Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Let’s talk about feelings - feelz.
Does anything else really matter?
Ok, sure - health - yeah, right up there.

Covid was my generation’s depression (literally).
Maybe not for everyone, there were places that ignored covid, I think.

We didn’t ignore it, not any of it, not at my parent’s house.
Do I sound bitter? I got fifteen long months of ‘social isolation.’
In most states, you can shoot someone and not get fifteen-months.

At one point, we sprayed Lysol on everything that came into the house. Except the cats.
Anyway, that lock-down mess was reason #1 why I skipped senior year of high school for college.

If you look-up ‘desperate’ in the right dictionary, they used my high-school junior-year photo to illustrate it.

University felt so far, so different from my covid, remote video, no-touch high school life that it was, in the most basic sense, like going to a foreign country.

It felt dreamy, in a jet-lagy, out of sync, science fiction, not part of real-life way. I landed in this wonderland where I didn’t know anyone, or where anything was and there was a different sense of fashion, of music, of freedom and I didn’t quite speak the language (not snack bar, buttery).

It was like there was a soundtrack, that’s how serious it was.

You know how, when you’re intoxicated, you can be half awake and still excited? I didn’t want to miss any of it, I’d rub my eyes to stay focused.

Everything was so stimulating - the sights, the sounds. I had this idea about writing - a fealty to the idea that I could capture the experience and share it with others.

Now, I think that idea was so 2021.

OK, before it’s too late - poetry time!

Now-a-days I feel like I’m in the know
hold on, I’ll I paint the celestial afterglow
uhh, this might take a while..
.
.
Songs for this:
Dreamin' by G. Love & Special Sauce
VIRGO'S GROOVE by Beyoncé
BLT Merriam Webster word of the day challenge: Fealty: an intense loyalty to a person or idea
I too will go to you, says the son
to the face of the father.

He broadens his smile
thin and gathering dust for long
as if to acknowledge
he always knew
one day his son would stand before him
resigned and weary
willing to join on his route.

The son sees his father's lips
move in the briefest prayer..

Welcome.
Would I do it all again
For the price of joy,
The debts of pain;
For the strains of love?
What would I gain?
It could never be the same.
Not better than we had before,
With entwined lives,
With all we bore.
Yes, all that,
And one day more.
<>
Noun. sonder (uncountable) (neologism):

The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it.

Dear One:
it is one of those days, when everything becomes a poem,
every mundane, brushing my hair  be/is a philo-treatise,
& the errands of the day, starting  at 6:45am with an assessment,
a weighing of oneself on a numerical scale of justice,
requiring one to rethink his moral behaviors of a prior day,
a kind of confessional I guess, for I have never been inside one,
(a confessional and actually confessing) but my hebraic genetics
require Veduei (1),
constant awareness of one’s
everything deeds, making confessing a ongoing process 24/7
process unceasing, onerous and relieving,
by reliving our each~very individual action,
which means that I am in a sensory paradise / hell and
sleep comes in bursts of exhaustion,
as I misplace my compass
daily, and the re-search required to obtain, nay, reGAIN,  
my footing, my true directionS,
and it is worse than never ending, more akin to the
regularity of irregular breathing…

Thank you for “Sonder;”
restoring the awe for not knowing it, and occasionally forgetting, that there are words, ready, willing, and able to become poems, as I exegesis, excise, and exercise their purpose
to better to remember the worth of everyone and every thing within in a too oft / clouded, self centered
“I exist , therefore I am”
very limited filtering device….
so sonder becomes a poem, an essay, un écrivez,
and I study your photograph, and fly away,
I am in a garden,
you may have (no, probably!) planted,
(like the sonder word in my brain)
and the colors, the soils, the colorex (2) variety
teaches me you better than words…
while I am sundering, sondering, you,

and so many others
who give me the great pauses
of my existence,
the purposed understanding
of the arrogance of pre-judgement…

Surrounded,
I am breathing salt air, luscious greens, a variegated
bluey (love that show)
sky,
and all my voices rise, in a choir of one,
fo forgive me, forgive myself,
for failing not to be bigger than
than the distances
my aging weakening senses
and my low powered sensibilities
physically provide,

I hear you,
I sonder you,
and so many others,
and I
bind and bound myself to you
and
thus emboldened!

to go forth and walk in unfamiliar gardens,
to read better  and be,
between the lines
y’all provide

here’s where a a modest thanksgiving
is due and herein provided,
and the inspirations keep coming and
coffee need re~reheating, so the brain can
start
all over again,
S’wondering
S’ondering
just like a (wink)
An American in Paris,
the next poem is aborning,
jealously
demanding
it’s very own
birthing;
an embryo,
asking to be
imagined.

so thank you,
dear one…
(1j Viduei, (our words of confession) has become our sacrifice. Atonement is as far away as your lips. Don't allow your silence condemn you to a prison of guilt
(2j. colorex ~ index of colors visible and even invisible .

09:50am
Fri Jul 19
two thousand and twenty four
is to be able to breathe.

this first & foremost activity,

is the very permit missionary

authorizing us to instigate & create

our very own self~definition, thus our

cognition is the product of our ignition!

oxygen to breathe is the stuff of our

dreams
Relax, relief, Steve, a short one, I do believe,
is coming down the turnpike, a simple
thought kernel that occurs me to each
morning, and then gets swept out to
the sea, via the sound’s currents them,
a reality check on weather.com, an internet
a daily compilation of mispredictions,
guesses and disconnectedness to our
reality… that we yet must read first,
always & nonetheless…

so, here it is, a golden buttered kernel,
that flys past my poem seeking radar
so fast that, it has escaped for now
nearly sixteen years…

this spring chicken, lies besides his woman,
who wakes traditionally secondarily, and
she sleep best then, shedding the dreams that
come unwonted, the review and recap of life’s
tumult…and finally gets the deep sleep that
recharges our cells with restorative justice…

as she sleeps, her face sheds, a morning miracle,
deep at ease, she breathes soft, clean and clear,
silently and a m a z i n g l y, every line on her
face
eases,
disappears,
and her skin, smooth, tight,
and I’m face flushed, by guilt for never telling
her, and that guilt that has not been yet here
recorded, and yet…

a reminder that a first poem of the day (a FPOTD),
like morning ***, starts a human off right, clears
forehead, like smooth writing, fresh oven baked,
blue lines on paper, begging, asking for fufillment
and satisfaction, that has no competition, for it is,
unique, that the first deep breath of a day, when
you take in all that surrounds, and observe close
the minor miracles, all an addition, that gives our
body, the reasons to wake up, with wet eyes, and
just…
a thin, curly, half grin, hall (half+all✅) whimsy smile…

natty
6:34am
Sat Jul 20

(and this one flies out the window, past the oak trees,
to the water and the wind grabs by its lettered bones
and is sending it out to Iowa, Travese City Michigan,
Missouri, Oregon and the great  Northwest Pacific
over the Pacific, to the Philippines, India,  New Zealand, Israel, Europe, the UK as in You Know) and back past Lady Liberty in the New York Harbor, along the Long Island shoreline, to a little house on a little island, where it recenters my body, asking why oh why, no way, natty, have you not offered me
my first coffee of the day, (MFCOTD)
yet, all this traveling, loving and thinking is

so very tiring… java, por favor señor!)
Traditionally, Jews recite three blessings when they wake up:

Modeh Ani: A short prayer that expresses gratitude and thanks God for returning the soul to the body after sleep
Elohai Neshama: A blessing that thanks God for one's soul
Netilat Yadayim: A blessing that relates to washing hands, which is a symbolic way to remove spiritual impurity
Next page