The words were just not right tonight. I’ve tried for two hours to get them out and they were all wrong. Every single one was wrong. There were a total of 25 revisions.
Instead, I’ve decided to share a poem I wrote just about 12 years ago while crying in my dorm room, overlooking a parking lot. I later won an award for it; I was published. I feel this every September and every September it feels new. And every year I forget I wrote this, and every year it comes back to me.
I’d prefer to ball up on the couch, under my weighted blanket, and pretend like the truths I need to live are simply bad jokes. But I can’t. It simply can not be this way.
Instead…
“Sour Cider Air”
feel autumn between our fingers
as it creeps uninvited
into my mittens,
and watch it swing on the crisp of the fire colored leaves;
we are the turbulence that pushes them from the trees
they drop, they drop,
an avalanche erupts
and
i’m
running
and i’m losing
and i
lost.
and we see it in the rotten apples
that
b l a n k e t
the ground;
sour cider air.
acorns shower,
martyrs from dark gray clouds.
they soar and they tumble
and they slam into my sneakers,
but they do not break or bleed.
it is the fall that promises a steady tree
but when you’re as frail
as the sprout that springs
i tell you, there are no
guarantees.
we push for a yearlong October,
but our attempts to delay the
snowflakes and the shovels are
hardly good enough.
still, you and i will dance on the dead, straw grass and
pretend
that we are still alive;
we have been part
of moments that are much more mature than we could ever
be
and it’s alright,
because we are pumpkin seeds.
let me
close my eyes and imagine an orange
haze that
resembles the nights that we swore we were
untouchable,
invincible,
when all we really were
was nothing but
the bitter autumn wind.
lystakesflight 