Ode to 5am poetry (old poem unknown date random flash drive)

It was one of those nights,

                That you cannot seem to fight the nagging

The sleep beckons in the distance, but weakly

                Green glows from outside your eyelids, and the thoughts run free

You begin to wonder if you have ever slept before, and strain to remember a

                                Night that your memories didn’t betray you. 

Mom

Sometimes I dream that my mom is in the water, beaten against sugary brown shores and I play life guard.
 other nights she is the water, and I am dragged out to sea by her absence
The funny thing about losing a parent at the precipice of adulthood is that everyone expects you to gain from their passing
Gain maturity
Gain words
Gain anything
But I lose my sleep at night, wondering what the last thought that fluttered through her mind  could have been
If a "help me" flittered across her tongue that wasn't quite strong enough to vocalize
I think of myself miles away from shore, grappling for any trace of a life vest,
Something that lets me know she is resting
At peace with her own fate
Even if I am not

Who I have time to be

The passing  of seconds is no stranger to me,
I am only who I have time to be
The tick of the clock, plucking at my strings,
I have come to realize that
Life is what you do to maintain it,
You are a breather, sleeper, and eater, not a traveller, academic, or poet.
You are a human in the whole of it parts,
 an organism spending its time regulating body temperature so it can contemplate the feel of anothers skin.
Breathing so it can inhale the fresh cut grass, and the sweat of the morning dew
Dining in resteraunts with others so the conversation makes the act less lonely, and more meaningful
Interests are what come after you are done being yourself
You pick up the pen to forget that you can only dine with one now, instead of two
You go far away to pretend like the home you left won't be there waiting, empty.
You learn, so that each time someone asks if you're okay you can rationalize the way you are behaving, but that just makes it easier to make excuses
You run, but the clock follows close behind you,
A reminder that the more time you spend racing
The less time you have to be you.

Shadow

Reflections pressed on parched lips,
 inhaling myself

The succubus shadow entices me

 with spider limbs, reaching for me

entrapped in vines that stretch across my throat,

 the scream that does not escape

I allow it to take me,

To pull me under dark water
surrounding me with it
to quench my thirst 

I let fluid fill my lungs, and close my eyes
I find the peace in letting go
But
My next breath is light,
And I am shocked by the air that greets me,
I open my eyes and the flowers surround me
The shadow eliminated by the suns illumination
I let it be, and close my eyes again

Grief

When you are grieving, take it slowly
   Take all the times that you wish they were with you and let your words fall laden in the silence,
I cannot promise they can hear you, but I can tell you the air will devour every syllable
And I won't promise that this will heal you, because it will not
Grief is something as unavoidable as the
Death itself.
So while it may take time-- despite how much has passed,
Lay in the grass, a little damp with fresh dew
Stare at the cloud blanketed moon and speak
    I promise you will cry.

Draft mom

Upon the passing of my mother,
I set out to find books on greiving the loss of
Someone who had literally given me life
I stumbled across a book denoting daughters who were motherless.
I am not motherless.
My mom may have passed but her words carry on
She may be resting but the lessons she taught me
Play on a loop in the back of my mind
And while no more direct words of wisdom will fall from her lips,
I remember how she behaved ways she reacted to situations
And every time I am faced with adversity I remember her and while
The lessons she taught me were not always spoken and
The moments we shared were not always palpable
She had a way of knowing
Just what you needed, before you needed it.
And while my mother is
Elsewhere, she is stitched into my mind
With the strongest thread she could find.

Dear mom

I have been racking my mind each moment
Since you've been gone
Thinking of all the times I didn't burrow into my memory, recalling things that never really happened
Details that are on the phantom tips of my thoughts
I recall things when I don't want to, things that are all too real and intense
Your smell, your laugh, your voice
I catch it all on the whispers in the moments that are passing by much too quickly
Things that seem to have never had a connection to you suddenly carry emotions I've never felt.
I recall only one movie we ever watched together about the girl with down syndrome
And how you and I laughed at Little Randy through our tears for his own
Your compassion for others
Late nights where we bought food to deliver to others
You confiding your stress to me, I wish I would have listened more, ma.
There are not words enough in the world to
Explain how I wish I had been here
I wish I had stayed close to you for as long as I could
And I can only regret the times I was just too busy
Or that I wanted to relax
I should have sat with you, holding you for
As long as I could.
I will never be able to tell you these things
This house is so empty and it no longer feels like home, the eerie silence without the sound of
Your snoring, which I hated as a kid but now I would give anything to hear it again.
Give anything to catch your laughter in the wind
To see you in a drea, or when I close my eyes
To continue as if you are not gone,
And to know exactly what to say and do as you did. There is no way to end this thing that I have wrote
These last four days have been the hardest of my life and I have a heavy weight pushing on my chest. Love you, ma.

Puzzles

I find myself hopelessly awake
On nights where I have forgotten
To go to sleep
Times where I barricade myself behind so many doors
With puzzle locks, that eventually I
Lose track of the times I could fit all the peices together
I wander through fog and broken trees
Grappling at phantom branches
My feet make sense of the terrain through clumsy steps
And the wind whispers fairy tales
That I am curious enough to follow
If only until the the morning breaks

On our fifth anniversary I let myself feel

I have always wanted to read poetry on a train
To feel the rails vibrate beneath my feet as I live
In anothers world, devour their words as if it was the only thing I had eaten that day
The mechanical mobility a muse of
Cold metal against small streams struggling to maintain the name
The sun glows from behind broken trees
And it catches the Golden flecks of your iris
The shape of your jawline becomes the only poetry I read,
The curve of your lips left in a smirk
I fill myself with the way your foot barely touches my knee and the way you look into my eyes and mouth
"You're beautiful"
I have always been one to shy from those words
Despite the declaration
But in that moment I allowed myself to feel the weight of it
Rest on my tongue, quenching any thirst I could ever have

Cut loose

She was a firey girl,
     Every step she took, she bounced,
Laughing at nothing
I sat beneath the oaks
Envying the carefree moment
I do not let loose
And enjoy the moment
Too many criticisms for someone who's not in complete control
But I am safe barred and controlled under the
Guise of mundane words
Content with waiting,
   I am the saftey, you can be sure that
When you cut lose
I am there, keeping every bad decision at bay

Memories of the mundane

Memories of the mundane, life passed by in moments that tick, each one forgettable
Lay within me your soliloquy shrouded in hushed tones,
Speak eloquently of the times you thought no one would reach for,
Ideas that hook you at 3am, with your lulled breaths against the laden silence
Locking you inside your own head
Whisper the the things you find odd
Social conventions enevloped in contradiction
I collect your life in my mind, and draw constellations to connect your dots,
I'll tell you of the ways I fall in love with words
Inevitably dripping into my eyes, each hushed tone
Bringing me closer to the stars.

To you, I am sorry.

I have immortalized your name in my mind
Scratched it into a list of people who were only there
Temporarily,
Painted you as this fictional person
As if I never memorized the map of your eyes,
completely
Abandoned the memory of the way you pried into mine
 I have forgotten
That you were there,
Strung along in the pursuit of self
Destruction
You were sweet
Even if a little broken

Stages of being drunk

For the first hour I am elated,
Fumbling and bouncing from one activity to the next
Until the realizations begin to set it, revalations coaxed by the poison in my throat
You are the hate that cracks parched lips
That no amount of fluid could drown
it is not your fault.
My mind is a game of puzzles and locks
No one can ever quite tell what I am thinking
Sometimes, I can't even tell
I cannot speak through the vines of regret wrapped around my vocal cords
I wonder why I cannot be someone you would want
The more I think, the more I realize,
I don't even want myself

Quiet

My life is a series of survival techniques,
Strung along on friendly smiles.
I have found that
         If you hold a countenance that
Bleeds demure,
     You avoid
       Misunderstanding
When you are engulfed in the background
And pick yourself out
When spoken to,
        You can be sure no one
Mistakes you for a target,
When you speak,
Be sure to keep it scribbled on the wall
Poignant and sweet
      Keep your eyes neutral
And don't let a fire burn so intense that it cremates
The teeth you keep clenched
Let it smolder, and keep it in the back of your
     Throat
Afterall,
It will only be heard by you.

Nightmares

Greeted by the darkness,

I am bare,

Left the comfort of a mock death,

It is silent, and almost maddening 

The blank interface of a cold room

I am here

Abandoned amongst muddled pillows

And tangled sheets 

Throbbing breath in rhythm with

A quickened beat,

I am tormented,

Trapped in an unconcious hallucination 

You were there,

  Sullen amonst the oaks, 

with the realization that sunrise

would never come,

With each rise and fall of your chest

 the woods began to rot

The branches began to curl in towards one another

I stood, throwing water on the trees as they decay

As if drowning them could stop 

Our inevitable end

The joke

In my head,

Everything is a laugh
The way the world slips off
In a frenzy,
I am not concrete
 I float between the lines, plucking and
Picking things apart
We are mad,
 Twisters bent on destroying everything in their path
There is no order on chaos
Nor logic in justice
You can only destory me,
By being me
And you already are. 

Hopeless

How do you move on,
When you've spent your whole life
As a hopeless romantic
Finding  yourself only as valuable
As the person who holds your hand,
How do you free yourself from the
Twisted and gnarled branches that ground you
Can you be a whole person,
    When they have slowly ripped you in half,
And left you longing for your other.
I play romance, as if it were my job
Mastering the art of kisses, and
Cleaning, keeping hobbies
Like reading
Something to give me just enough depth
To appeal to people without
Being threatening
.

It is five in the morning,
And I am crawling into bed as the birds are waking
A gentle light begins to form over horizons,
Shining through the blinds
And While I cannot touch it,
My fingertips dance across the sky,
As if to grasp what can never be held
As if to claim the vast illumination as mine.

Validation

It was the way he brought the world to light,
At first.
For a second each cell in her body illuminated with the glow
Of the static fingertips lightly resting on her
hips
She grew restless with
  here and now and
Her feet longed for trails untraveled
as the electricity slowly left her body
and she realized the spark was transient
She began to move, away from the
Thoughts that bind her, insecurities
gift wrapped in rejections of her past.

It was the way he spoke to every girl like he wanted to devour them
and the way he looked dead at her
With eyes that promised to make her feel
Wanted
In the worst ways
The fluttering she felt was not butterflies in her stomach, but a flock of birds angrily flapping their wings, ready to rip free from inside her
it was the first kiss that brought her gasping from
Water she didn't know she was Submerged in
When she walked away from this one for the last time, she swore
This was the nightmare in her dreamland
And she was finally free

It was the way he had always been there, behind every voice in her head, telling her to leave.
he spoke of her words the way you make love for the first time
Slowly, and as if each syllable was divine and unique
it was the way he sat next to her above all other possible seating choices, and said that being close to her was his favorite place to be
it was when he grew distant,
Confused with what he wanted
It was no longer her.

He has been here for as long as she can remember,
Where life before had been only half a shadow,
The clarity was almost painful
everything she had wanted before rolled itself into
This person, with fumbling hands
and enough awkward conversations to
drown himself
the solidarity in his words, wrapped her securely, stability is something you crave when you have spent so long
 moving.
The problem with this is
When you remain sedentary
Your heart wanders
And while you're too afraid to leave
    You are never truly there
And he knows.

He is the poem she cannot write, half smiles and confusing undertones
A medley of colors she never knew could be seen. She returned her feet to
Woodland paths, and began to travel farther
The idea of what could be and what is intertwined
vines against an unstable wall

She is the character in her own story,
     One she only defines by the number of times her heart has been broken,
Her worth has been placed in how many names she can hold in her palm
She is a writer, melancholy words drip from her fingertips but still
She is only as pretty as you tell her,
     she is on parade, a contest of self worth.
She is an academic, late nights she stares at words that she devours and rationalizes
But the way that others view her
Is the way she views herself
Still,
She feels the only validation she has are
Words from those who mean well.
All those who have loved her before, medled together
She wanted to be more
Her words trickled down her chin, sighs against an unforgiving wind
but she will never break the chain,
It is better to be hanged than to
Freefall.

Marionette (a)

Tugged and turned,
    Led around on tight strings,
You twitch your hand and my arm leaps fourth,
Grasping at something I did not know I wanted
You let my head drop, and all the thoughts in the back of my mind roll forward
My feet dance with your amusment
and stop on your command
   I hover, somehwere above myself, aware I have no control
I watch you pilot me, commanding every limb
I waltz and unfamilar pattern
Always aiming to please.

Familiar faces

I have returned to words
The way you return to a lovers hand,
        The moments where you tip-toe and whisper
Scribbling sweet nothing lines
On blank page corners,
      It took oceans for me to find you again
And seas to find myself
          I have barreled in, like haphazard waves
Against tired shorelines
Clumsily searching for scrap paper
    As if the words are conditional,
And as long as I embrace them
 Each fleeting syllable leaks
From my restless fingertips
I can pretend this is not a poem for you,
The one who returns words
to my desert mouth
As if my return to poems have nothing to do
With the way you speak to me,
My words are absent of the ways you look to me
Hopeful, and soothing,
  You stain my paper parchment,
Yellowing the corners with a soft glow
Familiar and broken down
To comfortable to leave.

Marionette Alice

They coerce,

The destructive whispers in the wind.

       They take my hand an guide me, to ideals I have not felt

They force me down the rabbit hole, 

        They share pretty tales of a wonderland I cannot be a part of 

        I am a marionette Alice,

Picked and plucked, guided by 

Ill intentioned hands

"You are no wanderer, dear." 

"Simply a girl, who fell down the well" 

Wonderland Waltz

On an overcast morning shrouded
  in fine mist, dew kissing everything the light forgets,  I wander.
I wander through forests
eyes closed,
willing my feet to remember how to move
          It is quiet
 the chill freezes voices before they speak
        Lonlieness drops, melded with serenity
I do not mind
The sound of my steps, I stand
Willing myself to feel the beat in my chest
My song sings of silence,
 I am not lost.
I continue deep into an unknown forest with only broken branches to guide me
   The more dense the trees become, the louder my heart beats skipping to the sound of my
Footsteps.
     There is no map to where I travel
Only my own desire to meld with the grove
 I wander across a river, weeping willows gently kissing just enough of the water to ripple,
I surround myself in the hanging limbs
And relax my own, leaning against the trunk
I allow my eyes to close
  Behind sullen lids, I see petals fall gentle into the stream I see myself floating on them, small and serene
        I see where I am running to, I watch the rise and fall of their chest,
And briefly I can remember their eyes, prying into my own
 For a moment time seems to slow,
    My breathing becomes shallow and laden,
In my head we dance a waltz,
 Each step more hectic than the last.
 We whirl together in wonderland
    Tripping over our feet.

Bound to the river

There are places I go
  When the world speaks far too much of time
And place.
 I find myself lost, in the hypnotic moan of the river
Wandering through fog thick enough to blanket
The voices in my head with silence
Briefly I trace the initials carved into wooden guard rails,
And pretend to know more than the scar they've left behind
Staring into an unforgiving depth, I imagine what they had seen
A bountiful river illuminated by midafternoon       sun
The way her lips curved, modestly
   and the way he stumbled at first, without words to guide him.
Between them the water screamed a welcome, promising more than it should.
That is a time forgotten,
   I watch myself, a reflection in the water against a golden light.
Wondering how many others have longingly stared into their own selves, wishing to be swallowed.
I am present, in this reality
Drawn to the history left in currents,
Words abandoned carelessly in the flow,
The amity is unspoken between us
In the dull morning glow,
         The water welcomes me,
 with more
   Accord then I have shown.

Realization of transient nature

Sprawled before me, a grove

      Grappling towards the sky, but too thin to blanket it, they sigh against the wind

       Muffled by my own laden breathing

I've spent my time on something.

           I began to travel slow, it is lonely at first,
I move meticulously,

Through all the forests I've known, but never quite
 Traversed alone,

Learning what it means to be transient 

To remain lightfooted, and absorb

Taking in the surroundings, but not enough to leave a footprint
Fleeting, as if staring too long will

Compromise the very allure of the woods
I glide

Like an apparition on desperate fingertips,  lingering above the brush

I've  spent my time observing, picking at the way

The tree roots grow above ground,

As if they were legs that could follow my path,

And briefly, I wished they could,
A breeze tickles down my neck,
A wind that

That knows far too much about time

But all too little about permanence.

Time is fleeting, without regard to lingering stares, even if your eyes are not 

Quite finished reading the landscape.

I began to travel farther,

Going to places I had only heard about in passing, vast depth and vehement waves

Enveloped my mind, 

Each crash akin to my own pulse

Rythmic beating against an unretreating shoreline, unapologetic to the sea.

I began to travel home,

    With the realization that it was just a word

But each step closer, harder to take then the last. Bound by the responsibilities associated with growing up

I began to travel inside,

Exploring places I couldn't seem to find

A vast ocean melded with the forest 

      Pounding against hollow trunks 

I am Submerged and surrounded, 

 A cluster of orange lotuses blur my vision, 

       Dancing around, lively.

The leaves hum my name

I exhale and push the blossoms away, 

Quiet sunset skies, wrapped in gentle purples and blush illuminate the surface

 Broken by the ripples in the water,

Darkness closes over me

Delivering me from wonderland 

I forget to travel,

Usually when I am too busy

           Exsisting 

Sometimes my abiltiy is restricted, bound by the crushing 

Tether of a better life.

One that I can no longer see myself a part of.

I force myself to travel, pick apart the ways in which here and now can change

The key is to never be contented with how much you've seen, but to turn restlessly in the night  with how many ways it can be percieved.

Surreal

I have walked the line,
Every senerio in my head has long since
  Played their course,
Fact and fantasy find themselves intertwined
Within one another
Masking the way I have come,
  Curioser it becomes,
the more lost I feel
The more sentient I am.
     Slipping farther through
The woodland, adrift among the trees
I become
Aware that
    Home is a place I have not felt,
And
Comfort is a treasure untold,
Among the towers and the lullaby of
Rain, woven with my own rythmic beating
I begin to grasp that
I have misplaced myself in a wonderland,
              Always ephemeral
And in that, I find peace.

Fear

fear is a blank slate,
  Not knowing where your feet will land one moment to the next, transient in space and mesmerized by the way everything you want
sparkles
 just out of grasp,
you're left grappling and gasping, leaning towards whatever gives you solidarity.
Only to find that has become vapor,
The solid rock wall beneath you gives way and you are floating.
Suspended by things you never thought you'd feel:
Regret burning on your tongue like a taste that's always lingered but was never quite pungent enough to make you realize it was poison
   And still you can't bring yourself to spit it out.

Untitled

Lay within me,

    The colloquy shrouded in hushed tones,

Afraid to speak too boldly.
                Allow me to read between the lines
  of uncertainty and doubt
secrets heavier than the body that
Bears them
  I collect them, they are cinder blocks on my shelf
Let the silence become laden
      and more permanent than the broken syllables  
     more vehement than the heaves of your sigh
      I do not need your words,
  dolor
envelopes us softly
       and lulls you to sleep.

There is an art to
  the thoughts that control you.
      They are
Whispers on the cuffs of jacket sleeves,
     That no name can be given to
The
Slowly dying tree, branches curling inward
    Retracting upon itself
Self depricating, and worth nothing.

The morning

Splintered in the stillness,
    Illuminated by the dull
Morning glow
She is empty,
 Wrapped in the limbs of refuge,
She is mundane,
Infatuated with stability
And the ways
Conformity cacoons her,
She stares at the crumpled maps
   Allowing her mind to trace the paths
She no longer wanders
She breathes slowly,
Exhaling her aspirations
And replacing them with docility.