poem a day

February 4, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

man
these morning poems aren’t doing shit for me
and i’ve felt adrift since 2022 day three
and i thought i’d found where my serotonin was lost
but it turns out it was just capitalism in a silly mustache
and i tried for a while to follow the dopamine
but i guess that dopamine i followed wasn’t meant for me
so i suppose i could just succumb to the unconscious dreams of sleep
but naps give me less time to accomplish the day
but is it even day if the sky is so grey
and the haze of the rain pounds the panes in sheets
and this playlist slaps but sometimes too much too deep
and i’ve probably lost the rhyme scheme somewhere in this mush of words
but i push and i pull and i try to open new doors
but they scare me so much
i’m paralyzed
to the floor

so i guess i’ll write
and write some more
until i can pull up my feet
and walk outside
once
more.

February 3, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

still don’t know what the groundhog said
guess i could look it up
(even tho it has very little to do with anything real,
but we all need a distraction these days, right?)

six more weeks of winter
(as opposed to ‘early spring’)
but six more weeks isn’t terrible;
the full month of February
(which is annoying, but expected)
and then half of March
(March, which lost its status as
‘normal month’ way back in 2020;
i don’t think i’ll ever look at another
March
the same way again)

but i think,
i *think*
i can do it.

~~~

most mornings
the sunlight blazes through
our east-facing windows,
catching in our eyes
as we sit to write
morning pages and morning poems
and things of that nature
and the shine is so great
that half my computer screen
fades to white
and generally
we put up with it
for the warmth
(and for the plants)

but this morning
the sun is barely making itself known
through these dense clouds
bringing with them rain
and drear
and we miss that sun
not just the warmth
but also the light
the indication of daytime
the blasting through our senses
waking us up
in a way
that only coffee comes close
to imitating

~~~

i keep wanting/desiring/being drawn to the
writing
of tough stuff
in the evening
but in the morning
when i have more wherewithal
to contemplate
the complicated
my aversion to tackling
the ‘tough stuff’
grows
exponentially

(but maybe one of these mornings)

(or maybe one of these days i’ll just have to
write
in the eveningtime)

February 2, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

2-2-22
[two, two, two two]

and groundhog day

is my delight of fun dates lessened
because i’m no longer in a class where
writing the date is required,
and i no longer have dozens of other students around me
commenting on the weirdness/wonder-ness
of the date

let’s see if i can get that same high
just from spousal conversation;

the delighted “ah!”
akin to the noise [i’d believe] would come
out of the mouth of a baby velociraptor
that just emitted from my blue-haired spouse’s mouth
has made up for
years
without classmates
(and years with)

and how wonderful that i get to live this life
with this Kip
(especially since,
when i was a child in those classrooms,
i was sure,
absolutely, 100% convinced
that i would never be partnered
because my ‘weird’ was too much
for anyone else to love
(and also because, you know, the trauma,
and deals i made with myself
to avoid giving love to another
who may end up leaving me)

and yes, tomorrow isn’t guaranteed
but i now have hundreds of these morning page poems
each encapsulating a memory,
most across a giant, cluttered table,
writing early morning musings
while my spouse does the same
(or programs)
(or peruses the internet)
(or writes emails)
and those mornings turn into days
of silly moments during work hours
stealing a kiss because we missed each other,
and evenings of silly videos
or deep conversations
or delicious meals
or tight cuddles
or cat-hassling
or meandering dog walks
(oftentimes most or all of the above)
and baby HJ never thought they’d encounter
a human being
who could love them so much
warts (and tears) (and weirds) and all.

February 1, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

Fauci Ouchie
Round 3:
The Booster-ing

a whole walk
to and from
computer systems
being buggy
acknowledgement of
zero side effects the last two times
told to just go
(no sitting around rest required)
but
i probably should have
due to the [unrelated] stomach pains
that showed up that morning
that 15-20 minute walk
was the most precarious
15-20 minutes in my life
but i survived
to tell the tale

and the only effect of the shot itself
(so far)
is the tender soreness
at the injection site
(and the only effect
of the stomach pains
are loss of sleep
and a tragic aversion to coffee
i’ll soon rectify
because
of that loss of sleep)

January 31, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

it’s about to be
That Time:

February.

in a non-leap-year,
February and March
have the same date attached
to the same day of the week,

and this messes me
the fuck
up.

i’ve missed more appointments
than i care to admit
scheduling them for February
when i thought i’d scheduled them for March,
and more than a few
shown up too early
seeing the day and the date come up
in the second month of the year
just to have them actually be
in the third.

i know ‘reading the date more carefully’
is a way around this,
but sometimes my eyes see
exactly what they want to see
instead of what is

(and especially within this
year three
of a global porcupine ,
where concentration is lacking
in most of us
due to collective trauma
observed
[directly or indirectly]
day in
and day out
and day in
and day out
and my only saving grace
last year
was that nothing needed to be scheduled
during these months;
resurgences,
and my own clumsy injuries,
and the cold outside,
and my own seasonal depression…
i hid through most of the winter,
hibernated the initial instance of
‘Tuesday the first’
away)

but
i’m trying to be more proactive
more energized
more engaged
this year
so i’ll read
and re-read
and re-re-re-read
and have my spouse check
the dates of things
(or just not schedule anything
non-consistent
at all)
(i mean, hey,
there’s a reason i scheduled my booster
for today,
the last day in January,
a date i won’t even see
for another
fifty-nine
days)

and maybe
just maybe
this therapy
of breathing
and taking my time
and forgiving myself
my past errors
is [could be] helping?

January 30, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

not knowing what to write
from day
to day
makes the flow of
‘i don’t know what to write
day to day’
both overdone
and
sparklingly new

like, if one looks at the
subject matter,
the themes between the lines,
it all kind of
muddles together,
but the ways i go about
expressing
these same subjects
can sometimes have
lives
within the poems themselves.
like the tempo of
‘it’s been days since i knew what to write’
is much slower than the pacing of
‘i’m itching for something to write about
and i feel on a precipice
about to find
it’
and the stuttering step of
‘who am i and what do i write’
clashes at its core with
‘i’m figuring out
that it’s ok
if i don’t know what to write
from day
to day
to day,
i’ll just write
and write
and see what happens
and what writings
may sling
from my head
to my fingertips
to this [formerly] blank document page
before my bespectacled eyes’

and that,
i find,
is the difference.

January 28, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

the snow sprinkles downwards
as i look towards the sky
wondering why
wonder when
wondering how

the beauty laid out on the ground
but i always search for answers
rather than accepting
beauty for beauty’s sake

(which may make me a curmudgeon,
but damn is there beauty in science
too)

January 27, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

so cold
too cold to think
too cold to do much else
but obsess about the cold

~~~

apparently that poem is too true
my brain has short-circuited
and i ponder things other than the cold
but they only flit in and out
as my body gets used to the
inside heat once more
(even though it’s not nearly as heated
as my freeze-baby body would prefer)
(and that’s still with snow pants and a sweater on)

(but will i stop drinking this ice-cold coffee?
absolutely not.)

~~~

fake fireplace
give me warmth
flicker your rolling light flames
and force heated air towards my
shivering bod

my one solace in the wintertime

January 26, 2022

/ HJ / Leave a comment

when dogs get ‘the zoomies’
it’s an indication
that they are a happy dog

but is the same true
for cats
with ‘the zoomies’ ?

our cat
is a very zoomie cat
but she has increased the amount
of zoomies
since our moving to this house
probably five-fold

so i think i’m going to take it
as a win
and assume she is far happier
in the house
than she was at either apartment

(though she can’t see the birds as she once could…
is she now chasing bird ghosts instead of birds themselves?)
(a question for another poem.)