Fine Indefinitely

I’ve made a sort of peace
with my chimera-like self.

Yes, I’ve envied
those whose lives were made
of uniform fabric, whose seams
always lined up with each other,

until I realized the beauty
in the patchwork of all my loves
stitched into my grinning soul.

I shall never be elegant.
I shall never neatly fit
into the costume of a role
not meant for me to play.
Those itch anyway.

Singing my praises to the beautiful blue
of a sky as high as I can imagine,
or murmuring prayers to the heart of a fire
that jumps and sparks in steps known only to itself,

I know that certainty sometimes equals confinement
and prefer to stay unconfined, undefined -
unless of course that’s what I desire
at that particular moment.


This poem is linked up to the Tuesday Platform over at Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads. Kerry asked us to contemplate if a song has ever saved our lives. I'm not sure about saving my life, but something about this song always comforts me and feels like home.

Delicately Bold

Demurring by day,
true night blooms are selective
binding up allure
into tempting scents not hues,
beckoning night visitors.


Night Perfume (1950)
Kaoro Kawano
fair use




This poem was inspired by a prompt given over at Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads: Kerry Says: Let's Paint A Picture, which asked us to create a Tanka based on the art of  Japanese print maker, Kaoro Kawano


Unvanishing

Spaces between can be stretched, like shadows lengthening in the fading day. Strange magic tugs on atoms, bending and pulling objects until they vanish. She does not understand that it is herself she wishes to make gone when she says her words into the waiting air. She only speaks the words, “Make it go,” and mass, neither created nor destroyed, rearranges itself elsewhere. It is simpler to make things disappear instead of feelings.

Easy to banish
a bowl or a trinket, still
the shadows remain.


Photo by Jellico's Stationhouse

This story told in haibun came from a combination of the picture prompt given over at Friday Fictioneers and the prompt from Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads, Physics with Bjorn: Space time and the theory of special relativity.