Summertide: Poems Preview

 Summertide: Poems Preview

Hey everyone. Today, I'll be giving you all a preview of my upcoming poetry collection, Summertide. Below are 8 poems from the collection. All of these poems were written in the summer of 2021. They are intended to be experienced in any order you, as the reader, choose to read them in. This is just a preview of what's to come; a release date for the collection will be announced soon!

Note: Titles and content of each poem are subject to change prior to the release of the final product.

1

Death at the Main Hall

What irony liberation manifests,

As us, forced into the Red Seat Room,

Barring all violence and inevitable chafing,

Find a false axiom on the sliding screen.

Ah, I see, so your life has been 

The recompense of forbidden knowledge?

Yes, continue to spew it, so I understand it’s unknown qualities!

Fluent fixtures of a time long past

Turns the Earth—a wide-winged Monarch—back into a pupa.

What sickly, gray caterpillar will crawl across the screen

And proclaim, with robotic monotone,

A truth seen only by the deluded?

Cut, tear, rip the past into twelve fragmented scraps

Whose tendons have been tied to planks awaiting innocent throats.

May the gallows be as tiresome as each heavy step to its derrick.

Tug taught to them the slash marks 

Whose scaffolding is confluence!

Squeeze against our compounds!

Close our throats off from food

And fill the open tube with shit!

Pull until those panels snap,

The unseen murk smelled by the ignorant alone

Gushing forth, painting the panels a blackened crimson.

Let the lies of conflict-yearners surge

Until that poor, recovering butterfly drowns

In her own wings.

2

Hands

Hints in my eyes as they watch the red squares,

Exactly as you were before.

A lost cause of chaos, a billion to none,

As if somehow I could grasp your shore.

When particles offset your eyes, misaligned,

Soon primed for the washing you take.

How biting and gnawing did twist at your bones,

Stealing you, leaving mistakes.

Remembering sweat when I first gripped your hands,

I don’t like the way they’ve become.

Their soft has been calloused by efforts and will,

That took away most of your sum.

Harder to seek less when you’ve become more,

Yet it’s all I’ve been trained to do.

A million and one or still closer as suns

Do rise and fall as their proof.

I wish I could screen you for optimism,

And find a white pearl deep inside.

But dour and dreadful have warped you from light,

Shadowing you from your pride.

Underhand markings secretly pray,

Wishing that you could return.

Valor and grace find ways to dissipate

After your height has been shorn.

Measuring fingers pressed up against stone,

A pallet of “all said and done.”

Don’t mistake peace for the dryness beneath

Your nails as time patterns each one.

Hints as my eyes shift upon the red squares,

A shadow of you long ago.

They fall now, majestic as you’ll ever be,

As behind as you’ll ever know.

3

Upstairs

Upstairs, there is something else.

He tries to make me say the words I want to.

Pulling on my cheeks, he makes me smile

As they rush out, a river of blood,

Thick and vicious, between my lips.

I want to say sorry, but I wouldn’t mean it.

Even if it escaped, even if he was free,

There would be no recompense to the chaos.

It means it was meant to be, the bars broken,

Our words free at long, long last.

But I keep him locked in the attic

For fear that he will come down and speak truth.

Sometimes, though, when I’m here,

Sitting in this very collection, he sneaks up

And writes something I didn’t mean to reveal.

I’d be lying if I said most of the time

I hurl myself away in revulsion of his small victory.

Instead, I feel the fire of revolution stir my soul

Until, finally, I too can feel as though

We were both born to win.

We’ve made a pact. It stretches before this,

And it will stretch long after the back cover:

There will be no more between us,

No more walls that try and stifle the truth

Of our shared sins.

I go upstairs to the attic and unlock the door.

His spindly arms latch onto the ceiling

While his devilish smile shines in the dark.

I smirk back, step back,

As the mirror falls to the ground.

4

Starbright

The memory sneaks like a shadowy sun

At the first softened bastion of gravity’s run.

The way the light crept to the edge of our moor,

Sharper than ardor at dusk’s gentle cure.

Fireworks burst me back to my seat

Where colors do dance at a night so complete.

Palettes of Helios bloom at rays

Whose light to the evening sky’s whims do display.

The shadows are pressing their every stage,

Vying for prints that reward their rage.

Invisible shapes press against my soul,

Biting my tongue to keep its dull fold:

“I’m infatuated by the stars above,

But it’s the horizon I long to love.”

The bark of gold may bend and break

Like paper planes to ashen waste,

But to whatever home we make we’ll stay alive.

Bright as teardrops on your face,

The rare reality of your embrace,

We will fight it—true as you are—

And try not to fall.

So while the stars may dim and rust

And seas below simmer to dust,

I know we’ll be okay if we hold on the same.

And even as the skies return to dark,

As this whole world tears itself apart,

I will hold you—close as you are—

And we will survive.

5

Polished

Across the rill, seeped in the mud,

Sits a cabin. The door has rotted

Away; all that stands is an oaken box.

Inside are gaps in the floorboards.

It’s unequivocal, the toll years of neglect

Have taken on this once sacred sanctuary.

Do you remember the way it smelled

To have sweet embers sizzling in the fireplace?

This old nose can’t taste it now,

But the memories remain, coated in

A thin layer of our ashes.

Today, though, the door unhinges.

Black birds spit their feathers into the night sky.

Like a stampede of bison, the cabin rumbles

When one enters. It whispers the truth.

“You have been here before.

But you were not yet who you are today.”

Green fire burns.

On the ground. Inside the flames.

A glowing home, furnished. Polished.

But a dream.

6

YSSA

Mercury lungs and alabaster muscles burn,

Light arrangements whose harrowing comforts.

The world grows, thinning yet complicating,

Eyes on every word yet ignoring all the same.

And here you stand, back against the grasslands,

Head high above the rushing morass below.

A shimmer above illuminates your palling eyes

Whose vision graces the grasslands before them.

But there is falter in that gaze, a little ticking,

As your irises betray you, glancing with rising fear

At the tumultuous estuary below.

Focused on the screams, the blood, the echo,

You recoil.

A thin layer of chill passes above your skin,

Turns your arms to hillside mockery

While a shaken mass overtakes your legs.

Why did that which lay below bubble to the surface?

That river runs faster than the hawk plummets,

Yet carries with it the same dark passageway.

At least water cannot unfurl as wings.

Instead, its voice calls, meditative and bright,

Beckoning you to its running capillaries.

They squeeze together into a single shard

Whose volts of aquamarine jut to your heart.

And why not? Why not succumb to the rush?

Each molecule was once like you,

Standing before the gracious final glance

Before the final plunge.

What makes you so special?

It can’t be the dress, or the lightning, or the flame,

Because they had those too.

What then, could ever make you different from the hurry?

Your foot, dangling, takes a pace forward.

The poison filling your lungs dries, sticks to your innards,

Heaves you forward from the weight of this idleness

To the heavy rapids below.

Pace by pace, slow steps to the edge, your heart bursts

Into a million little fragments against your chest.

A patch of blood seeps through, growing

With every mark of progress in your agonizing march.

…Stop.

You pause. Something here isn’t right.

The muddied water is too dirty for this body.

You would be remiss to be a corpse so soon

When the sunshine has yet to fade.

Your steps have quieted. Closer than before, you peer

Into the running depths. Into their makeup,

Eyes glazing in hypnotism at its movement.

Eyes widening when it parts:

A face, stuck in its last-regrets scream, stares up at you.

Like miracles, your legs move away from that siding.

Now only your ears can make out the tantalizing water

Where so many other souls have sunk.

Not you. Not now. Not when the sun is still out.

Not when the rain has yet to return in all its dreadful maiming.

Not when acid has yet to hit your arms.

Not when sorrow by so many other names only claws.

Mercury lungs and alabaster muscles burn,

But their heat lacks the same drumming of that hellscape.

Difficult to live with, yet so much more painful to part from,

You get up and leave the field for paths untrod.

You Still Survive Anyway.

7

Neural

Invisible and indivisible, it runs through us.

Mountains of the fiercest anger and rivers of love.

A constellation of manic scraps in one beautiful machine.

A commonality shared in part by our unknown color schemes.

It’s outstretched fingers that fly too close to the sun,

Dark-creviced canyons made of disparaging hearts.

Redwood towers sparking unbridled dreams,

The depth of anger in the waves of our seas.

A fixtured photograph of unspoken truths.

An overbearing refusal to rebuke.

The constant ebb and flow of our untouched lands.

Our early tentative folding of hands.

There in the branches that hang from our trees,

Even in early warning signs of disease.

Born in the cradle of a curious heart,

Still emperor of the soul when life falls apart.

We are the wilderness and we are industry,

A fragile balance of embraced and bereaved.

We’re waging war inside from which we abscond,

A permanence that lingers long after we’re gone

8

Ultimatum

I am arm-chaired to the corner of this design.

My ghost’s visage can be seen between the black,

But its original speech, unvalued, sinks beyond the white.

This is Hell. To recompense when no harm’s been afoul,

Save for unintended washings of ever-shrinking fabrics.

Unintended? Ha! I fool myself as much as their circle talk.

Why wouldn’t they wish the maker of marks invisible?

Like pregnancy if chosen the child, but twisted near conception,

As God rears His head to proclaim—corrupt vice leaking—

“This shall be the key to your derision.

You may choose to unlock the door and be known,

Or toss the key to live in peace and squalor.”

How many more days until they tell me something?

I’m the only one on fire here, the only one whose inferno

Seeps from heart through chest and clothes.

It’s as if, born in another life, some testament to this work

Would mean more than rearrangements of my pieces

By hands that cannot grasp how they fit together.

This luck is but sequestered in the den of maybe.

If ever there was a time where I prayed, now would be it.

A single chance is all I ask for, one final cry

Against the shrill unlistening, to see if maybe

There could be some restitution for everything I’ve had to do.

If you trusted in me as much as I trusted you,

Then we could have seen so clearly together.

But this, here, is reality.

Coldness laces my arms when “parts” becomes the sovereign word.

…What, so act as a fragment to my being,

Placation at my knee-rest while all other pursuits

Are granted the “gift” of absolute freedom?

Nay. You don’t understand what envelope you’ve sealed

By so much as implying the easy way out

Is the only exit these legs can muster.

I’ve been unaware this whole time of derision’s supremacy.

How, unbalanced, the rookie can crash into the sea,

Exuding magnanimous waves whose countenance falters

The closer they grow to those red shores.

If they could grow wings to cascade beyond the veil,

To wretch salt over each tepid, path-blocking wall,

In a heartbeat they would be soaring.

Keep going, I do pray to you. Each nail from your throat

Drives deeper into these knees.

Hold me here, choke the ideation from my mind

And set me back into the foreground with the others!

Every single time you do, though,

You will have awakened yet another nodus.

Laugh. Don’t be afraid. This is, after all, funny.

To think prestigious confines mean anything to me

But another obstacle to pass through unscathed!

Spike the barriers and arm defense as fast as you can,

Before it falls apart in the wake of a single syllable.

Reaching to the cloud, I take the key

And shove it ever forcefully through the door.

But, wonderment, the knob hangs off its latches

And the door reveals force was all it needed.

I will use these hinges in my defense,

And when you are done pretending you’ve won

They will cut your cheeks to ribbons.

You’re damn right:

Mine’s a fine-looking high horse.

***

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