today's project

Today I got super frustrated thinking about my writing and feeling like I never escape this place of being cliche. So I did what I do and wrote a (rather long) poem about it :) Think of it as an ode to the creative process slash me just blowing off steam. You don't have to read it but it makes me feel good to get it out. Poetry > those squeezy stress balls. . . in my experience.


part one.
Sunsets are experts on seduction.
They saunter in, that typical hip shoulder hip shoulder
swagger. The whole thing is deliciously ordinary.
All thoughts are these thoughts and they are all thought.
Together you end up at a Comfort Inn and it’s his thoughts
and her thoughts and their thoughts and mine. The TV blares some
mediocre report about street cleaners on strike and the local
elementary school changing the world one box top at a time.
Your skin and her skin smell like paper-wrapped soap
and the TV is blaring. Bob with the weather heads home
to a wife who secretly wants a divorce but is holding
it together for the kids. Jane at the news desk thinks Bob’s
cute but heads home to Lean Cuisine and silence.
Sunset takes up her orange-red towel and you think
of how those colors, mixed up at least, make brown.
Your life is plain.
Ten years down the road you realize you let go
of the love of your life because it was hard work and now
you are left writing checks to a cliché. You are the bald spot
on your head and the 9 to 5 and the mask in a jar
by the door - an Eleanor Rigby.
One more line about the dazzle of the sky as it sets
just might kill you. And yet you are obsessed.

part two.
I wake up and hear the sound of coffee brewing.
I see the way the dew clings onto the green,
fingers scratching, holding tightly and asking
“Is this blade any higher than yesterday?”
“Is this all the same?”
“Maybe I should just fall.”
/
Even in my waking I am envious.
Not of the flowers as they scream and
push their way into existence.
I am them because my words are them.
They ache to be colorful, fertile,
even to be plucked from their roots to live
half-remembered in vases on coffee tables,
so desperate for love.
No, I am angry at the sound of coffee rain
in my kitchen. It knows the things
I cannot know and cannot produce.
More beautiful is the sound of it,
More beautiful is the creating than
what I consume so quickly in my mug.
And even in every kitchen in every house in every state
it’s there. Peacefully making, day after day making.
That’s what it does and should do.
and still I cannot.
still I am not satisfied.
and when I am satisfied, I arrive later to think that
my satisfaction was held in vain and I am really
bitter-tasting and stale.
when will I be alright with being alright?
should I be?