how to get out of a writing rut
bad poetry
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Give me therapy or give me dinner
I’ve had enough!
a slammed door
Give me my chicken!
overheard from your driveway, 2022.
hjb .
Loneliness
Comes in like a fog and
Feels like hunger
hjb
Oklahoma parking lot, after a flash flood, still in a tornado watch
I walk in that kind of light that sits on skin
Thick with itself and defying itself — welcoming and warning
Lavender and amber and the pink of ripe peaches with the fuzz still on
Dripping with that nameless, shifting color we haven’t felt since last time
We breathe the color in before it fades and
I squirrel home to write bad poetry before it leaves my lungs.
hjb
Poetry
I fell into you like I fell into poetry
Terribly
Caught up in pace
Hiding behind rhyme
Desperate
Fragmented
Immature and needing
My quick bursts of feeling leaving
heavy silent spaces for filling with
knowing off of the page
Drunk on images I
Couldn’t bear the tensions of it I
Drowned in the mystery of it I
Left you dangling on metaphor I
really said nothing at all
I fell into you like I
did poetry,
used you like I
use poetry,
and all I’m left with is —
hjb
prayer
Do not let my Hosanna lift
Please don’t let it echo
Only to fall as Barrabas
a few days later.
(prayer, or things I whisper in the dark.)
hjb
Ava’s Daughter
There’s a single mom named Ava
who rents the beauty shop room at Golden Oaks Village.
All day long, 10-7, M-S,
she styles the hair
of Alzheimers patients there.
Her daughter is in Pre K.
Ava sometimes brings her to work.
Oh, the stories that little girl will hear.
What lives she will see at the edge of their shores,
knee-deep in undulating memory,
stepping with the tides of bottomless time—
like waves of the mesmerizing sea.
hjb
