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one
The worst kind of pain I ever felt
is when I looked at the amalgamation
of everything I ever wrote,
and realized that none of it would ever be enough
to make you love me back.
two
Every morning you wake up exhausted.
Not because you can't sleep,
but because you keep having this dream in which
someone comes into your room
and paints the walls with my poetry,
and you have to scrub them clean,
because they just won't let you forget.
She caught him out in the shed
Like a thief
Stealing a moment of pain
Wracked by sobs and pouring out tears
Over small and faded pink canvas shoes
The shoes had supplanted his purpose
Sapped his intent
They made his tools indifferent
And uncaring
Turned them into nothing more
Than rusting steel and hanging shapes
Outlined on musty pegboard
That meant nothing
Nothing at all
Until her small and gentle hands touched him
And in shame
He dried his eyes
And put the shoes away
Back in their box on the shelf
And became a man again
Lived again
And worked again
In his shed full of tools
ain suffering loss death heartache depression love
Do not suffer the suffering to speak
Their words have a habit of earthquakes
Each syllable a fissure
Laying waste any doubt
The earth will groan her judgment
Justice only needs a mouth

Do not let the wounds of the innocent bleed
Their blood is a cornucopia of life
Each drop a fertile seed
In time will yield its song
The earth will spring up children
New life from where life’s gone

Do not attempt to break the broken
Their scars never seem to fade
And when they rise
For they will surely rise
And you meet them face-to-face
Your artwork bears their testimony
They have no need to speak
she wails
estranged
my unknown mother
tears on the Kenyan graves
i feel her from my corners
a thread pulled taut
from the web
of my citizen soul
They sat together like that, two old-***** birds
on the edge of a wishing well,
wondering when the other would fall asleep on all the
years of park bench they had known as a four-armed
entity, wrapped in ice creams and bed sheets.

They sat together, huddled against the earth for an hour,
in the confines of love and death.
From the Book: I Dreamed I Loved a Ghost © Derek Shane Keck

This book can be found at:  http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/i-dreamed-i-loved-a-ghost-derek-keck/1121105492?ean=9781312610644
read a thousand love stories,
pause, rest awhile,
read ten thousand more,
and then deny equality.

If you ask for no more than you can give,
you ask for not enough

love is imbalance not an equation,
with a single solution

love has both constants and variable factors

so you write of tribulations and tributes
so you write of lamentations and liftings

you think you are on the same page
perhaps
but do we not all read at different paces?

one of you is solid, one is dotted and dashed
one of you is straight, one is bent, forever curving

when you think you are
in balance
in the same place
in syncopation

perhaps you are for a moment
a calculus of one point on a trajectory

and you say I can only ask for what I give
and am given
and no more,
you have miscalculated

this flux
flummoxed
when the old terrain is flayed flat
but thru the windshield you see the
plateau ends, the geography unknown,

when you see unknown
when you seek the unknown
when you give from places you did not know
you had to give from
when you kiss a hand
for  twenty minutes more than than the one minute you intended
when you give more than is asked
when you ask for more than you can you think you can give
the imbalance is the only concert
the imbalance is the the only constant

how do I know this?
what are my credentials?
you are not a teenage girl,
what matters of what you know of these matters?

I am who I am
a diversity of man and manner
I am past prime and in decline
but this I know
for having failed ten thousand poem times
you must ask for more than one can give

but that's not fair!

silly one, still wretched confused,
even after one hundred
thousand poem times

you must ask of
yourself
more than you can give
and ask no less
demand no less

a body in emotion is not a body in rest
when the imbalance is too great or insufficient
then you write a poem
look in the mirror that cannot lie
and move
on
or
move
off

and begin to ask
yourself
to whom may I give myself
more than is asked
then you have finally asked
the correct solution to the
unsolvable equation
 Feb 2015 Daniel Samuelson
nivek
Acorns do matter
and slow growth
is so underestimated
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