It should've taken me seconds
To unhook this rusting bracelet
It should've taken me seconds
To just take it off and let it go

But instead I took hours

Hours fiddling,
Trying
So desperately
To free myself from its grasp
Itching to get it off
Restless,
I sit, tugging
On the charms weighing me
Down by each passing second

I don't understand
It should've taken me seconds

But instead I took days

Days choking
On the charms that used to be
My wrist is scratched, broken
My hands are red, tired
Eyes focused and
Mind set
On letting go
of the one thing pulling me down

I want it off

So why
Why can't I do it

I don't understand
It should have taken me seconds

is the poem a visitor
that the poet guides across
the river Styx
and into the afterlife
of the reader’s eye?

or is the poem a piece
of the poet that they break off
to share with the world
in hopes of understanding
but at the cost
of their wholeness?

or is the poem the energy
of the universe channeled
through both willing
and unwilling conduits
that you know best
as the poet?

or is the poem just words
scribbled purposefully
but for reasons uncertain,
created in a brief flash
of white-hot inspiration
or in a soothing release
of the dull, aching
need to create?

when the poem sits there,
steaming hot and fresh on
paper or screen, the poet
knows the answer to this
question.

ask them again, any other time,
and they could not tell you what
a poem is, just how they feel and
if the next one is coming soon.

i want to know what love is,
that what i’m feeling
isn’t just a mirage,
a trick of my dehydrated heart.

i want you to take my world
between your two hands
and stop me from spinning
in dizzy circles on my axis.

i want a guarantee that
i’ll never be looked at
by someone else the same way
that you look at me.

(i want you and only you.)

A saturated meadow,
  Sun-shaped and jewel-small,
A circle scarcely wider
  Than the trees around were tall;
Where winds were quite excluded,
  And the air was stifling sweet
With the breath of many flowers,—
  A temple of the heat.

There we bowed us in the burning,
  As the sun’s right worship is,
To pick where none could miss them
  A thousand orchises;
For though the grass was scattered,
  yet every second spear
Seemed tipped with wings of color,
  That tinged the atmosphere.

We raised a simple prayer
  Before we left the spot,
That in the general mowing
  That place might be forgot;
Or if not all so favored,
  Obtain such grace of hours,
that none should mow the grass there
  While so confused with flowers.

Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

We make ourselves a place apart
  Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
  Till someone find us really out.

’Tis pity if the case require
  (Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
  The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
  At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
  Must speak and tell us where they are.

A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.