Let us call it
exactly what it is.
 
 
Grand
Grandiose
Grandioso
 
 
gestures that leave me suspended
from a tray ceiling like
 
 
a glass chandelier hanging
on a string of beaded words.
 
 
It's all very
 
 
Grand
Grandiose
Grandioso
 
 
until the
string is pulled
too tight.
 
 
 
Then there will be
nothing left
but glass, beads,
 
 
and broken hearts
on a marble floor.

There was so much I wanted to say to you,
But I didn’t make it.
Like a beast at bay I was in a hurry
And eager to thataway.
I thought: “I’ll achieve my goals and dreams
That I need and then
Everything will go and run, and fly,
In a right way.”

It seemed to me that my story
Will surely happen.
And I exchanged myself recklessly
For nothing important at all.
I never imagined that my life
Would be depopulated,
And what’s left of it will turn into
A paper ******* in whole.

I’ve got to gather it all by any means, really.
I must have foolishly outdone my fate all over.
And you… Sorry, I will be honest with you, my dear:
There was so much to say to you, but I thought over.

I’m not always the most creative,
But I’ve always been a little naive,
Choosing easier routes to healing,
Ones that kept me feeling unseen.

But I think I’m done with hiding now,
Done accepting life’s just pain,
So I’ll start drafting love from everything mundane,
Romanticizing quiet mornings and loud summer rain.

I’ll find poetry in coffee steam,
In the way the trees sway and sigh,
In cracked sidewalks blooming weeds,
And cotton candied evening skies.

Maybe, just maybe,
If I love each gentle, ordinary thing again,
I’ll find the pieces of myself I thought I’d lost,
And fall back in love with life,
Or at least treat it like a friend

Old men sit
in plastic pink lawn chairs,
smoking cigarettes
halfway down our street.

Counting the cop cars that drive by,
One. Two. Three.

They laugh
with heads thrown back
and missing teeth

at little boys who
roll and play in shopping carts,
crashing-
One, Two, Three!

Little boys lay
in the space between
grey gravel road
and thirsty green grasses.

They laugh
with heads thrown back
and tiny white teeth.

All mirrors have two sides:
The one that's clear,
The other is in shadows.
Be careful what you're trying to find out,
Not everything reflects the same old pattern.

By looking carelessly into what's meant to hurt,
Prepare your mind to bend in all directions.
To make some sense of what's behind closed doors,
The only guide is a heart that's strong yet tender.

When you intentionally turn back from being honest,
You lose yourself quite easily in a void.
There are no maps or written rules that warn us,
The only caution is the hidden crack that's in the front.

A mirror is a tricky thing to have around,
Some people never look beyond the waters,
And some, who dared to peek into the back,
Sometimes stay lost without an inner compass.

The main idea is to persevere,
Ascend from all those dim new colors.
And hopefully, get through by pondering the thought:
A distorting mirror always shows a surreal portrait.

The shadow work requires courage in submission,
The story goes even the toughest one is wrong.
Rewriting what has already been written
Will only waste the power to go on.

To face what's in the back of a glossy double,
Without an everlasting crumble or a twitch beneath the bones,
Is to accept the past dictates the freedom
From being blindly led, yet not all seem to know
That once the border is crossed, you must stay present,
Or else the mirror's sides turn into one.