looking back

Almost six years ago, I wrote my first poem. It was right here, in the swing you see in the posted photo. It seems so long ago looking back, even though it’s only been a handful of years.

On November 8th, 2015, I wrote out my turmoil over feelings for someone that, by some miracle, I am still friends with today. I also wasn’t in a great spot with my dad, and shortly after in the early months of the next year, life seemed to fall apart.

But on that day, that cold November morning, I chose to put my feelings into words instead of wallowing in them.

I look for something new
A smile for my old eyes
A kiss to hold me true

I long to see that day
A light, with pale blue skies
A wish for you to stay

A life of just design
A warm, sweet sunrise
This ancient mind of mine

This was the start of a journey that I never thought would bring me here.

My dad always told me I should pursue writing. As a kid, I’d craft stories of impossible castles where the boy saves the girl, or the spy saves the world, or wondrous tale of the dragon-librarian. My escape from my world was creating another, and I’d get lost in the words like running through thick forest.

My relationship with my parents recovered, friends came and went—the best are still around, I have fallen in and out of love, and I am still here.

I have fought for my place in the universe, and I feel good about where I am now compared to where I was then.

So many wonderful and awful and lovely and heart wrenching things can push and pull you, but they will bring you to today, and that is absolutely okay.

Thank you, dad, and thank you, Alison Lee, for being the stones at my feet with constant encouragement that I will never forget. I’ll pay you both back in honest perseverance. I know my dad would be proud of me now.

I look forward to seeing who I am looking back on the next six years.

______________________

JK

maybe

With eyes like painted blue skies, would you let me fall?

If I stumble in, soul and all, would you let me feel tall?

Could I, with a bit of patience, maybe stall the heart of it all?

I only hope for some beat more indestructibly enthralled.

______________________

JK

heat

I can’t speak it,

Because if I say it, it becomes real, and that really makes me feel like I could lose it,

But I love this feeling—

Just behind my lips, tongue lapping at my teeth like flames, the heat of it so strange.

Muscles aching,

Concentrating on growing stronger, being better.

I should’ve never, but I have, and I need more, as much as I can take.

There’s no mistaking it—

I feel alive and amazing, overwhelmed and unshaken in the new steps I have taken to find myself making

the new me.

________________________

JK

shame

I feel your spirit haunting me.

Six feet under every single thing that is dead and gone, but your corpse still screams inside my dreams, what few I have these days.

The agony is something I can’t quite place,

And all the veins I trace back to the heart should show some mistake or a beat unmade—

The blood must be rushing from somewhere in some way.

The mere thought of your voice is something I’ve grown to hate.

I never hated anything, and I never thought you would grow like a cancer in my chest, swallowing and tainting any love for you that there was left—

Friends first, you said, but friends do not betray the very thing they agreed was sacred and true,

And what a fool I was to give that to you.

What a waste to think that you had changed, or that you ever felt in any way the same; blurred lines crossed, the very soul of it maimed—

Ugh, to even think you would’ve ever had my name.

What disgust I feel when I hear yours, like a pound of flesh, oh, why not take more? Or an endless cigarette on an open sore,

And to think that you were so adored.

Words once written with love and with feeling now seem to have lost all meaning.

How undeserving of those words you chose to be, and how undressed as it were that you revealed your true self to me.

How laughable it is that just so recently you were held with such high regard and decency.

Now, how nauseating is the very memory.

What cruel and vile punishment to have given myself and receive less than nothing—such a slight of hand stealing security, a heedless leap into adultery, abandonment, now what a shame you bring to me.

Fuck, how lucky I am to be free from your toxicity.

What a lot, a band, of friends that have flocked to me, encouraged, even, by your absence.

You should know your place and stand in it:

A pitiful, painful, used to be.

______________________

JK

residue

Perhaps I was wrong—

Maybe life isn’t what I thought it was or could be. It can’t be like the movies, where things eventually work out, because we see that life doesn’t always align in that way.

Maybe I should start admitting things to myself that I buried deep just to be happy in a situation that led to misery and some word for strained agony that I can’t quite abstract.

I have always struggled with the thought of having children.

In one hand, this is such a wild card of an existence to be brought into—there is no measure of what pain or suffering that a life could have based on any mathematics or ethical deduction.

What good could having brought a child into being be to anyone but the person who rears the child to existence? And then I think of myself, and then I think of the joy I may have brought my father, or the love that my mother still adores through her struggles.

On the other hand, it is a privilege—it is something that some may not be able to make the choice of because of financial status or wellbeing. And in that sentiment, it can become something that may be envied. One can become angered at the fact that having a child would be a burden, and angered more so at the fact that one wishes to bear that burden while others thrive without worry or care.

I wish I had more hands because there are more sides to this scale than feathers on an angel’s wing.

To wrap a bow on this in some sort of way, I believe that I would like to have a child some day.

And I believe that I convinced myself otherwise because I loved someone who did not share that same mindset.

Perhaps it isn’t best to bring a child into the world. Perhaps the world is undeserving of a life that sees such a suffering and has no power to fight back the horror, or to stop impending global catastrophe before it is too late.

I do have this feverish dream of a wife, a house, a kid and a dog.

I long for some sort of family.

Adoption is probably the best choice in that stance—to take a child who has seen the worst of life and give them the world, or the best pieces of it you can afford.

I would love to be a dad someday.

That is a sentence I have never written in my life, but I mean it, truly.

I would love to see if I could have a son that reminds me of myself, and perhaps I could teach him how to do things that I do, or advise him on what I did or would do in his situation.

I would love to tell them about my dad, share stories of what he taught me, tell them jokes he used to say, tell them that he would have loved to meet them.

I always wanted to be like my dad, and I think my dad would say that I would make a great dad.

I hope to be swallowed by a love that allows dreams to push through. I hope to make something of myself, to meet someone who desires glueing our souls together. You know, just to peel off the residue from our fingertips like in preschool.

I hope that someone sees me as a great man, a pure soul, a good person, the way my dad always bragged me to be.

And if life works out, I hope that he would be proud of me.

Perhaps he was right.

______________________

JK

silent hum

My heart aches and groans like a bedridden mistress,

Muscle sewn together like a white dress, stained with the blood of guilt and sickness, seams fraying apart like dead hair.

The fever brought blindness, soaked the sheets with the sweat of fear and hatred.

Could the wind ever blow the sound of my name, when all the lips who know have gone away?

Could the rings of trees write a song for me, a solemn, silent hum of redwood sorrow?

Could a life unlived be borrowed?

Uproot all that waste of good seed, good soil—

Weave what’s left between the the leaves, the branches—

Swing the sinner.

________________________

JK

let her

Perhaps I was wrong.

Perhaps love cannot be found in song or in basket you leave by the door in the hope it may fill with rain.

I had faith—I was strong.

I held hate and the progress I made in moving past it left me only with pain.

I thought I could be better.

I thought I could just let her fall into place, but the price that I paid can not be earned or replaced.

I am sure I’m okay,

But the glass that has shattered has left most of me scattered as I grieve in the afters—just maybe,

Perhaps I was wrong.

______________________

JK

harder to find

One day, with hope, and sooner rather than later, I will find my happiness.

I usually tuck it somewhere in the pocket of a friend,

Or sometimes in the hands of a loved one.

Perhaps I should fashion it to a keychain, or place a fold of it inside my wallet, lest I misplace it again.

Often it gets lost, especially if I tuck it within a person who never returns it, and it becomes harder to find.

By miracle alone, some give back pieces they’ve mined, or spare slivers of their own to get me by.

I hold on to the scraps I get in passing, small, silver change in a cup.

Then, maybe I could buy it by thrift, where others have thrown out old happiness that’s faded or doesn’t shine the way it had before.

After that I could restore or repurpose the happiness bought in dime for my own future rapport, and then maybe even more.

I will keep my head high for what’s in store, and may this life be my perfect storm.

_______________________

JK

feel less

Some days I feel the universe doesn’t deserve my presence,

That I could just go, kiss the stars on my way out, leave them to fall with all my well wishes.

I crave to be embraced by the sun, to burn away in the brightest of light,

To separate into my individual pieces, scattered through space and time.

Some days I feel less than enough,

Like the cracks can’t be glued back together, like I’m missing parts that cannot be replaced,

Stuck in the ruff.

What lies beyond the expanse of us?

…is it something I can touch?

____________________

JK

space for love

Today, I looked inside my chest and picked the bitterness from my bones,

Washed all but the blood from the ribs, rubbed away the callous from the heart.

I thought there was too much pain, too much hurt for anything else to remain;

However, in taking a breath, taking time to remove the clutter, organize the good that hides beneath the stains into an order you can see and explain,

There is so much space for love and kindness to grow and stay.

I can weave new vines of happy between the empty space, letting new roots grow and hold any sunshine it can take.

In stepping back, and observing what I’ve made, I see now that I am so much more than my mistakes.

______________________

JK