"mgv" poems
prompt: write about the way the rain makes you feel
07/18/19
12:39 am
I've greeted grayer skies
behind my bedroom window
like new blossoming skin.
The rhythm of the pitter-patter,
like a serenade to summer,
like a late-season peach,
soft with many bruises.
Listen —
there’s a kind of tender
in the rain
that leaves one to their smallness
as the world washes away.
Tell me,
what is the right way to miss you?
Because I’ve peeled away every weaponry
I’ve built from the rubble,
tooth and nail,
clumsy hands,
bricked walls
tightly woven into suffering,
And yet I am still
a welcome mat
to your name.
I greet your presence,
like downpour--
teeth bared,
but no longer quivering.
mgv
Jul 17, 2019
Jul 17, 2019 at 12:58 PM UTC
She bites her fingernails in math class
The numbers have always been a dancing cacophony of
confusion.
She was dyslexic
and the vignette of her vision were all the things
she couldn’t understand—
even when she wanted to.
Her lips weren’t the kind poets would write about either.
They weren’t soft, and red like cherry,
they weren’t velvety—
they were always chapped.
They were never inviting.
She’s grown so fond of peeling
the skin off until they bled
out the silhouette of anxiety
washing her insides
causing external decay.
But there was no external decay in coloring
outside the lines.
In 1st grade her teacher had told her
that maybe something was wrong with her—
but maybe its the unfolding of protest
in the early days.
Where little me believed that
things do not have to be perfect to be beautiful—
to deserve to be seen as art.
There’s poems you could write about
at the sight of coffee stained sheets
or faulty flickering streetlights
or collected dust that had found home in book shelves in bedrooms.
The little things that counted
were the little things that kept the flame alive.
Maybe the sun doesn’t shine for us,
but the world in its vastness conforms to the reality
that there are beautiful things in life
we are still yet to discover—
nestled in between the cracks we don’t step on.
In church she cracks her knuckles.
She found god more in navigating through life
and survival from mishaps
as opposed to sitting on a pew and
being told about how she could go to hell.
And in the lightest of days
she hums.
She hums along the rhythm of the abstract and imperfect structure of life.
Which brings us back to the hero's shoulders
and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence and misery in the world,
but despite the abundance of it.
- mgv
Jun 6, 2018
Jun 6, 2018 at 1:04 AM UTC
You’ve made your way to the party.
Your heavy limbs were sending you signals of something else—
every step towards the door sounded like two velcro strips detaching.
You persist anyway.
The welcome shots of ***** tasted more like a welcome to leave,
and the kisses you receive by your friends on the cheek felt almost strange—
but it also reeked of nothingness.
Home was a recurring thought
but home was also four walls that make you feel disposable,
claustrophobic, and home shouldn’t even be called home
when your demons take up most of the residence
only to kick you out;
and if you are lucky they don’t follow you out
when you should be happy and with company
but today was not that day.
Home was lonely.
But people for peers
and peers for bulldozers were too much for you.
So you tiptoe your way out;
slithering out of your second skin — dead and unwanted —
flipped switch, getaway car, calculated answers to future interrogations.
But every car is a getaway car
when you’re always trying to get away.
And every getaway is useless when you end up in the same place—
where the quiet is too deafening
and the noise is loud enough
to turn glasses into shards and smithereens
you sometimes daydream about
behind bathroom cubicle doors
where you could’ve sworn you would’ve had your final getaway.
And when you get there,
they’ll tell everyone they should’ve been there.
They’ll tell everyone they should’ve believed you.
They’ll tell everyone they shouldn’t have made that joke about you.
They’ll tell everyone they should’ve done something.
They’ll tell everyone they should’ve,
when they could’ve,
but they didn’t.
And maybe that was why it reeked of nothingness.
- mgv
Jun 6, 2018
Jun 6, 2018 at 1:01 AM UTC
how a soul
could wreak so much havoc
over another,
reminds me
why hurricanes
are named after people
and why pulses to pulses
are sometimes
unapologetically
catastrophic
mgv
Sep 18, 2019
Sep 18, 2019 at 12:14 PM UTC