Author: poetryfest

A friend told me she is
too wounded to talk
her father has died
where is the dignity in death?
Is it only in living
Would it all be easier to take
if that wisdom was applied?
Instead of the rosy pictures
painted and stories told
of old
what they failed to tell us
is how hurtful it is to lose someone
how undone
one becomes at the loss
how grief feels like a part of you has died too
and how long it can take
to start anew
you never really do

It has been a long and quiet decade,
After the strangling goodbye I was forced to bade.
With each passing day, I find myself becoming someone new;
But I realised, I am becoming a winter morning without the dew…

You were the brightest star in the canvas of my family,
But since you left, the canvas has become so dull and empty.
You were the strongest pillar in the house of my family,
But since you left, the house has been shattered into a million pieces.

There is none to hear me out anymore,
I feed all my emotions to this paper, therefore.
It is not that I didn’t try to reach you,
But only to find that you, too, have left my ship like all my family crew…

So loneliness has become my steadfast soulmate,
We stay with each other and even go out on dates.
It is funny how my friends think I am paranoid,
When they don’t know what dwells inside me is only a soul filled with a lifeless void…

Hence I am reciting all my emotional scribbles out to you loud,
For the sun in my sky has been taken away forever by the clouds.
It rains here in my heart every hour, every minute, every second,
Yet all your footprints remain as fresh as you left, even after a d-decade…

What does a writer do when their agony is far too much to write;
when the pain they feel makes putting into words, too much a fight,
when their heart is sagging across the sidewalks and streets,
when their lovers can’t even console them to sleep?

My friend from a world not so long ago is gone.
She was yellow and had a raspy laugh that made me smile.
She was from another world, galaxy, and beyond.
And now, she’s gone.
I’ve mustered every ounce to write out this pain;
to make a rhyme and use iambic pentameter all the same.
But I’ll bend the rules to my grief. I’ll make things differently and you’ll nod and be polite
while I have sadness growing all around me in spite.

What does a writer do when the very thing that gives them comfort causes grief?
She took pills and choked on her bed all alone.
The bed we had sleepovers on or that she’s talked to me while on the phone.
She killed herself and I texted her two days prior.
And now I am a writer losing my fire.
My flame, all my words in vain.
The funeral is in five days.
I haven’t got the stomach to show
Haven’t got the funk out of my flow.

Mortality is flirting with my soul as if it’s going to catch me.
It whispers seductively in my ear “You’re writing is not enough to top the harassing”
You see, the writing keeps me safe;
A barrier around this place.
This place that I don’t want to go,
where I think of how my friend died all alone.
All by herself because mortality chatted in her ear
But I had my writing to keep it at bay
Now I lost my Goddamn flame
My fire my heaven my source of inspiration
Now I listen to mortality outside my door
Inside my head
Telling me that my poems are dead
More dead than Jenna girl
Oh God forgive me for using her name
But I can’t even write without my flame
Tell me! I beg! What does a writer do in such dread?
What does a poet conceive in pain in misery
when no words can properly express
that mortality is a two-headed mistress-
take her away far from my bed!
Keep morality out of my head!
I plead with you! I urge your help!
What does a poet write when they are in such grief?
When they are frantic in their displeasure and disbelief?

My flame may spark at a few of these rhymes and witty remarks
But not as much as the pain does in my heart

I know a wondrous lady who moved from somewhere deep
and now lives in my city, in a basement on the cheap.
But places hold no value, for her home stays with her heart,
which she took to her new life, new country, new start.
She looked back with teary eyes at what she left behind
knowing life goes forward without a button to rewind.
In a harsh new world, she found a blessing in each day
and made the place comfortable knowing she must stay.
She tried to flourish here, to stand out and be bold
but her type of flower usually dies in the cold.
Rooted in foreign soil, the wondrous lady did feel lost
trying to show her true colors while freezing in the frost.
So yes, it took some time, maybe it even took a while
for the wondrous woman to unleash one of her smiles.
Winter nearly killed her, but in the end, she won.
She could not be frozen, for she had her own sun.
When she was feeling down she had to merely look inside
and find the place deep within where all her strength resides.
Now confident in herself, aware of the fortitude endowed
I watch her go through life, and I can’t help but feel proud.

I asked a computer to tell me about grief,
and it said the right words.

It told me that love was grief’s memory, a testament to the bonds that shape us.
A trail of perseverance, an echo that teaches us to learn to live with loss.
It spoke of transformation, of pain, of remembering, of profoundness.

I asked a computer to tell me about grief,
and it said the right words,
but without the aching of empathy
that comes from man.

It did not offer empty comforts, nor did it provide stories of love gone by.
No anecdote, a quote, a phrase, a way to lament alongside me.
It simply answered with the right pixels, as quietly as I had asked.

I asked my friend Katherine to tell me about grief,
and she could not think of the right words.
We cried together anyway.

To love with such abandon
That every tiptoe
Becomes its own ballet
In white mittens
Stalking touch
Corralling it
With dire calls
Each shout its own
pulse of gravity
That pulls heartstrings
Inside hands
That tells a story
For someone else to end
With oxytocin punctuation
Gladly, though truthfully
Never settled
for very long
To be a soft factory
Of precious contact
Is to have smokestacks
That billow solace
and stardust

by drew w sinclair

I carry my grief in my feet.
I miss you to the tune of
the click of heels on concrete leadened with summer heat,
to the squish of sandals on the ocean bottom
that can’t help but sing of childhood.

Grief landed on my shoulders
and I promptly shrugged it off;
I need those for other things
carrying my child
washing dishes
typing your obituary

It slid down my chest and made a claim to my heart
but I evicted it from there, as well,
I do not deal in clichés—
Besides, you already claimed it;
I’ve not the space for another.

Of course, my legs were next,
but their sinews would snap
if they dwelled on permanence.
It’s been a while since we played soccer at Rowley,
Forgive me,
I’m out of practice.

Naturally, it fell to the one remaining place
on this body that keeps me from you.
I felt it lodge itself deep in my tendons
and radiate to my toes.

So every Saturday,
I walk from my doorstep to yours
and watch the concrete under me
leach heat like a foreign planet.

I measure eternity
in paces
to wherever you are.

Trees, why do you continue to grow?
Haven’t you heard?
The poet has stopped writing.

Why do you look upon your homeland?
Forget the smoke over your rooftops,
For the poet has stopped writing.

The trees ask,
Has he died?

No.

Then he was no poet at all.
And we will keep growing,
shedding tears over our homeland’s rooftop

The Deception of Sparks
Came when I first met Her
And instantly they flew
On that day
In that moment.
In that second
But
Before they hit the ground
They changed
In midair
To arrows
Then daggers
And bullets
But
By then…well
You know the rest.

by
blaire baron

Sometimes
it crawls in through an email
adorned with an ominous subject line
like Grandma
or Call me.

Sometimes
it’s an invite to a group chat
and once
I even found death
hidden between the lines
somewhere in the comments section.

In such a way yours passed right through me
like an apparition passing through a stone wall.

I am since savoring your missingness
biting off morsels
of photographic evidence
– your hair falling into your eyes
– you immortalized
for as long as the servers hold.

I find you in pixels
found lost in an upload
of masquerade balls
and the cozy debauchery
of those early aughts
pixels of my eyes meeting yours
– your hair falling into your eyes
– your eyes gazing down at a lit cigarette

and I can still feel your eyes on me
if I stare long enough at mine.

Mine
dilated with love
– not one of those once-in-a-lifetime loves
but a love you carry with you through life
a love that carries you through life
softly wrapping a blanket around
the shoulders of the memories
of the cozy debauchery
of those early aughts.

A wisp of the fingers
while sharing a cigarette
kind of love.

One photo
of us wading in the floods
of the sounds of your guitar chords on my ears
– your hair falling into my eyes
– my lips a wisp on your fingers
as we share a cigarette

and the way your words ran together
as you serenaded the sun
rising over the lofts
– you daring it to finish the job
– me begging it not to.

Really though
how many more times
would we have met up anyway?

I only get to visit every few years now.
You probably wouldn’t even be in town.

We’d become just another one of those friendships
drifting into our respective middle ages.

Me, to abroad.

You, to your needles