Author: poetryfest

2025 , rent’s a war I lose,
Check come in, disappear like news.
Boss got bots, I mop the floor,
Work three shifts just to stay poor.

Cameras blink like they know my soul,
Street got eyes, but none got goals.
Cops wear masks, still smell like fear,
Freedom’s fake when they’re always near.

Scroll past pain, it loop, it rot,
Grind so hard I forget what’s not.
Sleep when dead? That quote feel true,
We ghost ourselves just to push on through.

Love’s a glitch, and touch don’t last,
Text replaces a question asked.
Raised on reels, kids numb too fast,
The screen’s their god, the feed’s their past.

But I stay loud, with pen like blade,
Write my rage where scars got made.
World on fire, I breathe that smoke,
I won’t break, but I might go broke.

Masculinity – noun
“the social roles, attitudes, and expectations considered
appropriate for men”

The idea of a man is a construction
Built from ever-lasting empires
Forged into iron swords and shields to
withstand all battles
They are created strong and protective
Masculinity is their cloak, their armor
And I know I was not clothed with the same fabric

Where a man’s skin is metal, mine is wooden
Nicked and scrapped
Shaped easily
The more curves I gain,
My figure is seen as – less
A puppet, strung on a stage
For your viewing
For your convenience
Because who I am can not be understood easily
But I’m not some piece of wood
or a puppet
Once you know me, you’ll see
I’m a human
I’m a boy

A boy with the hips of a dancer
Hugging dresses with childhood joy.
Heels tapping away to the sound of songs.
Wearing makeup because he likes to look pretty
I am a boy who ties his hair back,
wishing it was shorter
messy, in a handsome kind of way
A boy who is alienated,
because masculinity is not a blanket I wear
Not an image I express often

Sometimes, by choice
But other times by force
An inner war where trying to comply is easier,
than following the steps of those fighting the same demons,
The same perpetrators,
The same mirrors,
telling us we are wrong,
That I – was made – wrong

They preach it so easily,
To my face, in my ear
Caring not for how their comments cut my skin.
Every uttered “she” or “girl”
Becoming knives digging into wood,
Cracking the façade.
no matter how much I try,
They will never believe I am a real boy.

Those who do,
will tell me I must change.
Preaching it will ONLY take scars
It will ONLY take drugs injected into my muscle
That will BLEED from my palms
Shed from my mangled chest

Spill from my guts

I have – to be rough around the edges
Revoke the vulnerability – that womanhood
Has woven into my form.
Be cold at heart, fall in line with the system.
To survive and avoid harm at the hands of oppression,
I MUST become the IMAGE of the oppressor.

I can only ever “want” to be a boy,
never actually be seen as one.
I’ll never wield the metal they carry
Or be built from empires
Or be cloaked with the same armor
Society has not built me

Which is why I’m building myself.
My own wood stronger and flexible, shaped to my desire.
I will build my empire
I will open my heart,
That bleeds the kindness shunned by others
That sheds the tears forbidden for others
I am not a puppet but this is MY stage
And I’ll let out my voice and say
I am a real boy

with a big chest and bigger heart
A boy who likes playing guitar at night,
a boy who likes books where people like him
get their promised happy endings
And I’m a boy who gets stressed,
and happy
And emotional.

But before all of that,
I am a person.
My boyhood is not exclusive to my humanity.
And nothing you say, or think,
Could ever change that

We’ve met before,
when the sea was still young,
and we were salt dissolving into it,
dissolving into each other,
learning the delicate, hesitant
art of vanishing.

And again, as birds,
fragile, trembling,
realizing, too late, that sometimes
the difference between flying and falling
is only the sound of the wind in our ears.
That the rush in our chests
might feel like a high,
but Icarus, too, was laughing
before he hit the ground.

We’ve met as you and I,
in some other lifetimes,
where I watched you stake your lovers,
bodies layered like stones upon stones,
as to raise the height of some anonymous,
unreachable mountains,
that no one will ever climb, but you.
Returning with the devotion of a pilgrim,
who believes ruins might reveal a path.
And I forgave.

We shared some lives
washing fruits, folding shirts,
losing coins in the gaps of the sofas,
making vows, breaking them,
tending to each other’s dying parents;
while the fire of our ordinary gestures
burned louder than the passion of others.

We were never strangers
and yet, sometimes,
I looked for someone’s else arms
to feel like a kind of death postponed.

We are planets that have been colliding
for thousands of years.
Surfaces cracked, continents broken,
oceans evaporated into dust.
Meeting time and time again in the dark,
while we mistake the tremor of an impact
for the tenderness of a touch.
Every orbit a repetition of fate,
our gravity pulling us to endings
we mistake for beginnings.

Twenty years after
It first premiered,
I started watching
Rome, the series

Not for historical value,
Or the drama,
Or the sex,
But on account of a recommendation

Of course, all of the above are present
The bloody dictatorship,
The glamor of Cleopatra,
The shiny golden coins

Life then felt brutal but honest
And as Pompey Magnus stared off
toward the coast of Greece,
foreseeing his defeat, and lamented,
“Oh, to be a slave, how restful it must be.”

Either you were someone’s pawn
Or you were playing a dangerous game of chess
To be noble or a man of power in those days often meant
A literal fight to the death

Though today, we have plenty of other problems
They are just packaged up in different paper

While many things could be better, namely
Climate chaos
Human rights
Famine
Water shortages
Raging wars
Xenophia

At least I am less likely to be murdered by a power-hungry friend
Screaming “Et tu, Brute?” in the end
And for that, I am grateful to be
Alive in 2025

He planted flowers in her lungs
now she couldn’t breathe
for fear of their stems snapping in the wind
Holy hypoxia

The crown of thorns sat comfortably upon her
The flesh of her scalp was the perfect sheath for its barbs

In her liver grew fields of wheat and persimmon trees
His cattle grazed on the grassy plains of her face
The children grew in her heart[land]
And grapevines twined like tendrils of smoke around her ribs
Safe from what would happen later

soon her bones will be hollow
At least there might be an public housing project
For his disciples
In the encystment

her veins were swollen beneath
the water they now send alongside blood
To keep his plants, and children, alive

the question is
was mothering in – his
nature

In land of green and water marshy
throughout a busy, sleepless city
the lights are bright with such neon glass
they paint the streets a color pretty

a humid air so full of laughter
accompanied by raindrop chatter
on this another stormy night
such dark umbrellas soundly batter

bars, guitars, and superstars
throughout the streets, through the fog
keep the people fat and glad
in this damp and muggy bog

but smarter eyes aren’t focused
on pink and green and pretty thing
they watch the shadows between
where dark and horrid ones cling

they know the rumors, the cost
for each three, just two return
then the dark cloaks slink away
back beneath the swampy churn

foam and loam within the gloam
slowly wander in between
catching those with witless mind
drowning them in violent green

then there is no fighting back
body washed with ancient soul
follow them along the path
to be one with growing toll

beneath those languid waters
the unknowable beast winds
and communes with its children
further yet its presence binds

growl and prowl and eldritch howl
the ancient one is sated
through its call and followers
a new world has created

and now the marsh water swells
and now the marsh tides proceed
and now the dark cloaks will hunt
as their old master decreed

now a planet made of waves
scans the cosmos dark and grand
searching for ascendancy
a greater plane to command

I climbed
— the same spruce, the same snow —
where the real wild spirits are said to go
‘You gotta find out where wolves go
when they die’,
he called back to me and he went out the door
in a dream that woke me,
and said ‘remember — remember why that woke you.’
remember —
running on, running bright
Wildly awake
real dreamtime.
life
-song in
your bright shining heart,
your
bright shining mind.
Full
-color desert sky!
Can’t look away, can’t even try
when all the animal spirits come to look you straight in the eye.
‘Light in the eye…’
Yet to learn,
so much to learn.
San Bushmen say you’ve got to wake twice every morning,
once with body, once with heart.
Wake up body!
Wake up heart!
Open up, ways closed for the longest time,
fighting against Spirit.

With you I am home
Never one place
Nevertheless, lovingly inhabited

In your presence
With stronger belonging
Than childhood rooms

Returning to you
Wherever you may be
Like welcoming in an entryway

Placing my key on familiar counters
Walking the halls
Whose sounds I’ve memorized

Knowing the pattern
Of your approaching steps
That creak with the wood

A house I’ve returned to
Too many times, and too familiar
To only exist in one lifetime

Floors and foundation
Deeper than a single love
Undoubtedly reoccurring

With you I am home
The greatest gift of peace
It would suffice, for me
If I can always return here

silken grasp shimmer,
bearing the fate of mother,
unfurls one gray pearl.

“What do you want for dinner?”
My grandfather asked me.
Their house warm with the scent of biscuits rising in the oven,
and my grandmother’s chatter.
He looked down on me with a spark in his eye
because he knew he did not need to ask.
“Macaroni and cheese please.”
He laughed in a way that made it easy to picture him young.
“You got it kiddo.”
This was our skit we played at every meal.
Roast in the oven and mashed potatoes whipped in the pan,
but my grandfather couldn’t resist the urge to spoil me
with a special order,
even sometimes for breakfast.
I watched him in the kitchen.
He moved like a bird building its nest,
instinctual.
His hands broad and strong,
softened with time,
the skin a bit slack,
but his fingerprints told a story of work,
of many lives lived,
through pain and pride,
love and loss.
A thick woven web
that stretched all the way to his small kitchen.
He hummed and sang as he put water on to boil.

I sit with him now,
but he searches for me,
through a fog of confusion,
his memories stirred up in his mind,
but he finds me.
“How is your ski resort doing? You bought a ski resort, right?” he asks.
I own a house, near a ski resort,
but I do not correct him.
“Yes, it is going well.” I say, “We are having a great Winter.”
His eyes strain to read my lips and he smiles.

“Good, good.” He pats me on the knee,
his hands jittery in constant tremble.
This morning he thought he missed the school bus.
His mother is in his bedroom, she woke him, he says.
My brother’s room is his now,
filled with figments of his mind,
seeped out into the world.
He looks at me with watery eyes,
because he knows.
“Grampy, what do you want for dinner?”