memoirs of a poet

Excerpts from my final undergraduate poetry portfolio

1 

These flowery waters and these watery flowers 

Swallow light attracted to – 

Consequences of law 

Rain and snow enter the exist 

Pathways seep into our calculations 

Stream. 

Interlude to flattened sweat and  

The Bugs Bunny Cartoon your  

Mother showed you the surface of  

Adaptive similarities.  

2

God of the sea finally stepped out of 

World remoted in Late September  

Orbiting the birth of a baby the rings  

Wild laughter quickly destroys earnest balance: 

We can almost see the skin of. 

Sarcasm chokes in the throat of unbroken  

Clouds allowing its tongue-tied Earth  

Giddy on piecing them together,  

Asking is it mutual: 

“I’d like to do the same for you.” 

Each a source of Love  

Songs over playing  

Static cold touching the tad of learning  

Vastly different circumstances  

Laughing at Saturn –  

dying the entire time. 

3  

Knees dug up graveyards of sin 

Stuck in the bits of teeth 

Beaten by pieces of a boy’s smile  

Charged by a spectrum: 

Human (emphatically plural). 

Perils of our species answering  
“intuitive talent” when falling into our  

Best Guess at Love.   

5  

Adoration like drumming  

Hope visits another mimicking  

Scripts again and again and again, 

Waiting like 

Eggshells stepping newness out of them 

“Come look” at the hand on pen picking  

Petals of spring, 

Collecting consonants 

Telling her to give up and become an accountant.  

7

Trying to come to terms with conditions, 

Stepping stones migrated on the question: 

“How will I get any further?” in pursuit of  

Owning goodness hangs up strings of light 

Reminders of past struggle for independence taken  

Personally, as the doctor explains laughter  

Spilling out of windows framing  

Aram and Lina answering the question pinning  

Down the universe. 

9

The poem ends when the madmen lead the blind 

out of nothingness comes somethingness   

Mercy little and sifting through stories  

Foolish in their honesty blown by ambitious 

Bastards penned by words at war where  

Fortunes of fools enact false martyrdom,  

Gory could be beautiful.  

24  

Fulfilment is the merging of fictional and non-fictional,  

Dropping birdsong till the dew melts 

Shadows pouring time out of darkness  

Closing eyelids, searching surfaces overlapping  

Recitals first breakup 

Christmases at the wake of a grandmother. 

Birthday candles blow out  

Hopes of a career stumbling  

Uneven on a narrator naively expecting  

Pink skies to sound her to sleeping  

Empty dreams of cigarette smoking 

An ache for an open field.