overthinking it this is where i hide my poetry

I am the first leaf that falls in September.
A maple, I think:
red and delicious.
Or a silver birch that floats down
so gently it looks nearly weightless.
And I always thought
you’d be there to catch me, but

You are the gardener
who comes along to
sweep me up into a pile
of last year’s dead
leaves and sorrows.

I feel a snake slither by.
Or maybe it’s just a worm.
I couldn’t tell;
being sad always made me see the world
through a catastrophic lens.
I could make blue skies seem like an omen.
Too much of a good thing
only leads to trouble,
something along those lines.
And yet I didn’t see this coming.

Because here I am,
in the grass,
surrounded by varying shades of dead.
I see your retreating figure in the distance,
shovel hoisted over one shoulder,
and the stars winking to life
over your head.

Sarah, Unfound

I’ve lost a friend.
And that’s not a euphemism for
she’s dead.
She isn’t dead.  

What I mean is, at lunch
she sits two tables away:
her eyes avoiding mine
and mine avoiding hers

but sometimes I sneak a glance
which means
(I hope)
sometimes she sneaks one
too.

The buzz of chattering, 
the students flitting here and there, 
the shouting, the mess, 
it’s too much, especially when 
she’s there, and I’m here. 
There’s an angry question mark
on the ground
in the form of spilt milk.
Danny slips in it. Wipes his pants.

I imagine her slipping,
me helping her back up
her smiling, and me
smiling back
and asking, “How was your weekend?”
we’d start like that—
slow and fumbling
but we’d meet each other again
in the middle somewhere,
on a grassy lane,
on a rooftop under stars, on Mars,
anywhere,

But now she’s getting up.
She doesn’t look at me,
and I realize 
(painfully)  
I’m looking at her.

And she’s gone.
I’ve lost a friend.

A list of things I’ve tried to squeeze poetry out of:

The lone tree with a splattering of yellow leaves in July, surrounded by green for miles and miles in every direction (a metaphor for being special/or maybe being an obnoxious tryhard/or maybe just a lonely outcast who deserves our pity)

The dead crow on the road with one milky eye and one glassy one, staring up at something that doesn’t exist anymore

What it feels like to fail at the only thing you thought you might be good at

You–where “you” isn’t a definite person, but could possibly be interpreted as my ex-lover from a parallel universe in which all the roses are bright red and everything romantic that could possibly happen does actually happen

Partners in crime & in life

we, leaking out
something a little thicker than love and
painting the town phosphorescent
blue

battling our imaginary enemies and
soaking up our imaginary victories

we, with our black humor/dirty shoes that
stain everyone else’s carpets

then covering up our tracks like 
a couple of repentant
thieves-in-the-night

a day unlike any other

today was a day unlike any other,
just because you said so, and you
happen to be a human unlike
any other.

the dog puked on your white carpet.
sally called back, said she was sorry,
really sorry, but it just wasn’t working out
anymore.

the sun rolled over
and tried to bask in the chipped
light of the moon.

two children playing hopscotch both
scraped their knees in identical
neighborhoods and those scrapes
will leave identical scars, so that,
looking back, they could say
they were always meant to be,

the universe must have planned it
just so, because sometimes
the stars don’t align but
things work out
the way they’re supposed to
regardless.

and you looked in the mirror and
wondered what it was that dear
sally couldn’t bring herself to love anymore.

Everything is a metaphor for everything else
if you tilt your head a little bit and squint
artistically. But Joseph is a painter
and he isn’t in the business of selling literary devices.
He adds a splash of cerulean to a frosty eye
and calls it a night.

I always thought creativity was a never-ending resource that you could channel just the way you wanted. I didn’t expect to be bashing my brain in every night with a baseball bat until something half worthwhile ends up stumbling out, hands raised over its head begging please, please no more

Empty, full, empty again

There’s nothing for me to do here anymore.
No plans to unravel, no roads to wander along,
no feelings to get lost in.
I want to shake myself like a snow globe,
let the destruction fall where it may.
Everything’s been so still these days
and the stillness makes me want to scream
and scream until all the glass encasing my world explodes.

The kids in the backyard force fireflies
into mason jars, screw the lids on tight.
When they go to bed, teeth-brushed and sleepy-eyed,
they place the jars by the windowsill
and let the flickering ease them to rest.
They don’t notice when the lights blink out
a few days later. They don’t notice when layers
of dead bugs line the bottom of their glasses.

And I don’t notice when my feet
start moving like a wind-up doll’s.
First I’m here, then I’m not;
one day I’m eating a blueberry pie with carnage
running down my chin, the next day I’m hungry,
hungry, so goddamn hungry
and I don’t put a crumb in my mouth.
And I couldn’t explain why but
for some reason it feels like the most
daunting thing on earth.
I’d rather die than take another bite.

Dusk swoops down with open jaws, 
the fireflies whisper to each other outside my window. 

Don’t fill my ears with sweet nothings. The silence is sweeter.

In my dream, everything was the same, 
except the cars all drove
on the wrong side of the road
and not as many people threw
themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge.
You showed up with a bouquet of dead flowers
and we went star gazing, except
this is a city and the entire sky
was a mass of purple fog.
It was beautiful anyway.
Beautiful because it wasn’t raining
and we didn’t have to fill up our
silences with words like,
“I love you” or
“Your eyes are like sapphires, mon amour.”

Lucy is in the kitchen having an existential crisis, as per usual. She’s peeling an orange and wondering what it would feel like to be stabbed to death twenty eight times.

“Why twenty eight?” Someone would ask if they could hear her thoughts. “Why not twenty nine?”

And Lucy, being Lucy, wouldn’t know what to say, so she probably wouldn’t say anything at all, and keep picturing those twenty eight stab wounds.

She goes to work on a dark Tuesday morning. It’s raining, which, generally speaking, doesn’t bode well for minds that are prone to existential crises.

Anyway, Lucy goes to work; she sits at her desk; she stares at the telephone, at the blinking red light which means she has some missed calls to attend to.

But instead of attending to them, Lucy takes a ragged breath and knits her fingers together—like a basket that might catch all of her bad thoughts. She’d empty the basket into the river of muddy water snaking its way down the parking lot and pouring into the gutters. Then, maybe, her mind would be clear enough for her to focus on the task at hand. Listening to those messages.

But it’s too much for her right now.

Everything’s too much and everything’s painful. Putting one foot in front of the other, picking up the phone, that sort of thing. It’s pathetic. “Children are dying,” some asshole might inform her, and she’d turn that phrase over and over in her brain until it turns into a mush of nonsense syllables spinning at warp speed. Children are dying, and what is she doing? She’s sitting at an office unable to put the phone to her ear.