Via CC license
May the brokenness in me
fit the brokenness in you
so both are made whole.
Tag: poet
How shall I, whose tears now drench this steering wheel, share love with you
whose wheelchair sputters in the dirt, beside the road on which I drive
towards my home, so far away from this strange place in which we meet,
where I embrace your hand in mine, feel how your thumb enwraps my own,
feel how your hand has no more grasp, see where your other ends in stubs,
behold your legs that stop at the knee, that ache in the space no flesh has known?
who am I that passes cash, a fistful of a day’s earned wage,
towards your chest and speeds off tearing, tearing through the night towards home
where I will sleep within a bed while you lie somewhere on the street?
Forgive me, friend, whose name I asked and dropped beside the highway where
our paths entwined for one clear glimpse, where God himself saw through your eyes.
“WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; 5
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”— Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900.
I thought of this poem when I saw the image below, a GIF made from a compilation of 12 of NASA’s Visible Earthimages, one taken each month in 2004. The GIF was posted by John Nelson, a user-experience expert for the software firm IDV Solutions. I learned of it through Upworthy‘s posting of the link here.
Walt, what would you have written if you could have seen this image?
self portrait as a shadow on a prison parking lot
The paths down which we walk within our dreams
have led us to this place we dare not sleep:
this place where waking is not what it seems.
Our words have traveled down the narrow streams
of halting conversation from the deep
chasms carved by weeping in our dreams.
What scribes have caught our thoughts within the reams
of parchment buried deep beneath the keep
that slumbers here where waking shows no seams
against the teaming cauldron of our schemes,
across the patchworked calculus we heap
to bind the paths down which we walk our dreams
like dogs that bark at every light that gleams
within the shadows cast around the sheep
whose dim-eyed waking is not what it seems?
None but these, who prowl upon the lams
to gauge the ripeness of the time to sweep
along the paths down which we walk in dreams
towards a waking state not what it seems.
licensed via creative commons
A place from which you can’t escape is prison.
A place to which you must return is prison.
The space between the place where you were born
and everywhere you fear to go is prison.
Your shame has strapped a saddle on your back
and whipped your ass to ride you back to prison.
Their faces — all the ones you can’t forgive —
become the guards who lock you in your prison.
Pull back the shades; reveal the fragile glass
that forms the razor fence around your prison.
What taste now aches within your bitter palate?
What sweetness haunts your memory in this prison?
You see your lover standing at the gate.
You wave to her — but turn into your prison.
Click to learn more about my first children's book, which explains incarceration to children with a parent in prison. You can also buy the book on Amazon here.
Click to learn more about the children's book I created for the North Texas Food Bank, which explains food insecurity to children who want to help others. Rather than emphasizing charity, the book integrates a participatory model that demonstrates how to engage those who suffer from hunger in co-creating an equitable community solution to it.