I haven’t had the time or energy to finish the chapter of Infrared Isolation I’ve been working on, so I decided to collect the highlights of my daily haiku from last year. They’re more of a way to do some daily journaling than a proper attempt to employ the traditional poetry format, but the following poems are representative of the year I had, each one of them named after the day I wrote it. It’s kind of funny, but looking back through my collection of thoughts and feelings without context, I can’t remember what about a quarter of them are referencing. It’s nice to see that my pursuit of a simple, quick emotional expression has done just as good a job of managing my general anxiety as journaling did, but without all of the frequently frustrating and depressing details attached to it. Now I can look back at what I wrote and not worry about being reminded of specific troubles. Instead, I can focus on reviewing the emotional arcs of my life over the course of 2022.
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Intentionally Past Tense
Content Warning: This poem references loss of parents, grief, mourning, and also non-specific references to childhood trauma.
I speak about my parents in the past tense.
It is an old habit,
Hard-won as the only measure
I could take to build the distance
I needed to feel alright,
But this years-long practice
Of linguistic intentionality
Has served me well
In more ways than this.
Recorded and Reposted: A Moment of Imperfection
The early dawn light,
Too strong and eager to ignore
Even under the cover of sleep
That calls to me like a languid lover
Not ready to release me
From my place by their side,
Breaks apart the restless peace
Of a night I hardly marked
As I tumble from my bed
In an admission of defeat
And slowly begin a sour morning
I had hoped would instead be sweet.
Recorded and Reposted: False Summer
It takes only a moment,
The space between whispers of wind
On a scorching September day
As the sun roasts pavement
Two feet from where shadow shelters
A wilting garden unaware
Of how little time it has left,
And the past mixes with the present.
Fingers tracing rows and lines,
Too large now to intertwine
With the holes left in the table
Made of rubber-coated steel,
But still looking for something to hold.
Recorded and Reposted: Hollowed Out
A simple shifting of feet
As movement changes from past my door
To through it and I,
Lost in some deep reverie,
Move from past to present
To catch a smile, warm and expectant,
But betrayed by a furrowed brow.
Hollow words meet hollow eyes,
Or at least they should read as hollow.
I can never tell if what I feel
Is written as plainly on my face
As it is written in my heart.
Recorded and Reposted: Empty Echoes
I cannot tell if I am haunted
Or trapped in an endless reverberation.
Words from the past beat upon my mind
Again and again and again and again
Until I cannot tell if they are newly repeated
Or just bouncing around my head
Like an echo that draws strength and volume
From the walls I’ve put in place
To keep words like these out.
Recorded and Reposted: Everlasting
The sullen thrum of a distant engine
Rings in the cascading hills
As they rise and fall on the horizon,
Fading into the white haze
Of a humid Wisconsin evening.
A fire burns to cinders in the foreground
And the stars silently conquer the curtain of night,
Pinpricks of sunlight poking through the shroud
That wraps a dying day,
As we cling to the hope
That we are as eternal as this moment.
Recorded and Reposted: Sleeping with the Window Open
I used to sleep with the window open.
The washed out yellow street light
Standing sentinel at the corner next to my driveway
Throws wild shadows on my shelves and walls
That are occasionally stretched into thin waving lines
As the bright pale blue light of the patrolling cop’s
Fluorescent headlights roll past my yard.
The silent murmur of the woods holds sway
Broken by a passing car on a distant highway,
The echoing sirens of a police car needed somewhere quick,
Or the mournful blare of a train lost somewhere in the hills.
Gone Solo
Every walk I take is a performance,
A concert for next to no one
With no instruments to speak of
Save for the rhythm of my feet
As one step follows another
To the solid beat of my gait,
Stride staying steady
As I cross paths and walkways,
Each one a measure
In the score of my day.
The Perils of Creative Expression
I’ve been working on a new poem (goes up tomorrow). I got a draft done pretty quickly, forty-five lines across three pairs of stanzas, lots of nice imagery, all of that in about twenty-five minutes. I had a super clear image, a theme to work with, and a form that rapdily emerged from the way the thing arranged itself in my head. Not my fastest work, but still pretty good for a first draft. I spent another five minutes over the rest of the day reading it and making small adjustments and then sent it off to a reader for a quick review. I was expecting a comment about the end, that it would feel very abrupt or like it shouldn’t have been the end, and that’s the comment I got back. See, I had more I wanted to say, but I couldn’t find a way to say it, so I tried to wrap it up there. After all, not everything needs to go into one poem. But clearly it was missing something, so I decided I’d spend some time today to work on it.
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