5/5/14 (with minor edits)

Resistance knocks at my door. At home there was never an allowance for this unpleasant feeling. Though half of me does not live here, nor there, anywhere. Daydreamer, believer, covered in warmth and otherworldly pleasures as if a break was ever deserved. But what does one deserve other than what the ego decides?

Bearing in mind the limits of flesh and bone, there lies in my gut, tugging my side like a restless child never quite satisfied, or the strict drill sarge of a parent always pressing me to dig my feet deeper in the dirt, an obligation to confront the status quo wherever we collide.

The rollercoaster owes no breathing room, no space to cool off as the sweat betrays my thirst and plants uncertainty in familiar plots of the ground beneath. And this continual friction reveals pockets of fleeting happiness, just about the only currency worth its weight.

Find it wherever, whenever, if ever.

Travels that follow
Leap into the frame
Free fall down below
From a weightless state
Never settle in one place
Wings will grow today

Relay to me this one time
While my sleep is disrupted
Where are these good ol' days
You speak of, incoherent and slurred
Are they here and now or tomorrow
Yesterday, seven or even eleven days ago
How far back till my vision's blurred
To where I only see what matters
You, me, this, everything that I would miss
As fleeting as our reflection in the water
I catch it for a moment as the rock skips
Before long you, me, everything, arrives at the other end, and scatters

the mind wanders
within the realms it formed
in our beginning
that has since become your end
for split seconds and mellow moments
our fire subtly burned

-Josemarie Nyagah

Cooler heads don't prevail
Any longer than today
Always teetering on the edge
Constructive illusions
Make believe to make progress
I don't pretend to see the future
Stumblin' about with a guise of order
I only long to minimize the mess
Of imaginary lines crossed and quartered

By Taylor Mali

I don't want to tell you what you already know
So I won't tell you you're going to die
Even so there was a time when such a revelation would have felt a curse
My mother told me not to cry
That she, not I, would be the first to die, which only made things worse

And someone here will be the next to die
This, too, must come as no surprise, but this isn't a poem about the death of that person, the next in this room to die
This is about something else instead:
The very last one of us here to join the dead
He or she who outlives all the rest

When that day comes
And may it take its time
By then who will care or even know we all once met, gathered to share stories, rhymes, wine and bread
The rest of us all dead, except you, the last one to go
When that day comes who then will know

I say we will
We will be waiting for you in that other place To do what we are doing now
Face-to-face with whatever wine the dead have to drink
What bread to eat
We will greet you and say welcome
Come and eat
Take, at last, your empty seat

Having watched a piece
I have the time
So I will indulge
What I would not see the need otherwise
A moment past its prime
With feelings arrived, ready to be retold



Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–

Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.

You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.

I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Existence finds it funny when
You lose it and count to ten
It's there to welcome you back
After your temper tantrum
A chair smashed, some glass cracks
My ego may be petty and brittle
Feelings swing high and low but I cannot fathom
Why you put so much into so little