Of skeletons frigid cold.

Every day, a chain-bound strain,
Wading through rivers of lead.
With every stride, my strength wanes,
As I barely reach the beachhead.

Every day I try,
Wrestle with all the whys,
Every day the pain,
Of things I can’t attain,
Every day a fight,
Hide inner blight behind an “I’m alright”.

Every day I’m knocked to the ground,
Black-eyed and blood-stained,
Yet the gloves go on, and the hands go up,
Every day, again.

Tender Days

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Some days feel like a full-body bruise:
Abstract, intangible, and mental
Pressure like over-tightened screws,
Digging in against my temples.

Turmeric stain instincts,
Stubborn, indelible, and distinct.
Let them be and they might wane,
Or let them in and re-live the pain.

Old pains not fully cleansed,
Bad juju from stifled energies,
Changing landscapes, but the same old lens,
Dull aches from blunt force memories.

The sharp agony has long passed,
A phantom soreness remains.
Illusions dissolving at long last,
Last gasps of waning hurricanes.

So I wake up tender some mornings,
And hurt through the day.
Sulking, sullen, and mourning,
The rotten fantasies I threw away.

Talons

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Your ascent
to healing,
My descent,
To delirium.

Clutched by thoughts,
Like bony talons,
Skull pierced,
Brain gripped,
Vice-like,
Unrelenting.

I fought
Day and night,
To free myself,
And I felt,
The grasp loosen.

It was just
A cruel joke,
A hawk,
Playing with her prey.

Clutch, release,
Then clutch again,
A wicked game,
By a ghostly apparition.

So it goes,
The rise and fall,
Till the ghost fades,
And becomes liminal.

Like an old tattoo,
A battle scar,
A sobering reminder,
Of when affection,
Turned into obsession.

I Remember

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I remember
Sitting outside college lecture halls,
Penning pretentious poems.

I wrote about princesses in towers,
Abstract visions,
Conjured fantasies,
Layers upon layers
Of bullshit

I was afraid to say
What I really felt,
In the way
That I really felt it.

Back then,
Enslaved by emotions,
Impotent Anger,
Fervid Jealousy,
Unrequited Love,
Intense obsessions,
I wanted the whole world,
And I could have none of it.

As the years passed,
I scratched, I clawed,
And I carved out little slivers of life
Wherever I called home.

The intensity mellowed out,
The pretense dissolved,
I cleaned up the bullshit,
Or it was just
Beaten out of me.

But My little slivers of life
Were deemed inadequate
And invalid.

They told me about
All the things I didn’t have,
And all the things I hadn’t done.

So I held my little slivers tightly against my chest,
And went back to the world
Of warped fantasies.
Yet again I was enslaved, impotent, and fervid.

The love,
Yet again unrequited
The obsessions,
Yet more intense.

The world in my dreams
Now desolate and barren,
The landscape scorched,
The ground sowed with salt.

And I sit here,
Halfway across the world,
Poeting my thoughts.
Unpretentious, raw, vulnerable,
Not wanting to care,
Not able to stop

Everything is just
All too real
There’s such a finality,
An invisible deadline,
For an invisible assignment,
That’s woefully incomplete.

No more re-rolls of the dice,
No more mulligans,
And I’m back,
Right where I was,
When I sat outside lecture halls,
Penning pretentious poems.