Miceala Shocklee's Blog, page 7

Brain Drain

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That point in the night

when you want to say something

right but you’re too tired.

—

A haiku’s too hard

when your brain’s got no more cards

to play but madness.

—

A frigid, simple

rhyme will take no more time than

deadened syllables.

Filed under: Poems

The Golden Rule

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I wish I had not learned the Golden Rule so well. Then I would not let fuckers like you be so blatantly rude to me while I turn the other cheek, look the other way so that you might laugh in the other side of my face too.

I would not let you get away so easily with your attack on my sense of contentment with my value as a person. I would make you atone for your attrition – or else do it for you. I would pull a gun on you, as you sit there in your drop-ass car with your backwards hat, jee...

Cupped

There is something comfortable to holding a hot mug of coffee in your hands, fingers cupped around it while a gentle heat exchange between capillary and vessel quietly bonds you together. It’s the modern Thinker’s pose, in a way. Elbows resting no matter where, cup steaming between dreaming fingers, eyes looking over the sconce off in the distance, as if it held future just before time dipped out of sight. The grey and wet city street, the dry and dusty desert playa – they’re both the same. I...

Ferguson

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This is my home.

Well, that is, in an extended sort of way. I grew up in St. Louis, on the other side of town. Or rather the other “quarter” of town, because that is always how St. Louis has been divvied up, based on its socioeconomic populations. There’s West County, the safe, predominantly upper-middle and upper class white suburbia of St. Louis. Then South County, the older part of town populated by the lower-middle class echelon of African Americans and elderly white folks – un...

Emptiness

I have a preference for emptiness.

Or rather, I have a preference for possibility. The blank space full of a thousand million hundred outcomes, undecided and bubbling with whispers of choices competing for resolution. A blank space is so many finished products, each one undone in perfect construction. No mistakes yet.

Emptiness has a cleanliness to it, a space to breathe with only the dust to tickle your lungs and make you cough, no memory yet to cause that other choking. “This space is yours,”...

Headaches

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It’s too late a morning for what I’d planned,

hours of dream-thrashing that left me sweaty

what I wake up to, instead of the cool and metal sheen of dawn.

The shrunk-down woken-up figures of odd dreams and bad memories

wrestle round my neuron junctions, pulling at threads

and threatening connections that would sooner be left alone.

I re-heat the coffee and guzzle it down like magic,

hoping to thrust my mind through enough caffeination

to ridme of this rough-delivered headache

and release me, for...

Silence

Life is a hard thing when you go numb. When soul dies, hopes dissipate into nothing leaving not even a shadow of an imprint.

Silence is a terrible thing. I hate it. I fear it. I fear it, because I fearme. Silence means I’m left alone with myself. And that’s terrifying.

Silence means I only have the chatter of my brain to keep me company. And when that chatter comes in the form of verbal knives and memory punctures, those internal conversations can hurt a lot.

It wasn’t always this way.

I used to...

Is poetry important?

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Is poetry important?

Is poetry important?

Tell me – do you breathe air? Or if not air, do you breathe at all?

Do you carry within you the in and out, in and out rhyme

of a life still whispering small sounds keeping time?

Do you hold within you the cadence of sighs,

turning your very nostrils into music-making machines

and your lungs a chorus of singers

meting out your metered ties to existence?

Then I would say that poetry is important.

Is poetry important?

Tell me – do you push and pump a beat.be...

Poem: Dark One

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Dark One

I worry I am too much chaos. You stand there, in your sweet and indeterminable beauty, and you think I am frail because you see me cower. But I am only crouching, trying to hide from you my soul as it glowers.

I am a stormy soul, oh light one. I worry I might obliterate you if we were to crash together.

Insanity so easily swallows up naked possibility.

I’m worried we would go insane, if I tried to swallow you.

But you are so tempting, you over there with your soft breezes and gentle...

Poem: Penning

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Penning

I don’t know how they do it,

those strangers who find my soul.

They do not know me.

They do not even write to me,

but there, somewhere in the echoes

of the story they were telling

or the thoughts they were thinking

or the love they were feeling slip from their bodies,

I find myself.

In the dust you only see in the streak of sun

from the skylight,

little ephemera dancing there in the silence

near your upper rafters,

little cosmic ballerinas you would not have noticed

if you hadn’t been bored an...