Category: 12th

One thing I can always come back to,
A most loyal friend.
Nothing I’d rather do,
Until my life’s end.

Cold wind whipping my face,
In the mountain up high.
A most beautiful place,
Evergreens and the sky.

My board I am riding,
Shooting down the mountain,
On my heel and toe sliding,
Snow sprays like a fountain.

It is my annual reward,
The same mountain year after year,
I never get bored,
A place I hold dear.

I Have a rose, beauty filled with every petal
Built with a strong stem, with proper posture as to say
“Look at me!”
Covered with the most vibrant colors that would
Fill others with jealousy
I have a rose, with thorns as sharp as nails.
They were acute little daggers, and if I were not careful
Blood will be drawn and the sharks
I have a rose, filled with care and performance to stand out above the crowd, like a shining star that burns bright all alone in the night sky.
It makes me feel warm, safe, and gives me purpose
It fills my sense of fulfillment, as it needs constant attention everyday,
And in return it blooms its beautiful bright colors for me
I had a rose, it was beautiful from the root to the flowers on its head.
I would take hours out of my day just to stare at its beauty, and many more to give it the affection it craved.
It was silly of me to see that this wouldn’t last forever
For nothing is eternal and no power in this universe can make something last forever.

Every night
We would pray in your home
I knew not about God
But I knew the sounds leaving your throat
And I would utter them in accordance

Now the pews, the altars
The stained glass, the hymns
I drink it all in
For they are all about you
Never about God

I was the bearer of the ring upon your finger
And in tears
The blessing they received
Was in the palm of my hand
The hand you held when you lead the prayer

You’re weak now, weaker than I could know
Yet you push through
Your thorns will cut my skin
But my skin will heal
And my love will be all that remains

Her silhouette is dimly lit
By a weak bulb that dangles
From the pale kitchen ceiling

A scrap of steel wool is clutched in one hand
Whilst the other strangles a rusted iron pan
Her apron is soiled and soaked
Her steaming rubber gloves cling hot and close

She pumps with a fury
From its old plastic crock
The watered-down soap
Onto the food-spattered wok

There, in the shallow tin sink
Lies a mug, a cutting board, a spoon or two
She disentangles the mass of forks interlink’d
With mechanical movements; as one well used to

Her children are silent in their beds
She looks out the window, oppressive in its night-black
There is a pounding, a swelling in her head
She shuttles more dishes onto the dripping plastic rack

In her mind, she reviews and replays
The happenings and trials
Of her working day-to-day
Phone calls, letters, marking files.

This was not all she had once known –
She used to always be with book in hand;
Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch
A modern Becky Sharp in rigorous self-command

She too had once had aspirations
Ambitions to rise from her lowly stool
Clever schemes and sagacious machinations
But alack – the world was subtly sly and cruel.

This was how she was thus bound
With hands constrained to the kitchen sink
Her dreams; they slowly drowned –
And her hand remained chained to its silver ring.

My heart is an ocean, one once teeming with life;
With clownfish and bluefin,
With spinner dolphins and striped,
With humpbacks and belugas,
My heart is an ocean that once bubbled with life from all corners of the world.

During its days as a young ocean, a mere shining sea,
It was stormy.
With splintering lightning, raging waves, violent winds,
the animals would scatter.
Pelting raining tears,
Deadly riptides of dread,
The crack, crack, cracking of stoney rage;
They would disrupt my sea,
For moments,
Blips.

And although a downpour of sorrow was common,
There was the occasional sunshine of joy,
Parting the clouds and gently brushing the backs of rising mammals.
Rainbows of excitement would arch around the surface,
And life would bloom like the new stocks of seaweed upon the decorated seafloor.

But I was used to sudden rain showers,
Clouding the sun
Or,
Once in a blue moon,
Accompanying it,
With the great waves cresting and falling in tune.
Tides toil,
And winds spin with my grief,
Grief over a loss I couldn’t comprehend.

I didn’t want it,
A burden I couldn’t shake,
A sinking ship no one could save,
A lost diver no one could find.

My heart is an ocean, and it’s broken.
Toxins sink into in, dumped by people without a care for my creatures:
“You’re too sensitive,”
“Fat,”
“Ugly,”
“Stupid,”
“Quiet,”
“Weak,”
“You’ll never amount to anything,”
“You’re a failure; a freak.”

Plastic bags of words and oil barrels full of pain
Stretch and stretch across my waters.
Pollution beyond what my little hands and my oblivious loved ones could clean out in a lifetime,
They infect my once beautiful heart.
What was once an ocean of emotions,
Good and bad,
Now is a sea of sorrow,
Sunlight all but forgotten.

The tar has killed all my sweet animals,
My wonderful hopes and dreams.
What was left were nightmares:
With lionfish and snaggletooth,
With tiger sharks and bull,
With Sea Nettle jellyfish and Australian box,
My heart is an ocean, and it’s become a warzone.

The violence would break the surface of my heart often,
Bursts of rage from blood-stained waters,
Biting sharks and unlucky touches,
Venom sprawled in this sea.
Jellyfish entangle,
Sting after sting and tearing into each other with no regard,
The damages blankets the waters.

Battleships,
Torpedoes,
Bloodshed,
War.
I fight I didn’t start,
Didn’t want,
Was infiltrating my heart.

I didn’t want it.

My heart is an ocean,
One full of struggle,
So I cover it.
I cover it in algae,
Hoping to suffocate my dreams and nightmares,
My hopes and my disappointments.
I encase my ocean in a shell,
A mask none shall see behind.
I become a fake,
To avoid being a failure.

They try to fight,
To breach the top and show the truth,
But I refused.
When my hopes try to live again and fight the nightmares,
When my nightmares try to conquer my hopes,
I tell them all,
“No. Go back.
Go back to the depths of my heart,
To bottom of this shrinking sea,
And never come back.”

Because the world will never accept them,
Never understand the loving dolphins,
Nor the enraged tiger sharks.
They’d only see the outside,
A thin layer of lies that none will look past.
And I no longer saw the point in trying to get them to see more.

With my drowned hopes and nightmares,
I wanted to quiet the skies,
Quiet them with ignorance,
For even I could not get rid of the sky;
At least,
Not completely.

My heart is an ocean,
One that longer changed.
It was one of falsehood,
Of solitude,
And an overcoat of emptiness.
My heart was deeper than anyone could’ve known,
And no one will know.

Even as hail raged across the sky,
Fires spark the oil-algae mixes,
Carcasses of my creatures floating within the mask,
I would smile.
I would laugh.
I would tease.
But not a sliver of sunlight would be seen,
Only hurricanes.

The algae began to layer as I aged,
To the point where my animals couldn’t even hear the ever-pouring weather.
Years went by in a staggered status,
No direction in mind;
Nothing.

Until:
“Why are you like this?”
Simple words,
Simple questions,
Simples answers…
Or were they?
I could no longer dig down into the depths of my heart,
The mask was too thick.
Impenetrable,
By my friends,
My family,
Or even me.

But I told anyway.
Words matching with emotions from a far off shore,
Creating more miles between the two the longer it goes.
And once it was over,
I let my heart cry,
Alone with no shoulder to lean on,
Because my heart was ocean to be seen by no one.

I laid my fascade on thicker after that,
Playing a role in a film no one knew was being shot.
Every action,
Precise,
Calculated,
And absolutely,
Completely,
Fake.

When I showed rage to the outside world,
My heart would be cloudy.
To others,
I was quick to anger.
To me,
I was down in a spiraling whirlpool of something.
What it was,
I didn’t know,
But my distance from my ocean,
Made it indescribable.
I only knew,
It wasn’t what I showed.

But I wanted no part in it,
That sinking sensation that plagued me.
It was a burden,
An anchoring attachment that was drowning me,
And maybe even everybody around me.
It was a pain beyond that of the greatest injury,
An invisible stonefish barb digging into my soul.
My heart is an ocean,
One in great peril.

Words would get to my ocean at times,
No matter how hard I try to block it.
And at times,
The animals would come,
Breaching the surface after so long.
With them came the rain,
The sobs,
The sensitive nature I wanted to stuff,
The unnecessary feelings.

My heart is an ocean,
And it’s building towards destruction.
With battleships above,
Torpedoes tearing through,
And bodies upon bodies,
Both animals and humans alike,
Litter the ocean floor.

Conflict rips through my ecosystem,
Breaking me and my oceanic heart.
And,
For once,
The outside reflected my heart;
I’d snapped,
After years of pretending,
Being someone else,
For the sake of myself.

I hide away after the break,
An enormous wave of water swelling in my heart.
Blame,
Guilt,
Horror.
“Was it my fault?”

Stares pierce me,
Sharp sea glass ripping through with each.
They gawk at my rainfall,
Puzzle at my tides,
And judge my marine life with their bullets.
My heart is an ocean,
And it’s dying.

I look down on it,
Broken and battered,
Caught in a war that others may have started,
But I continued.
I continued living in those times,
On ignoring the so-called “weakness”,
And letting the past drag me down to the deepest of trenches.

So I peer down at the algae,
Combing over the mask,
And dig for what is beyond.
My animals wanted freedom,
To see the sun,
To see my feelings that I’d shoved down.

I couldn’t live like this,
One buried in emptiness and lies.
Sealing everything away,
Letting it die in the depths,
Does nothing.

Piece by piece,
I remove the algea,
Smashed away the pain,
Replaced the harm with those of love.
My heart is an ocean,
And it’s finally begin to heal.

New life coming in,
Battleships sailing away,
Coexistence becomes possible,
For my dreams and nightmares no longer war,
And my ocean is no longer forcefully still.

My heart is an ocean,
One that tells my story,
A story of pain,
And healing;
Of despair,
And hope;
Of nightmares,
And dreams.

My heart is an ocean,
And it’s not one to be hidden,
But to be shown.

My first time on an airplane, my head blocked the window for my elderly seatmate, I was that transfixed.
I told the old man my cousin’s wedding was in Monterrey, and learned he was coming home for his brother’s funeral.
La vida es divertida, he said.

Serendipity is bred in this setting to a confluence of stories
Crowds of questers cut off from social reality.
Drinking in the morning, brushing teeth beside one another.
Uniquely bored and free enough to get to know one another.
Any airport is more alike another than the city outside its walls. Closer, paradoxically.
Smiling, straight-backed stewardesses sell us a century-old American future.

My first time traveling alone, my flight was delayed for a military memorial.
A soldier slept underneath my cabin, flying home to his mother just like I was.

I think of the romance of flight, da Vinci, and brothers Wright
Could they have guessed we would divide the sky, too, by class?
First, business and economy—as above, so below.
Winged men make conference calls and watch the birds trapped under ceilings high like cathedrals.

We are the Glorious, and the world shall know
As we shine to put on a magnificent show
We witness the kiss of the dawn sun’s new light
As we march onward through the perilous fight

They see us ascending, we watch them go by
To their leisurely lives, with an envious eye
And yet we stand proud through the heat and the snow
For we are the Glorious, and the world shall know

For in these months when we could not see
Time slowed to a crawl through this adversity
And yet we conquered each day to face each night’s woe
For we are the Glorious, and the world shall know

So let us go now on this beautiful night
As we reach the zenith of our glimmering light
And the heavens shall shake as our sound makes us glow
For we are the Glorious, so make the world know

That we’re the Bowie Band, when we put on our show!

i can’t dare to yearn for you
so instead i’ll cross my fingers behind my back
stare up at the stars
and wish that you’d shatter me
wish that you’d wrap your hands around my throat and squeeze
and with every last ounce of my soul
i wish it would break you too

i don’t dare to dream of you
but if i did
i’d wake in the dark of every night with tear-stained cheeks
arisen from visions of my own blood spilled
all over your polished hardwood floors,
your carefully manicured hands,
your open mouth.
you’d lick your bloody lips and i’d follow a drop of crimson down the column of your throat
look up into your uncaring eyes
and make you watch the life leave mine

i won’t dare to speak to you
but i looked you in the eyes once
you held no spark of recognition there for me
(though i swear we knew each other in some other life)
(i won’t blame you for forgetting)
i groveled at your altar
dirtied the knees of my brand new slacks trying to make you feel worshipped
‘cause i know it’s what you crave
your face gave no emotion away
save for the vaguest shadow of quiet displeasure
you’re a greek goddess
carved into bleached white marble
unknowing and uncaring of me
your starving devotee

In the bleak months of winter
In the bedroom that wasn’t just a room
In the house that felt like a home
In those precious moments, I felt the warmth of summer

The warmth of tanned skin
Of hiking trails and laying in the sun
Of staying up late with the stars
Of kisses upon bruised shins

After the bleak months of winter
After the bedroom that wasn’t just a room
After the house that felt like a home
After those precious moments, I felt the wrath of summer

The wrath of blistered skin
Of tangling paths and the heat of the searing sun
Of the night underneath the gilded stars
Of scars accumulated on already bruised shins

*

Clinging to the warmth
Ignoring the wrath
I failed to notice autumn’s approach
The seasons changed, as they always do
Summer disappeared as soon as the frigid winter winds blew