Tag: National Poetry Month

Sir

On By MaryIn Poetry, WritingLeave a comment 
Darling boy
Everything about you would destroy
Everything about me and yet
And yet
I desire that destruction.
Make me your toy.

And we have reached the last day of April, and finished the poetry challenge! I got lazy here at the finish line and am using the last of my built up lee-ways that I wrote before April started. The other two lee-way poems were April 16th’s “communication” and April 23rd’s “The Game.”

Strangely, up until this week, it hasn’t been too hard to write any of the poems. I don’t typically consider myself a “poetry person,” but I’m thinking I might start cycling it into the rotation. Although I have been awful at keeping up with my story prompt cards, I would like to start getting back into that. And I keep telling myself I need to get back into painting too. Ideally, I would like to do the following things every week: the Sidequest update, a prompted response (either from one of the daily prompts or flash fiction from the storymatic prompt cards), a poem, a painting, and perhaps a serial story. But, I am fairly lazy and I doubt I will do all of that every week. We’ll see if I can at least do a few though.

Regardless of what I intend, things may get a bit quiet after this. Now that we’ve been done with the 2023 Writing Challenge for a month and have had some time to sit on it, my friend and I are going to compile the chapters, exchange feedback, and work on rewrites, with the goal of slapping the polished products on Amazon’s self publishing by 2025. So no serial updates of any sort this year as we finish that out. But once we’re done with that, we can start a 2025 writing challenge.

prose poem – a rumination on loneliness

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i.

There is a growing suspicion that the fear of dying alone tends to manifest within the soul of an individual that is terrified or incapable of love. When one holds others at a distance, separating emotion and building a wall around the heart, what other end can there be? You see it and can predict it and feel it deeply, bitterly, like Crane’s desert beast, singular, teeth tearing into that dense muscle, knowing that there is no rescue from that fate. Your fear has predestined you. There is nothing else for it. Alone, then.

ii.

There is also a growing suspicion that those that fear being with the wrong love more than being alone are secretly the same. We speak it into being, being too proud to admit the effect of that dreaded “L” word, stronger than love, cousin of love. It is easy to criticize a fault in another, but I have also built my walls. Tended the defenses. Separated my emotions. At the first stirring of the heart, the only course of action is to flee. Declare unworthiness. It is more terrifying to be known, intimately, and thus another fate is sealed. Alone, then.

iii.

I’ve done all my running.
I am an open book, easily found.
Perhaps we can defy fate?

Or perhaps not?

Alone, then?

Missed Connections

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no battle’s plan survives first contact with the enemy.
the set up is perfect, the line was drawn
delivered perfect (enticing, full of promise)
yet the implication seemed to slide
beyond your notice.

hindsight is 20/20, in retrospect I look back
seeing where you attempted to snare me within a web
and in my stubborness (or plain stupidity)
the words whooshed in a faint breeze
right over my head.

perhaps the lesson is that we are imperfect for each other.
but I think I will always feel
that it could have been…

ineffably sublime.

“that would have been a completely different life”

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that a small change in the past creates possibilities.
a million tiny fractaling what if’s
the shape of which may have formed something
with all the same meaning and depth
but a completely different shape

my life has always been a meandering line
and when I found the shape of my desires
I realized I had grown to unfit it

We cannot unmake ourselves…
but we can still mold the future.
after all, a small change creates possibilities
a million tiny fractaling what if’s
the shape of which can form something.

please

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ask it of me

if you asked
i would freely give

every ounce
(heart, body, mind)
(soul, life)

i cannot do it
you have to be the one
that gives in
and asks

and if you did
you would find me
malleable

willing to belong
to only you

but you have to ask