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If I, when my technological conveniences are off
And the mail has come,
and the moon has risen, high in the sky, resting
In the embrace of fog
Above withered trees,
If I, in my scarcely lighted room,
Hum loudly and quite off key,
Clapping my hands to the butchered beat.
Humming, quite off key, to myself, humming,
Louder,
Louder,
with each passing
breath.
If I, admire my voice,
my tone, my pitch, my rhythm
Against the shallow ambiance of the outside
Who is to say I am not
the vocal prodigy of my household

If when the sun is moving
and the moon and stars
are elsewhere
and the sky is a righteous marvel
in constant wonder
above amazed eyes
if I in my house
stare out awed
behind my window
watching with wonder
and gently tap my fingers
tap tap
tap tap tap
on the window sill
if at night
I admire all the constellations
and all the wondrous stars
against the black night sky
who shall say I am
wasting my time…

Oh, look at the yellow in the birch trees!
The rain pours and they fall to the ground,
Like heavy snowflakes.
Look at the yellow and the green under my shoes.
Now shiny, wet and slippery.
The rain is gone now,
And all is quiet.
Everyone is home,
The chickadees are in their nests,
The squirrels are safe in their dens.
It’s just me out here,
stuck in the humidity.
It’s finally fall again.

Based on the Philadelphia Inquirer story ‘Pilot gets 366 days in fatal Duck crash’.

“You should’ve stepped away
You were trained to step away
I don’t know why you didn’t.”
Said the captain yesterday
But the deaths they saw were hidden
When her call came to me, unbidden

A single call
A courtroom wall
She never should’ve told me
Their final breath
The stench of death
The law would take and hold me

The steamboat rolled
The gray river rolled
2:37 P.M. in July
When the teenagers’ fate was told
I felt guilt when they asked me why
And it’s not in my heart to lie

A single call
A courtroom wall
She never should’ve told me
Their final breath
The stench of death
The law would take and hold me

“I shouldn’t have called him
Oh, why did I call him?”
Cried my wife, and tore at her hair
She said “Surgeons have sinned
Left our son without air
As his eyes were fixed in their lair.”

A single call
A courtroom wall
She never should’ve told me
My sentence stands
In judges’ hands
A year and a day, they’ll hold me.

I am time.
I am that which was, which is, which will be.
I am the now, the then, the flexible future and the potent past.

That which is, was.
That which was, will be again.
That which will be, is now.

I am creation.
I am destruction.
I am all.

All that is great, is nothing.
All that is worthless, may be vital.
All that is mighty, all that is proclaimed to be great and wonderful,
is nothing before me.

I am all.
I am that which you lose and gain.
I am the infinite, the immeasurable, the unstoppable.

The greatest giants, the mightiest mountains, the most amazing
creations, both artificial and natural-all those are dust before me.
They who live may try to control me-to measure me, change their
travel through my flow, disrupt me, even harness me, shift my ebb
and flow. Yet the most ambitious plans must fail before me, the
mightiest beings bend to me.

I am infinitely complex.
I am the bringer of darkness, the destroyer of worlds.
I am that which was, which is, which could be, and that which
must never be.
In creation, there is destruction.
In destruction, there is rebirth.
There is no such thing as void, all things are in flux.
This is my nature.
Fire and ice, light and dark, life and death, energy and matter,
all these bend before me, for I am time.

 

 

If a knife is stabbing me in my chest
While my wife and child are sleeping
And some superior force is burning me
In the pitch black dark
Over my head under my feet,
While I on my porch
Sing, killing me softly by Lauren Hill
Out to the people of the world
As they throw sticks and stones, as they break my bones
As I tell myself: “I am not afraid, I am not afraid,
I was meant not to be,
So I shall stay that way!”
If I take my pride, strength,
And power
And put myself against the world,
Who is anybody to say I’m dying?

 

 

When it is day, it is blue
When it is dark, the sky is new
When it is day again, I feel free
When it is night, the stars twinkle
When it is day, I try to fly
When it is day, I like to swing up high by the sky

As I stand here, ready to take on the world in a fight that will seem to last an eternity, thoughts of doubt, intimidation, and sorrow swirl around my mind sucking away any confidence I have left. And more and more as my confidence fades it leaves nothing more than these thoughts that tear away at my esteem. I sit through the night waiting for the battle to begin, the sun slowly arises and more and more like a fungus the fear starts to grow inside infecting everything. With all this internal pain it seems my only escape is to submit and give into the enemy and all my uncertainty, but through all the fear that tears away at my spirit a gentle voice as quiet as the whistle of the wind seeps through my ear and says “Stay strong my weary child for greater am I that is within you, and it by my anointing that you will stand against the forces of evil till you return to my kingdom to mend and heal the wounds of battle, be encouraged for you are my child and victory will be guaranteed for thy faithfulness.” For it is then that all fear was cast away and my spirit and courage was renewed with confidence ready
to fight another day.

 

 

John Thomas attends the New Media Technology Charter school.  On Thursday, July 14, 2011, (his 17th birthday) he attended the PS Jr. Poetry workshop at the West Oak Lane Library with Teresa FitzPatrick.  The attached work is the result of his attendance. John lives in the West Oak Lane section of Philadelphia.

In this lugubrious land
where coltan and fighting decide to rhyme
where the Congolese and its splintering neighbors forget
what they’re really fighting about,
it’s easy to not hear Parfaite’s dive into a lake of dreams
and dismiss the battles fought on her brave brown body
like she was the war.

What happened to simple desires unattached to the manufactured desires of outsiders
like fu-fu pounded fresh, obnoxiously yellow
mated with deep fried Nile tilapia
that Parfaite had pulled a thousand times from Lake Kivu
like Sundays after Mass when she moved with the shield of some god’s word
like those voices of the market folk haggling just to extend the day
like the dress makers exciting Parfaite’s sense of her own beauty
with a bounty of pagne sold by the meter.

When the sun was obnoxiously yellow
and the cries for justice and the fall of machetes clashed in evil dissonance
Parfaite carried a basket pregnant with the bloom of coffee flowers
and she hummed a tune to match her simple delight
when he attacked
with a broken bayonet and a mercenary’s penis
in front of a basket of fallen flowers
not just her vagina, but her place in the world.

Parfaite returned home with her story between her legs,
backs briskly turned,
time did a wicked dance
she was left with life inside her belly
that kicked
and would never be welcomed.

Abandoned, displaced
and now carrying a sinless sprite pushing for its own attention
Parfaite, wrapped in new found pieces of pagne-audaciously yellow-
returned to Lake Kivu
to the memories it held
to the sustenance it gave
to the laughter of the its fish
and with a pardon to her god
she jumped in
tightly holding on to her sense of her resplendent beauty
and humming a tune to lull her baby into a watery dream.