I’ve started writing some poetry lately, not because I’m a poet, but because I think it’s an important discipline to make my writing more creative. There are some things that can be said through poetry that can’t be expressed otherwise. And I’m sharing them here once again, not because I think they’re any good as far as poetry goes, but because I think that there are some ideas that come out of them that are not able to come through other forms of writing.

This first one is about how sometimes our best intentions and our proposed solutions seem like good ideas from where we sit, but they are not at all natural to the environment or the culture that we’re trying to introduce them to. Sometimes it’s better for us to just listen to the nature of it all rather than try to make it better.

 

The Lights

 

There aren’t supposed to be lights here

Only stars and treefrogs

and the moonlit clouds.

Then again Man always seems

to stain the purity of it all.

“Innovation” he says.

But is it better to illuminate

than to train the eyes to see

how things look

from the point-of-view

of the evening dew

itself, invisible?

 

Ignoring the invitation,

Nature’s original intention

To dance in the dark

with the stars and the treefrogs

and the moonlit clouds.

Listen to her whisper,

“This is what I call Clarity.”

 

This second poem is just meant to reflect what most of my day to day life is like working here trying to manage a nonprofit that depends on foreign means of support which also means foreign understandings of the way things are “supposed to” work in the world.

 

Managing a Nonprofit

 

Siting in the gas station

waiting for the bones to fall

Sweating

The guy next to me

deemed deodorant

unnecessary today.

And the fan’s not oscillating

The wind’s not coming my way

Nothing is coming my way

Stagnant.

I can taste the poverty,

my poverty

It’s a bitter drop of salt water

choking me.

 

Tap, tap, tap, and send out a plea

A reminder

A desperate cry

A dirty offer to sell my body and soul

But it’s already 4:00.

My time, not at the bank

so I refine the lie

that I began to craft

when I woke up this morning

No, in my dreams last night

Or the day that I came here

for why

the bones didn’t fall.