Free Verse
Uncertain Weather. Honorable Mention in October Challenge.
October has uncertain weather. A monochrome sky, I think. Air that turns the AM radio to static. Rain, probably, since the roads of October are always slippery in my memory. A darkness perfect for masks. Mine was Casper the friendly ghost, plastic and white. There’s no screech from tires. No thud of impact. But there’s a bump in the road, then one under the mask from my forehead meeting the dashboard. Maybe there was fog There must have been fog. Suddenly my mom is dropping me at school with children dressed as Superman, Wonder Woman, Bozo the Clown. I slip off my mask when the teacher passes out snacks: pumpkin-shaped cookies, blood-red punch. She has known me for almost two months. She must know I get hurt at home. She doesn’t ask. Years later, my brother tells me he was the bump in the road, that our mother pushed him from the car. October has many twisting roads. Some go through rain. Some through static. Some lead to my brother. All circle back to our mother, to the scene of a possible crime. I keep my mask on and continue through October.
By Tina D. Lopez28 days ago in Poets
How would you live?
How would you live if you had a secret portal buried deep in the center of your being that could take you to a place where every answer to every question ever asked sat waiting for you ready to jump out the moment you decide to beckon it? How would you live in this world full of people in a society if you knew that at the root of each individual identity it was you just playing a game with yourself ego hide n seek with a singular, eternal cosmic puppeteer? How would you live in the day to day mundane mediocrity if you were able to see that the chaos and order and radical energy it took to get you here washing the dishes walking the dog waiting in far too long lines is something all together magickal, that there’s nothing boring about the billions of cells in the tip of your finger going through mitosis to make sure your fingertip still exists, that simply sitting in the dirt and being warmed by the sun is not an act of laziness but of devotion honoring the blessing of life. Would you live as you do now? Because, my dear friend, I hate to break it to you but it's all true. Everything we need comes from within, we need only be silent enough to hear it and brave enough to search for it earnestly. And there's the lonely little fact out there that we are all a Me in our own heads. I am I and though I see you as you, you see you as I and I as you just as I see you and in that way we are one. Sacredness does not need robes or diamonds or even the respect of those who encounter it, sacredness is, whether a fool can recognize it or not yet it is simultaneously something only ever found in the eye of the beholder. A temple with no god is a pile of rocks and an ocean no matter how polluted is still mighty still commands respect and may still kill. The more I understand the more I see that knowledge means nothing if it is never put into practice. So I ask myself how do I want to live?
By Lolly Vieira28 days ago in Poets
