Category: Poems

Metal Hippie

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Today,
a girl wearing a long, loose, flowered skirt
and combat boots
walked by me in the library.

Her look
is exactly the persona I want to adopt:
metal hippie.

You need to know
that I want peace and love in the world
*AND*
will fuck shit up
to make that happen.

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“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
–Martin Luther King, Jr.


Ordered Chaos

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I’m a master
at narcissistic, grandiose self-flagellation.
I purport to believe that no one is beyond redemption,
yet view myself
as the only person somehow bad enough
to be an exception to this rule.

But sometimes,
in moments of wisdom and peace,
I can see an order in the chaos of my past,
a perfection in the imperfection.

Perhaps I had to fuck up enough
to make my life painful enough
to motivate me enough
to work hard enough
to change.

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Postscripts

A real question I’ve been contending with lately:
If I believe that no one is beyond redemption, but can’t extend that same mercy and compassion to myself, do I really believe it?

Guilt is just the ego’s way of tricking us into thinking we’re making moral progress”
-a nun in the book Eat Pray Love

Undercurrents

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Addiction is constant pleasure and numbing, with an undercurrent of self-hatred.
Sobriety is constant pain and hardship, with an undercurrent of peace and growing self-love.
Addiction looks like a shiny suspension bridge
over the chasm of your loneliness and despair,
but it’s a lie–there is no suspension bridge, no easy road, no pain-free life.
There are only two choices:
move forward by descending into the chasm,
or stand still and procrastinate.
The more you choose the latter to avoid the sharp pain,
the more you’ll pay for it with the dull pain of letting yourself down.
We must choose
between the head-splitting agony of presence
and the slow, rotting feeling of escape.

Addiction is constant pleasure and numbing, with an undercurrent of self-hatred.
Sobriety is constant pain and hardship, with an undercurrent of peace and growing self-love.
And I’m beginning to learn
that despite their subtlety,
the undercurrents matter most.


Coffee Shop Thoughts

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Suicidal depression is a strange thing.

You go about your day,
make small talk with the barista at the coffee shop
and look normal, perhaps

and no one knows how intimately you know Death
how you commune with Her on a weekly basis
how frequently you must negotiate with Her,
trying to convince Her to give you more time

So strange how I can somehow blend into casual spaces
while fighting a vicious battle for my life.

*If you are in the US, feel this way, and need someone to talk to, call 988 for the national suicide hotline. You are not alone.




Dangerous

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The more I learn to love myself,
the more dangerous I feel.
But dangerous in a good way.
Dangerous to systems of oppression,
dangerous to bullshit.
A wrecking ball that’s coming for the things
that need to be destroyed

“I believe that the more we love ourselves, the more potent we are”-India Arie