Female Friendship

There are some friends who grow with you until you both grow apart.
There are some friends whose path you cross once and never meet again.
There are some friends who will lead the charge into drunken shenanigans.

This is a letter to one of my greatest friends, who is none of the above.
If you don't understand, good. You don't have to.
--

Florida Is Not Indonesia:

           where you have blessed

                                

Caramelizing skin in a hot southern sun,

sand like sugar crystals on bare feet

pacing slowly with great purpose

Under the omniscient eyes of her Father,

loving others as she has been loved by Him.

Poised and vivacious laughter spilling from the same lips

as speak encouragement to wayfaring hearts

and comfort to salt-streaked eyes.

Calloused souls massaged and manicured

by a collective sense of peace.

Ask of her nothing. She already gives freely

and gift her your time to be rewarded twice over.

Wit, tenor, charity, true

Kismet drawn, and bound by greatness

to travel with grace to the least of these.

Endings are bittersweet, a chocolate best found in cookies

which there are sure to be a lot of.

Her sweet tooth is as bad as mine.

So I ask of the universe, could one have been sent a better friend?

Career Goals: an introspective

The world is white-black and my eyes are liars who’ve not yet betrayed my heart.

Destructive interference in cardiomyopic waves,

Solutions muddled in a Collins glass shaken with two parts rum, one part lime juice and Hemingway’s pen scratching away on a white-black book against this dingy bar,

Drinking until his dreams are no longer paralyzing.

A Hemingway and a Hamlet

Torn in directions by dreams

By dreams, per chance, or by duty

To find calling in the world or to be led, listless, towards a destiny chosen by your father?

It’s a difficult path to pioneer when you head fights your heart,

but where is the path for the heart that fights itself?

A ring with only one boxer has no winner,

Only a point: it is fruitless to try to strike the left hand with the left glove.

By duty am I bound

But lies down this fate no freedom, that is

No delight, that is

No guilt.

By passion am I drawn

But lies down this fate no honor, that is

No fidelity, that is

No rancor.

Butter-rum skin on universal white-black canvas

melting indecisively as though relativity were a joke everyone is in on but me:

An imposter-scribe of my own life events

Fighting the shadow of the thoughts that create me

Betraying the cardial crossroads when my eyes sneak a glance at one of a million possible destinations.

Vespers (A collection of 3 poems)

I. A sentence

, which is not to say that I am lacking in that respect, but rather that my voice, a voice that relies on a pair of inherited chromosomes, the eternal promise that this air, the same air we’re sharing, will always be able to vibrate and carry those vibrations and transfer them to the hidden receptacles within your body so that you can interpret them, and not an insignificant amount of chance that my shaking voice will match to patterns you are familiar with – but of course you must be familiar with them as you are human and I am human and our humanities allow for a certain amount of innate understanding of one another unless you are, well, you know those people to whom I refer; there is a difference between talking and speaking and it lies in the fact that for one, there is no purpose, and for the other, the purpose is complex, evolving, and inviting others to eventually join a larger conversation over something that is personally meaningful and to somehow have to convey these abstract ideas and words by means of voices over which we have no control,

II.An Afterthought OR My views on the purpose of existence

(                          )

III.My Poem

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” – Oscar Wilde

I speak with words not my own.

Who owns each syllable, each sound that drops from my lips like diamonds and diamondbacks?

Each hiss of breath,

hiss of hot lead

feverishly melting in delicate patterns on paper,

who owns this?

The writer has the fever,

infects her audience with its heat,

but the fever belongs to the disease which has come before,

and will come again,

though an age may pass in between of curséd health.

It’s the cacophony of teeth,

the smell of sweat and stale vomit,

the neatly simmered rage,

all of these things of mine,

that plagiarize the playwrights and philosophers of old,

those rulers of the Golden age of thought and reason and linguistic innovation,

who, in turn, plagiarized the divinity of the planets they could see,

somehow turning them into a mockery of a representation in the process.

But the planets are mere shadows in the background of some ancient man’s cave painting

and in the foreground is the only truth he knows:

the immediacy of his situation and,

unable to see past his need and into the future, he

like me,

speaks with words not our own.