Despair

It is a terrible despair,
Knowing you'll never be able
To live off your passion.
But American society
Isn't build to support career poets,
And I fell back in love with dance
Too late.

Don't get me wrong,
I do love history.
I do love what I've chosen for myself.
But what is the point
Of screaming into paper
If no one will hear me?
What is the point
Of learning more movements
If I will never use it
Except sad, lonely nights alone in my kitchen?

When the tears leave,
All there that is left
Is cold, quiet, crippling despair
Inking itself
Into every corner of my life.

Thames River

I remember the river,
And the rolling rhythm
That sang to my soul.
The lights glistened like gold
In the darkness deep
With its seeming smile
That led my heart
To long to leap,
Pulling at my pulmonary.
That siren sang* sang
Until I grasped the guardrail
Caught in this cry
To desire my own destruction.
I eye the edge
Between life and death,
Pen and paper,
Ink and blood,
Only because the poem told me to-

Then suddenly as the song began,
It ends and
I am left bereft.
Because the poem desires to be written,
To be told,
And it knows I have more poems
So the fatal song waits outside my memory
Until it sings again,
Until my life-ink has run dry
And the last words written.

*A/N: The word sang is French for "blood" and sounds very similar to the English word "song."

Life Turns

Life turns,
On a dime
And on the wheel.

Life turns on a dime.
One day
You have a friendship
And a secret love
That might blossom
And grow so that you might learn
Of yourself and the other,
But the next day you stare down sorrow
As you're torn apart
Without the chance
Of ever knowing what might have been.

Life turns on the wheel.
An ancient song,
Sung to you,
Is used to calm a panicked friend.
A modern song,
That you learned to dance to
In your basement on your father's toes,
Takes you across the floor with strangers.
A well-loved and known book,
Read to you before you knew words,
Is read to one hurt
And they slowly crawl off the ledge to you.

Life turns on a dime.
Life turns on the wheel.

Dans La Lune

A man in the moon?
I tilt this way and that,
Trying to find the face
Thousands claim to see,
Most famously Méliès.

But all I see is a rabbit,
A creature that stands
For creativity,
Speed, and abundance.
And is that not what the moon
Speaks, too?

Ripples and ringlets
And round, round circles
As like dives into like.
With drip and drop
Water rises
As water falls.

Everything is quiet,
Listening to the rain.

It's a wonderful sun,
Even though I am quite red.
I can't bring myself to mind
When I carry warmth in my skin.

The Could-Have-Been King

With every decision,
We feed the Could-have-been King.
His army of Meanwhiles
And Neverweres
Grows each time we turn left
Instead of right.

But the Would-Have-Been Prince
Has one sad flaw:
He is a Never-Will-Be.
And one Is
Can withstand thousands
Of Is-Nots
And Cannot-Be's,
For one Is has the infinite advantage
Of being real.
It may stumble,
And falter,
Under the weight
Of a million
Might-Have-Beens,
But that one Is will triumph.

I AM
Always defeats
I-am-not.