May Daily Poetry Challenge 2022

I found myself at a loss for words for 40 days

I did think of them

But I could not make them stick to a page

I am back now

And they seem to be sticking alright

I suppose I’m just worried

I was so tired

And I’m sure to be again

So many words get unstuck

And then I just have a handful of letters

The stubborn tree root

Grown up from eroded soil

Clutches the bare rock

Singing with a pianist you don’t know

“I’ll meet you at the end”

Hopeful that your respective degrees

Will get you both there

Somehow

And eventually

I’m so glad to be an adult

I can decide to get a chocolate malt

At 9 pm

Walk to the graeters in the downy half dark

A man that talks too loud gives me my malt

For $5.75

And I walk home in the freshly fallen night

Knowing a stag waits lonely in the woods across the street from my house

Love bites from the cat

Itch on the back of my hand

My sunburn peels

I cannot help but pick and pick and pick and pick

My tomatoes are wrinkled

And the garlic skin is damp

Making it harder to peel and peel and peel and peel

I clogged the sink with the garlic skins

Summer rain pebbles the dirty window panes

The gently approaching night

Swallows the verdant green swath of woods

The summer thunder guffaws

And its lover flashes a brilliant smile

Grey clouds spit

Blacker now, and darker still

Heavy and descending slowly

To rest on the drooping treetops

I could write my life story on a book of matches

Each memory burnt away

Every time I light a room

The way my nose fits against your cheek

In that picture

You know the one

The way you drape your hand around my neck

Holding me close

My smile

My eyes

All yours

And ours together

In that picture

You know the one

A knife called Kindness

There is not enough time in this place

Never enough time for me to be ready to say goodbye

Again

All the singing girls

They come from Ireland

And all the tunes they hum

From cross a frigid sea

The singing girls with jeweled tongues

And throats cast out of purest gold

Sing their merry songs

And call the rainclouds in

I know a singing girl

With Ireland in her wake

She sings no dancing songs

Nor ballads meant for me

She thrums as taut as piano strings

With rainclouds as her ferrymen

Oh, The thunder o’er the raging waves

And lightning bright enough to blind

All bespelled by the silver voice

From my lovers’s golden throat

There’s a building on the corner that used to sing

Alas, one by one the voices left it

But it used to sing

Not always well

But often well enough

Its myriad voices tumbled down the steps

Some loud or soft

Some going silent for many days

When the windows were thrown open

Those anonymous voices reached all the way to the lake

All the way down the hill if the street was quiet

Alas, one by one the voices left it

But it used to sing

It used to sing

In a time of lasts

I prepare to make my first

An ending in one place

Sings the beginning in another

I leave on my dramatic eye makeup

As I put on my pajamas

To sit in the living room with my friends

(The hair goes in a bun, the bra in a heap on the ground, the look deteriorates but the eye makeup stays on)

Perhaps wiping just enough off

So that I look like I’m in a high school production of Cabaret

Flowers are filled with rain water

The streets of the Gaslight are still

And cool with the lingering breath of thunder

I breathe in air laced with lilac

I run my hands across the Juniper and Hemlock

The water hung from their needles

Cleanses my hands of the dirt from the back of the friendly outdoor cat

The Japanese maples droop

Under the weight of the dew

I do not know how loud I speak

Nor for how long I have spoken

There is only the crowding of the words in my mouth

And my clumsy tongue unable to get out of the way

I am not ready to say goodbye to you

I am not ready to let you go

Though I stand on the threshold of leaving

With a suitcase of memory in tow

I am not ready to say goodbye to you

Even though I have to go

There is a stickiness in belonging here

A feeling I can’t wash away

I have forgotten more than I recall

I wade slowly through a remembered day

I am not ready to say goodbye to you

Even though I cannot stay

I am in the walls

In the stains on the ceiling in the kitchen

I am in the scratches on the baseboards

And on the wood floors

I spackled over thumbtack holes

I hung command strips

That ripped of 20 layers of paint

I am in the rooms and halls

Though I go

Something of me remains

A woman sits on her fire escape smoking

She taps the dwindling cigarette and the ash falls 15 feet to the ground

She slowly crawls through her window

Back into the dark

Hangry is

Seeing red at the deli

Want

Bagel

Now

Semi obstructed

View of backsides and profiles

A dancing green girl

Pooped in Carnegie Hall

Titties out, Carnegie Hall

Ass out, Carnegie Hall

I am a menace

Images from my eyes

Become words tapped out by my fingers

I look at a thing

And describe it to myself

The tearing nets on an abandoned baseball field

Sunlight on the seaglass green Hudson

The silver blue sheen of the city

fading away behind squat, red brick buildings across the bridge

Clouds pulled thin across a heat swollen sky

How can I make the world around me into poetry

What words are waiting to be teased out by my aimless tap tap tapping

I cried

For it seems the only thing I can do

I cried

Impotent

Useless

I cried

And it was the only thing I could do

I wanna go to bed

I’m fucjinng pooped

And my autocorrect won’t fix swear words

So I’m fucknng wiped out

And I don’t have the energy to fix fusinckg

So I’m just gonna fucjing let it be

Duck

I give what I have of my soul

They give what they have of theirs

Give and give until exhausted

And it is never enough

It could never possibly be enough

Strauss is a balm for the soul

There is a soul that isn’t

But should be here

I met god in a water park

He makes the water slides go

Sometimes

Singing isn’t enough

And that’s okay

May Daily Poetry Challenge 2022

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