Tag: Childhood poems
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Train
One place I used to retreat to when I was a kid was under our mobile home on a bed of sand where I listened to spiders making noises and imagined I’d found an ancient tomb in some exotic place and to this day this is how I think about my own thinking whenever I […]
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Imp
I’ve never been very good at telling people how I feel. In fact, I don’t even think I’ve ever really known. I ask myself what I’m feeling all the time, and whatever plan I had for fixing something broken flies out of consciousness like a sudden concussion. I believe I can’t know because there’s something […]
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Dump
I’ve never been very good at remaining congenial after being left behind. Like when I was 7 and learned my mother was cheating on my father, or that time in high school when a girlfriend admitted she’d kissed one of my friends at a party. There was always a waiting behind in the bushes moment […]
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Bananas
When I imagine walking down the street with my parents and talking to all the living houses in the neighborhood through a kind of personification telepathy that helped me survive the lifeless and darker edges of my childhood more than they did, something flat and insensitive in me climbs out of a wish to be […]
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Belt
Anxiety has been a constant algebra I’ve had to practice solving while out in the variable of public life since I realized I was an introvert’s poet. Just this morning while standing in line at the local Co-op I imagined a work colleague by the melons, and her looking at me as though I’d walked […]
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Headlights
My imagination has always been a little library of worry, where I drift from room to room observing the imaginary goings on in an attempt to not only predict what might happen should I not change, but garner some knowledge as to how to behave in waking life. So why wouldn’t I think they’ve always […]
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Floodgates
The Incredible Hulk has had nothing on me. The explosive student inside me slams a folder on the desk in his head and throws a thought open so hard it leaves a doorknob-size dent in what’s left of this thing they call a heart. And being a teenager, he can’t reconcile how he sees himself […]
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Sperm Whale
I’ve glided above and beyond the waves of my life like a sea captain who refuses to return to land. Even when I could see myself like a sunset on the horizon, I could never quite reach myself in time to make me happen. The search for self was as slippery to me as the […]
the real subject is always you 