#15. Lots of new work.

Been a long time since I've updated this blog. Spring semester at Hope provided me with a very interesting poetry class, in which I wrote somewhere around 15 poems...all of which I'm fairly proud of. I'll post a few here now.

The first two, however, are works that I've written here at home this summer.

Enjoy =]

-amk.



he's a constellation.

the closest star to the god given soil
was birthed of sand, of blood and of sweat;
a golden eyed Arcturus is on the earth
and he's screaming, he's screaming,
he's looking towards the heavens.

to be touched by this glowing mass of
hydrogen and heart, who breathes and
who pulls the other stars into motion,
is to be touched by a holiness without
religion, purity without a blood-mark;

I've lost all of my senses, the time,
a constellation's lighting up my mind;
he left marks all down my shoulders
while I was staring at his sky. celestial
treasure, scream yourself into my heaven.

stellar-burned skin is
skin renewed.


an introduction to black-eyed insanity

he keeps his guns in twenty-one places;
enough to keep his mind alive, keep it
screaming revolutionary mad.

sitting still is rare in occurrence, artful in form.
if one is blessed with his quiet, one may
feel revolutionary themselves.

I can feel the veins in my head pulsing, moving,
and he's staring out his clean wide window
watching, breathing, waiting.

gun number nineteen is reserved for me, for
the one he shares the quiet with; I alone
understand his ammunition.

he holds the barrel while I pull the trigger
and the quiet we keep inside his room
shatters in our hands.

I wear
these scars
with pride.


The words of your mouth.

For you, I would create prisms – my inartistic hands
fumbling through colors and lines, I would imitate
your motions, and sigh over the pencil in your grasp.
I would snatch the stars away from their science if only
to scatter them back into your voice, and if only
you promised to continue speaking while you drew.

The words of your mouth – patient architecture in shadow –
allow me a quiet heart and an artful eye. For your words
I would create a classic turn of verse; a window to crawl
through, a muse to still look upon in uninterrupted awe.
Oh, even now, I hear your voice in this noise, the way in
which it once echoed off your bedroom walls, full and bright.

For you I would catch, I would pick up, the light sliding off of
your words, so that perhaps you could reuse it, place it inside
your drawings. I passively attempt to give you rainbows in
return; I carefully accept my words coming out too short. The
prisms of a writer are cold, and unpolished, and the words of
your mouth are too stellar to swallow anything sharper than pen.


Regarding the dye left on the carpet of your old apartment.

Like stains, how they stay, I am ever constant
in remembering this voice; textured lies, the smile
through which they came. I must have misunderstood,
running my fingers through black ink on brown;
yes, that’s it: misunderstood. How could I perceive
that you would leave a mark so deeply set, a mark
so far beneath that no matter how I attempt to scratch
it out, it will not leave me? Will these new
owners notice the place in the matting that mars
the rest of the floor? Will they hear these constant
thoughts, embedded in that black; will they see what’s
yours and yours alone - the smile refusing to be dimmed?


Where the Rest of Us Go to Feel Normal

“You give me a quiet mind, and I, I love you.”
- A Quiet Mind, Blue October

I hide myself inside Southeast Michigan,
inside the comfort of streets I know like veins
in the backs of my hands. Plymouth sways
quietly under the weight of autumn sun, and
I am without noise; I am full and self only
here, close to those I know and understand.

I rest where the rest of us go to feel normal.
I am an unashamed heart of Detroit, a brilliant
product of a hushed suburb, and my friends and
I will sing these love songs to our homes; we will
not, cannot heed to the teachings of this America,
claiming that our state is dying, is dying, is dead.

Here, we sing: here lies our history before us.
Families of an industry bruised but breathing,
loves built in the landscape of concrete and oak,
open spaces found inside the cities compound -
these threads are binding and strong, like
the trains that lullaby our evenings to sleep.

Times and places that shape our quiet minds
cannot be erased because of a suffering number,
a pained figure of currency. For the metro, we will
ever feel, and sing, and love, regardless of how
the Free Press worries and sighs; for the metro,
I will still proclaim my normalcy, my homeheart.



(c)AMK2009.