Short Insights

I.

It no longer feels weird.

To share the bed

With textbooks.

A constant presence.

Not friends, never were.

Neither the opposite.

Just there. Every night.

II.

Six in the evening.

Already!

I am half-done.

With everything.

My back is all done

With me.

III.

I stopped going out.

At night.

We fell out.

My shadow and I.

IV.

It has rained,

Enough already.

It is dead.

The cloud.

Above my head.

The forecast, once again,

Was incorrect.

©Aaysid

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

Photo by fotografierende from Pexels

Lovely/Unlovely

A sideways braid

Remains unfrazzled

Throughout the day,

A friendship bracelet

Does not break,

And contact lenses

Stay put through

All of it;

The literal pleasant

In the unpleasantness

Of everything else!

©Aaysid

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
Leo Tolstoy

Not Lost in Translation

Sometimes you read something, and you cannot stop thinking about it afterwards. At least for a few days. I have finished reading a collection of poems by Fernando Pessoa called, I Have More Souls Than One, translated in English by Jonathan Griffin. There were a couple of poems in it that made me wish I knew Portuguese so that I could read the original versions of those poems. When a verse reads this beautifully tragic even in a language it was not penned in, how magical it must be in a language of its birth!

With this thought making rounds in my head, I wrote this poem today:

I have heard you talk,

And I have seen

What you have seen,

But I still don’t know

You at all;

We are worlds apart,

Words-that-we-speak apart,

But may not be apart

In your art.

Maybe if I could

Walk your walk

By becoming a part of what

You do with your pen,

I may still limp,

But I might not fall anymore.

©Aaysid

Photo by Kaboompics .com from Pexels

Too Distant

Someone who is only

a text message away

can still be too far away,

because the distance

that can be measured

in short units of words

might still be just as great.

©Aaysid

Photo by mahe haroutinian from Pexels

Muted

She had resorted

to muting conversations

right where they’d become

all about the people

who were not

the ones making them,

and now she cannot recall

the last time

she was talked to.

©Aaysid

Not Real

I thought there was fire

In at least one of our hearts

Even though there never was smoke.

We kept seeing things

That weren’t really there

And hearing words nobody even spoke.

Then you said that I

Was like one of the charms

That had fallen from your bracelet and broke.

©Aaysid

Photo by Ellis Mbeku from Pexels

Showers

It sometimes rains

inside my brain,

falls hard and strong

and lasts for days,

but when it ends

is when I get

something that makes it

worth the pain;

too many puddles

that I can jump in,

over and over

and all over again.

©Aaysid

Photo by Ave Calvar Martinez from Pexels

Five Little Things I Know Now

I know now that to get by

you should have questions

but none of those nagging questions

should begin with a why.

I know now that to get through

to someone who believes that you

are not worth listening to,

you have to believe that they aren’t too.

I know now that those

who only show you their tears,

could be seen laughing with the ones

they actually hold close.

I know now that to sleep

even a little at night

you should part ways with the memories

you do not want to keep.

I know now that to freely breathe in

the air outside your windows

you have to learn to make peace

with the stagnant air within.

It is time to buy another planner to put atop the other empty planners on my desk.

May you find countless reasons to smile in 2021.

Happy New Year!

©Aaysid