Aaron
Life is slow sometimes
It moves at an impossible pace
Leaving impatient fingers tapping
It comes seeping like the smoke from a cigarette
Twisting and hazy
Like you can’t see the future and you don’t know why
The Earth turns slow sometimes
You can lie on your back in the night
Look at the stars and witness the curve in the sky
Moving fast and slow all at once, ever present and very far away
Time inching, unwilling
Nothing moves quickly here, under it all, the whole of everything above us
The river runs slow sometimes
Crooked and cold like the rest is irrelevant
It takes and takes and gives it all back
The wind is fast on the surface, the water she rises and falls
I wonder if he felt it like I do
I wonder if he was taken aback by how slow the river runs
Hands
I just wish you could see the world the way I do
Feel how lonely it is
Stand on the top of a hill and stare down and out at it, the world
How faint is the mighty?
How great is it?
Oh the world, full of love and cool whispers
Love…the way someones skin feels when you’re all alone
Gentle and warm, like those breezes
And everything, it rises, like rain in reverse
I want the sky to pull me up, by the collar of us
keep it all suspended in starry blue
and it’s perfect, the fact that we can feel such pain
The fact that we can hurt, we can die from our sorrow
we can live for our joy
The idea that things are so good, so yellow and sweet, so velvet
and we can love
We can cherish, and breathe in and out again
that we can be entangled in a moment.
Oh, the world!
We smile…together and laugh, and love and hate and fear
all of us
It all lasts and fades, doesn’t it?
Hold my hand.
(Note: I’ve been trying to do some poetry lately…It’s all a bit jumbled and weird. I listen to a lot of Sigur Ros. Sorry for my absence, it’s been a weird few months)
If I tried to blame my slow response to your poetry on weirdness, Mariah, I’d still have to define weirdness. Which would take more poetry. Which would take more time.
Truth is, I’m not very good at chewing gum while at the same time musing on the velocity of the cosmic aorta. I needed to finish a couple of my own posts before I could give your poetry the focus it deserves. Now that I’ve read these poems three times — slowly, at different points along the continuum — I’m able to be roundly moved by them.
I suppose it just takes time, sometimes, because the universe is even weirder than we are.