Poetry

Noise

Warming up

Keys

Fingerings

Chatter

Laughter

The chorale

Stopping

Starting

"Again"

"I know you can do better than that"

Serious but

You also love it

Cornered

I put my hands up

Like you taught me

Only now

You're the one attacking

"Helping" because

You "just want me to feel better"

And I braced for impact

I am tormented by slight movements

even silence is hurting me

reality seems to be strobing

or something like it -

I've yet to learn how to explain these moments to others,

even myself.

It's not normal,

now I sit in the orchard

Apples, pears, and plums filter the sunlight

it shines through in thread-width rays

pure and packed with heat

unmeasurable in inches

unmeasurable in its own way

How can it be that I cannot exist without and with her

Sometimes I like to imagine we have the same eyes, brown with glints of green and yellow, like a sprouting garden in spring.

Cursed.

Am I cursed?

Cursed to tie myself to people, swearing that they’re going to be different.

Only for resentment to grow like ivy, sentencing me to a place of discontent.

I’ve called it paranoia.

i think i know why aliens haven't visited us. they're 

definitely watching with rapt attention, waiting 

to see how we climb the highest wall 

humanity built for ourselves in the past 

What is done alone can be done together, 

with anger can turn love, 

with hope there will always be a light. 

The tide calls 

it beckons hearts 

it soothes souls 

it will encompass you within its salty wrath 

give you praise, accept you 

and then spit you back out. 

Siren’s yell pounds on my brain,

graffiti paints the walls in the letters unknown,

I feel so small beneath the metal mountains above,

the honking brings fear into my peaceful existence,

Picture something in your mind. 

Anything.

Then, like water eroding the sand on a cliff,

like a white van coming to take them away,

like a dream,

imagine it different.

imagine it better

or worse,

This is the worst kind of anticipation

this anticipation isn't just fear of what is to come

it's laced around the edges with knowledge of how it went last time

of how a repeat of last year is most likely inevitable.