The Nth Poem on Inadequacy

the burden of existence
consumes me in my idle moments
— when nothing can buffer you from
the imaginings of expectation and the
suddenness of failure.
when inadequacy licks like wet heat against
your very marrow — acidic, inescapable,
immobilizing. when it fills your bones
with lead and you are never able to mount
appropriate defenses.
here you are held down by your own silence.
nothing you say has consequence.
nothing you do is relevant.
the burden asks for proof of your
being and the burden of your proof
is as immaterial as your efforts.
here you lie and sit and stand and breathe and run and jump
and nothing matters except the inadequacy
observed after your actions.
nothing matters except the fact that your matter
is so much futile atoms.
you occupy definite space and edge out
all possibilities away from you.

– July 5, 2015

weird headspace poem circa Dec 2013

the problem with circumstance is that it happens all the time
every time and not quite in the same ways
but always somehow getting in the way
of your routine. your fixed habits, your
unerring patterns of activity,
your consistency insulating tightly the
breathing space around you.
you plug it into the holes you didn’t know you
could bleed out of, where the people can otherwise
comment on how surprisingly clumsy you are,
or how funny, or how disarming.
you disarm yourself when you disrobe yourself.
so instead these become part of your artillery:
fixed activities and an obvious path.
so people do not see too much, or comment
at length, or heaven forbid, try to understand.
nothing is worth the revelation.
nothing is worth the exposure, the unexpected
judgment, the inevitable reveal of your most secret, softest parts.
you are not prepared for how the sun will feel
on your uncovered surface
or how damply the rain will buzz against your skin
or how jaggedly the weather,
the wind
or someone’s words can cut you.
circumstance leaves a lot of room for error, and error
leaves you no room for entitlement.
you must realize this.
you must recognize this.
habits are protective, and routine can kill you,
but it will do so slowly,
without obvious pressure or passion,
quite in a considerate and humane way.
hide your epiphanies away.
shout when you must shout, and whisper
more quietly than how the trees rustle on a still morning.
do not come without a warning.
let people expect you, even if they will never know the
depths at which you have hidden your self-concept.
daily is a secret, subtle art of becoming someone
tighter and tighter against
who you are.

To One of the Best People I Know

For Jeanni-Panini, something I wrote for her 23rd birthday in 2013:

This goes out to a beautiful girl with a stunning mind
and a reckless soul. She is strong and proud and has a good reason
for remaining ever quite just so.
Her roar will make you quiver down to the marrow of your bones.
Her bones are made of steel and sometimes in the light of the mornings
you could be seeing the faintest outline of wings.
She can fly like many other beautiful things.
She deserved to be airborne. Gravity is reserved as an option.
The winds of circumstance run through her fields
and others would be windblown but she remains rock-solid
and unchanged by blades. If she allows herself, she can be unmade.
This goes out to a brilliant girl who thinks as soon as she blinks
and edges up to the brink of the frozen lake
of thoughts. There is a square kilometer of ice
beneath her smooth surface. You would be afraid of such ice.
You should be afraid of such depth.
Turn her over and you would uncover a mountain.
Turn her over and the very ground
of how you love and who you’ve known
would be the sky and would be the clouds
and the very land would shake beneath you.
Her devotion is no question. Prepare for a landslide, an earthquake,
the smashing of tectonic plates.
This goes out to her when she is not anymore a girl
But a woman who stands under the weight of the world
she has tried to love and understand and hold
without knowing if she must or even if she could.
She could not understand it all, could not love it all.
And that is fact. Clear as day and plainer than sunlight.
But still she tries and there are few of us so unrepentant
in intensity, so adamant in our tendency
to love and think and feel.
The world will rub the salt in before the wound can fully heal.
This is her greatest strength and her most breathless fragility.
Take care of her, beware of her, hold her close and let her explode
far from you and when she does, remain a rock
so if she must, she will remember that she is whole.
Before she burst, she was a soul.
And when you see her, you will know
that being rock-solid can still mean growth.
The world will unmake her but she will recreate
herself — she will contract, expand and oscillate.
She is hotter than a white dwarf and colder than a dead star
and denser than collapsing plasma and wilder than a supernova.
She will enter your life and change the orientation of your polarities
Hold onto her if she enters your orbit.

This goes out to her in her moments of hurting
and her moments of remaking and her moments of healing.
She has wings even in the dusky light of the evenings.
She can fly like many other beautiful things.

a thing you write to tell yourself a thing

what is success but the sum
of small victories and happiness
but the sum of small satisfactions.
say here that you find yourself
beating someone to the last
seat on a bus, or you find a rolled-up
wad of bills in a bag you haven’t used in months
or that your best shirt is all clean
and waiting for you
on a hanger with no snags on its edges
on that 7:00 Monday where
you couldn’t afford to be late for work.
— those small victories that snowball
into something truly magical.
say here that someone bought you your favourite
coffee because they owed you or because
they found you cute in that shirt
(it is your best shirt, after all.)
and that while this other person bumped into you on the
elevator and your coffee spilled all over you,
it was a cold-brew and your shirt was dark
and nothing would stain anyway.
(and then because they felt story they bought you
another cup of your favourite.)
those small, endless victories; the shrewd precision of fortuity.
what is happiness but a series of endless
averted crises, success but the
zero-sum of a game between you
and Murphy, and you come out winning.
somewhere out there is that day, then;
and somewhere out there the sun is shining
and somewhere out there some
regular run-of-the-mill sucker
like you is winning at life.

so go on and step up to the plate, child.
no matter how drab you feel today
or how small your field is.
the drumbeat goes on,
the crowd is still watching,
and the game won’t play itself.