kdmillerpoetry

[kdmillerpoetry]

Untitled

9/16/2017

i sat on the corner and stared until you woke up in the car, later, the sun dipping under the trees and painting the air dark blue i remembered the vermillion summer sun frowned deeply, for some reason i didn't say anything you looked at me and smiled i had to two hunters came out of the woods empty handed. i looked over your side and over the seat: saw your blue reflection, the moonlight sheer and objects seen in mirror are closer than they appear

[kdmillerpoetry]

the problem with the future

10/17/2017

it's not real. not here. not yet.

driving past the streets i've grown to memorize clapboard and craftsmen, american

summers drifting over me like haze and all the memories that ensnare me all i know is the past and that scares me

i am thinking of exurban new jersey and thinking of last week,

the lights across the Delaware river at midnight reflected perfectly but not quite,

orange red and white oil slick in the black of the water, the lights of cars creeping across occasionally. i burn a loose match out, toss it into the water szzz

ah, god, you say, looking up from your stoop i love that sound, you recall you used to burn them out

on your hands because you did not feel them and for a while there is nothing say. you look back down again and it is quiet.

but look, i stand up, almost yell, almost wading into the cold October water and

maddening with interest by the second. is that a light i see, in the water? a glance towards you

again you look up, now leaning to the side the faintest glimmer,

you conclude. i wonder, out loud, what is it. you tell me it is hard to be like us.

i ask, what's us? eyes still on the water. oh, well, you know.

then i understood. striking a match again and pacing round the riverbank

i throw stones now, smooth ones and rough ones, each making a different sound as they hit the water

trying to hit the glimmer then stopping, wondering why? i sit back down, chastising myself for my inability to relax

you listen to my heart oh its fast tap my thigh as you hear it, head on chest

dundundundun i laugh because my heart's gonna kill me one day just like it did my grandmother's father

and so on and so forth. driving back,

on the bridge, i shake my head. point at the darkened spot

hey, thats where we were earlier i don't tell you this, but i look for the shine in the water. i don't find it.

[kdmillerpoetry]

I need my small, meaningless lies. I need all my self-created semi-truths. It’s the only way for me to keep exclusive parts of myself to myself. Believe me, I do not even perceive them as lies. It’s something different that keeps happening inside my head. At the same time, I long to tell you the truth about me, always. I want to share with you each important or unimportant detail and feel and fully embrace the very act of sharing. But it occurs to me that it’s the hardests of tasks; I hate it. I hate unveiling bits and pieces of anything permanent or temporary that resides in me. I loathe it with my heart. You can find more honesty in the smallest of my gestures rather in my words; my words are too impatient, too loose, too doomed in some way.

Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1 (via mirroir)

#q

[kdmillerpoetry]

rock brook

*arguably one of my most popular poems*

4/12/2016 "Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme, Ce beau matin d'été si doux: Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme Sur un lit semé de cailloux?" "My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path, a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed?" Charles Baudelaire I sat on the mossy footstool that lied by the brook- I had to really open my ears to hear the soft regurgitation coming from the clear muddy water, gliding over the slate, piled up the road, the one I drove on that one day we snuck out, was placed gently beside it, uptop a little cliff, I felt this a beatific metaphor. The air felt amorphous, held a quality I couldn't quite put my finger on. and then I saw a tree, a crooked one who had seemed to grow on the bank of the creek because life, it seems, imitates art. Its trunk dipped until it ever so slightly grazed the water its elm fingers almost almost. I smiled when I saw this, for it gave me hope. I likened myself to the horseflies and new tadpoles that flittered, seraphic in quality, borne with the quality of new life- the innocent quality the one that just made me feel tainted, the more I surrounded myself with it. The Friday afternoons on the avenue, with its port wine air and this bubbling black slate brook are the only places that innocence lives- if I had realized how quiet the soft gargling of the cherub water was I'd have stopped the car and baptized ourselves In it.

#ghsf