Monday, November 17, 2014

Poet Didn't Know It

Penitence

My perseverance was a plague, a perplexing
Plague which propelled
You away.

My pitiful pushing was an attempt
At piercing and penetrating
Your heart.

I thought with pushing and pleading,
Perusal and passion,
I’d win.

But it all proved pernicious.
A pathetic plan, that lead
To pathos.


Crush

I have learned about
The falsity of romance;
Love at first sight isn’t real,
It is a protrusion,
            A fantasy.

Yet I find myself longing
For the quixotic.
I yearn to be jittery,
To give and to catch glances,
            To play.

I desire the jocundity
And the felicity that comes
With the uncertainty
And the stupidity
            Of infatuation.        



CS

Raggedy Ann sits on my desk;
She is an old porcelain figurine
Wearing a dress painted yellow and blue,
The dust has settled in the cracks of her orange hair.

My mother painted her. On the
Back are her initials: CS.
Christy Stultz.
Her maiden name was Christy Chinn,
Her name now Christy Heywood.

Christy Stultz.

This name represents a time in between;
A liminal space after her childhood and
Before she became the mother I
Know her to be.
A time in my mother’s life
Which remains a mystery to me,
A time I will never fully understand.
With a child, a faith, and a determination
Which kept her going, she was experiencing
Things that would make her
The woman she is now.



Summer Rides

The summer after graduation,
I felt trapped in my town.
I couldn’t stand being home,
            Or being at work
            Or any place where people were around.
I wanted to be
Alone.

I used to tell my parents
I was going to a friend’s house.
My mother worried
About the "burn-out" friends I spent time with, but
She had no reason to worry.
Most of the time I took
My sister’s car
And went for drives.

I would let the windows down
And listen to Stairway to Heaven,
The smell of wet alfalfa
And roses flowing
In
and
out
Of the car with the wind.

These were moments
Of peace
            And freedom
            And joy;
Moments I wanted to last
Forever,
But I knew they would end.
I would have to go back home
Or go back to work,
Trapped in a world
I didn’t want to be in anymore.

I longed for a world of my own.
I longed for the solitude 
And freedom of

Independence.



"Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored."-Zora Neale Hurston


To Zora Neale Hurston

I can feel the colors of the music:

Red
                                                Blue
                                   
                        Yellow

                                    Green
                       
                                                                                    Orange

Purple

                                                Pink

As the melodies mix with the harmonies and
The rhythms Pow
                             Boom
                                    Da,
 The shades mix together:

They
                        S
                              W
                                    I
                              R
                        L


They

                                    N
                        A                      C
            D                                             E


They

          P           L             A             Y             

Creating a climax of colors
In my body.

Ms. Hurston, 
I can feel the music too.

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