Friday Night Lights

-EJoveJohnson

The Art of Being

How do I reconcile The parts of myself 

That exist 

In worlds that cannot touch 

Each other

But, yet

Somehow exist

In the present participle

With or without empirical backing 

Because some things 

Simply are

Beyond the scope of objectivity

I still can’t own my adjectives though

Because I am the art of correspondences

But also

Diametric opposition 

-EJoveJohnson

Stranger

Every day in every way I grow
Stranger
In this body stranger than the mind it does not know
Soul deed and countenance so wholly out of tune
A glimmer in a mirror glimpsed so utterly askew
Whose is this face, whose are these thoughts, in whose mind do they belong
For mine is surely not the one from whence these wild things come
Who is this person growing here wild in her cage
Why is this person sentenced here, apathy her stage
A stage a cage a half filled page familiar yet unknown
How is it that I am here, so very far from home
A place I don’t remember well, perhaps one I’ve never known
But home is more than place and time
And I am more than she
A girl who grows within a cage
It’s walls she cannot see

All that’s left

I sink below the horizon
Into the quiet protection of absence
I have reached the noble inertia of unbieng
Perfect silent stillness extending to eternity
Only
There can be no freedom for me
From me
Who imprisoned myself
I, remain
-EJoveJohnson

Feral

He wore her wild like the crown of a fallen kingdom

Celebrating the mythos of her savagery, in the context of his taming it

He never loved her, could never love her, anymore than one loves the carcass of a withered rose

But feral things don’t survive in cages, any more than fire survives under glass

That’s where he went wrong, see, he could no more possess her than he could the trade winds

No more tame her than even the most skilled seaman tame the waves

She didn’t kill him, no

His pride was his downfall

Her hands just guided the blade
-EJoveJohnson

Betwixt

There are the things I cannot say. Thoughts that grow in those dark parts of my mind, the places I can’t talk about. It’s almost like they come from someone else. But, they taste so very very good. Sometimes, in that liminal space between control and freedom they slip out into the world of sound, eliciting shock and hurt, but also an electric pleasure.

It’s rage, certainly, but what happens when you silence that rage for too long…. You suppress it and suppress it and eventually it just stops knocking. Stops roiling at the never ending whining and bitching and criticizing, the thousand little injustices you face everyday. Instead blooming, deadly as any nightshade, into something completely distinct living within you. There’s power in that rage, tremendous power. Only you have to be at home in the darkness to be able to use it. Sometimes, in that hedge crossing between waking and dreaming, I see her. The child of my silenced rage. I wonder what she does while I sleep.

 -EJoveJohnson

Assimilate

People experience in different ways
And
I, am no different
In that
My experience, is different from yours
I will not perform my experience
To
Appease your expectations
I will not
Perform for you
The ritual of superficial fealty in the court of public opinion
You hashtag for justice
Selfie for attention
Petition the gods of social media for recognition
That can be defined in advertising dollars
But
That is not how i experience the world
And
I will not lie for you
-EJoveJohnson

Pious

You boast of God
Of your godliness and goodliness
Award winning humility, a performance
But
It is not faith that has raised you up
Nor whispered superiority in your ear
It is not the God of redemption, or love
Rather the god of hellfire and fear
Yours is the god of competitive virtue
Preaching faith that is not faith, but hate
For all your rantings and rosaries
You are humanity in effigy
A wickerman whose bones are made of straw
-EJoveJohnson

Truth

I went to sleep a little girl wondering at existence

Only

I woke up a woman horrified by her world at war

Surrounded by the asymmetry of industrialization

We, as a species, have made the Earth shudder on her axis

More than once

In a single day, more people than I could hope to know in a lifetime

Die, unnoticed

Multiplied a hundred times, the number of non-human cohabitants killed with less thought still

How long since we last regarded our giver of life, our planet, as a treasure entrusted to our care

As

Anything more than a convenience of materials to be stripped bare

NASA has a fleet of nuclear warheads pointed skyward for planetary defense

But

WE are the extinction level event

The selfish nihilistic greed of infants incarnate

Floating fetish to fetish in the techno-stupor of the twenty-first century

Ensconced from emotion by the Narcoceutical war on social responsibility

I want the world to break my heart

I want to wake up angry, afraid of our free fall to oblivion

I want to fall asleep with eyes on fire for my refusal to waste tears in place of action

Because

However we gild it

This is life amid ruins

Populated by the ghosts of people not yet dead

And it should not be a vacation

I would rather awaken to the cataclysmic reality of Oz than gaze at its rainbows
-EJoveJohnson

Relativity

I always start my poems with grand ideas

Condensed down into single words

So full

They can ONLY be understood in abstraction

The heavy lifting of MY human existence

Outsourced in pursuit of transcendent literary greatness

Only

I’m just an impetuous girl from New Jersey

Damn near three decades in and sometimes, the person I undress at the end of the day is not the one I dressed at its start

I have no idea what I’m capable of, or what I’m not… or even who I’m going to be two weeks from now

This poem

Was supposed to start with

“Time”

How you need more of it

And

How I just don’t seem to have enough to undo what you spent a lifetime learning

It was supposed to prove that taking the next 50 years on faith is as easy as breathing

But

It isn’t is it….

It’s the rest of forever as far as we’re concerned

The entirety of our human experience signed, sealed and delivered

It’s the end of our youth

And that.. just… doesn’t seem fair

I’m in no rush to get to the end of our story

I know I don’t wanna glue anyone else’s dentures in

But

I want those dentures to be as far away and abstract as the words I use to start my poems

You’ve already taught me more about who I am and what I’m capable of in three years than I was able to figure out on my own in the preceding 24

And I want to spend the rest of my days exploring your depths because I have never in my life met someone so utterly captivating

This poem hasn’t gone where I expected, but then neither has my life so far… or yours

Somehow all those twists and turns and tears and tribulations

All those decisions large and small

Lead us to be standing in front of each other, that night, several years removed from this moment where our story began

This poem came into being as an explanation of the relativity of time

How three years CAN measure up to fifty and inform your choices about forever

I realize, though, that it was NEVER about grand ideas like time or even relativity

It was about an impetuous girl from New Jersey who fell in love with a quiet boy from Brooklyn

How she loved him so much that, perhaps selfishly, she wanted to claim him for all the rest of forever

That the magnitude of love she felt for him made her want, for the first time, to share that love with a being of our own creation

Really

It’s about how a quiet boy from Brooklyn taught an impetuous girl from New Jersey that in the universe of moments that are the rest of our forever time -, as a linear pressure cooker of frantic expectation, – doesn’t exist

We set the pacing of our story and before we get old together we should be young together first

-EJoveJohnson

Lullaby

I,
am fear
Not yet,
not ever, given name
Relentless whispered companion
Singing your certainty of regret
You, yourself, you fed me
Born in indecision
Bred in indiscretion
Ever chasing the smoke of someone else’s flame
Genuflect at the consecration of failures you ordained
Our world, your manifested weakness
Child of your gilded cage
I, alone, will sing you to your sleep
Requiem lullaby absent even dreams
-EJoveJohnson

Immortal

The eternity lens of examining
Deeds done
And
Loves gone
And
Words perhaps never given weight of sound
Battling the absence of existence is totality
I do not fear you
God
Or gods
Whatever your incarnate appetite for subjugation
While you
Higher power
Are burdened by this notion of omniscience
I, am burdened by no such forever
My world however defined by pleasure and pain is
Finite
I, will end
I
Therefore
Am potent beyond your wildest imagining
It is you, unending moment, who should fear me
-EJoveJohnson