Trying That Patient Thing

The moon is far too shy tonight
and the high notes of amphibian bards
too sharp too overwhelming too much
to be comforting.
I am chaos
on concrete questions,
semiconducting ulterior motives
in the shadows beneath my eyes.

I’ve tried to shape this poetry
spilling from my lungs into ‘help me’
tried to drip them and sway them to express
just the type of aid I need
but I fall empty handed and
the ink builds mountains and streams instead –
victory in the face of adversity
and I’m victim of my own optimism.
I’m tired of standing and tired of giving,
I’m a picture full of movement going nowhere
drowned out in pixeled expectation
Weathered into dusted granulation by too much light.

I’m filling notebooks with a voice
I no longer have,
stranding stories beneath my pillow
just so I feel less alone.
Some nights I’m dreaming of you.
Some nights hope actually gets a hit in
and comes away with another piece of me.
For a while, all these fingers will know
is sewn-in journals and boxes full of lines
to you whom I have yet to meet.
Half-finished poems will liter the carpet
like insect corpses crunching beneath my uncertainty.
Full blown stanzas will bleed out in unaddressed
envelopes because I don’t know you.
Sometimes I’m so delirious
I let myself believe the words.

Sometimes… like tonight
beneath a tainted sky,
I clothe myself in shadow
lose my way in constellations drilled out
by someone else’s lines
and decide that maybe a little chaos isn’t so bad,
that the tornado I drank for lunch today
doesn’t have to run its course so soon,
that maybe I’m better under high-wind pressure
as long as I dare to look up
and give hope an easy target.