I Want This World to Last

How often do you pause for a moment and appreciate the world around you?

Ephemeral Blooms

This poem was inspired by a very simple daily event. I was walking down a sidewalk at work and saw how it was positively papered with fallen flowers. Even though it's all part of the usual cycle of things, it felt like the trees bloomed then shed their flowers in the blink of an eye. I put my writer's hat on and started thinking a little more about the literary implications of the pattern. It started my mind down the path of thinking about how flowers have short lifespans, but live them beautifully and vibrantly.

I went a bit dark with my choice of words in this piece, with calling the fallen flowers "frail little bodies" and using words like "desecrated" to describe how people trample all over the petals. These trees were troopers since they were managing to survive in a city with staggering amounts of air pollution and other less than ideal conditions. While they seemed healthy enough, I couldn't help but wonder if the flowers would have stayed blooming longer if the conditions were a little bit better.

Savoring Each Moment

This is an older piece from my earliest poetic years. I gave it a pretty hefty editing, since this piece poked at some larger themes that were just biting off far more than it could chew. I opted to keep it very focused on imagery tried to use a little repetition to heighten the significance of all the natural beauty described in the poem. This piece draws a lot on personal experience; there have been so many days when the weather started to turn sour but I just didn't want to leave the ocean until last possible minute.

An Ocean in the Night Sky

Poetry focused on the beauty of nature lends itself to imagery being a key component of the piece. In this poem, I admittedly went to town on the graphics and kept the lines simple and straight forward. I really wanted the two elements to perform on the same level and not have one outshine the other.

Looking at the language, one of my favorite phrases is describing the night sky as an ocean of stars. It's something we've heard before, it's not an uncommon idea, but it's just so beautiful to think of the implications of that. It explains why in science fiction, we call the vessels spaceships. The nautical language pops up regularly and we often take it for granted, accepting it without thinking too much about it.

Oceanic Isolation

Not to bore you with too many details about my travels, but I went on a cruise this year. It was a lovely experience, very relaxing and surprisingly affordable as far as vacations go since we were able to book at a good price. However, the ship was generally too far offshore for regular cell towers to reach and the boat's wi-fi was more than fifteen dollars per day per device, and I wasn't going to fork out that kind of cash just so I could be bothered with work and day to day life matters. Everyone knew I was going to be gone, so no reason to bother paying a lot to check email and texts.

At first, I kept looking at my phone instinctively whenever I picked it up, just like I do normally on land. I was also acutely aware of how many random tasks I do on my phone to kill time; check email, poke at social media, play mobile games, and any other manner of miscellaneous cell phone activities. The urge to do those random tasks was there and it was strong at first.

Then after a couple days of being at sea, when we were on land again, the urge to continuously check my phone but not do anything actually productive on it was starting to ebb. By the end of the vacation, I was loving the sensation of being unplugged. When I am on land, even though I could turn my phone off, I never do, on the off chance that something urgent work related or personal did come up.

Regardless, being truly and honestly offline and unplugged was incredibly relaxing while it lasted. I still try to pause and keep in it mind. At least half of the time when I pick up my phone, I'm probably not actually going to do anything productive, and instead I should just enjoy the people or nature around me.

Anchored

This piece was written over that same vacation mentioned above, albeit at the very end. Getting to explore new places, enjoy time on the ocean, and being away from all the little pinpricks of stress from daily life was fantastic. I'm including this in the nature collection since I wanted to take a lot of ocean imagery into this piece. Since it is a less happy piece, I wanted to mention some of the negative things plaguing our oceans, like the woeful amount of garbage aimlessly floating around.