Friday, October 2, 2015

James Diaz- Three Poems


Cecilia, why aren't you laughing?

Push me
and I will edge open
along my spine
where the nerve of storm
falls along the wide expanse
of meadow and wet marsh

this is an absurd way
to get to know someone
but let's burn this bar to the ground
and roast marshmallows 
over its middle-of-the-night demise

and if the shadow of laughter
hails outward with its caustic contralto
into the valley along peace river
where winter will have buried the details of our crime
slap me hard in the face
and tell me that it was for my own good.



Men's Recovery House

My roommate Tony took me out to dinner
my first night at the halfway house
on that piece of shit side ways street
in nowhere Kentucky
there were I don't know how many
of us crazy sons of bitches
trying to find our salvation
in 12 easy steps

not so easy really

but Tony was my hero
the guy's life had turned around
and when he spoke people listened
and he had seen more battle ground than most of us
there was a certain poetry to the man

and being so new to this whole recovery thing
that dinner he bought me meant a lot to me
I didn't have much then
but Tony, he made me feel like I belonged
and I'd never really felt like I belonged anywhere

I looked up to him, hung on to his every word
it just made sense to,
so when he came into the room at 2 am
with a zip-lock bag full of nickels, dimes and pennies
high as fuck, and our eyes locked in the dead of that dead night
I felt a part of my soul crawl down into my stomach
and I wept in my mind
because I knew it was over
and because I knew that I would never feel that way again
like I belonged, like things could get better
and that not every one in this run down world
had to be so full of shit all of the time.

Not so easy really. 
12 little steps, but what if half of them were missing?



Cross Forms Of Errant Travel

The water weighs almost nothing
against a word so mutant
so on the run from the impossible
germ of before and after
the hope unravels
a fever and the threshold of another person
standing in the shadow
of what comes when you least expect it

across this border you are experiencing
a death before death
listening for the sound a pattern makes
through an open door
how a familiar smell can transport you
how the node of the memory looms
in the corner where the light fades
and you kiss your losses on the mouth.



Author Bio: James Diaz spends his time writing poetry as if his life depended on it, because it does. His forms of survival can be found in Ditch, Calliope, Cheap Pop Lit, Pismire, Collective Exile, My Favorite Bullet, and The Idiom. Do not follow him. He does not like to lead.
 
 

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