Five Poems for the Morning

i feel like these are all terrible and i’m sorry

1:
I was in the middle of thinking,
Big, beasts of thought,
And you and your dog walked up.
So now I’m thinking about you.
The big grand plans my mind makes for you at 7 AM.

2:
I wonder about the man who took a photo of his wife for the back cover of the book I’m reading.
Why did he insist on putting his name on the photo credit?
How did he ask her to pose?
Did she take a long time to get dressed?
Is that how he sees her, slightly stiff and turtle-necked?
Did he look at the photo and think it was good,
Did he put it in context of someone else’s world and think it was okay?
Did he think, well I think she looks perfectly fine, she’s never been gorgeous, but her friends will like this one?
How many photos did she ask him to take?

3:
I’ve done a lot of staring at the plant on the corner of my porch
It’s my yew tree I’m growing in a bucket,
Well a container.
It’s where I look when I’ve woken up too early in the morning,
And don’t want to be on my phone,
So I sit outside, and look at the horizon,
And the plant is in the way.
I wonder if it knows how long I’ve looked at it.
How many of my thoughts it holds,
Or if it even likes being outside.

4:
I told him it’s an empathy issue,
I was tired and he was mad,
And he kept telling me these things I’d only heard people on tv say,
Things like I can call those people whatever I want.
And they can just deal with it, it doesn’t hurt me so it shouldn’t hurt them.
And I thought I was special and still a full person to you, because I was somehow in your circle,
But I’m not, am I? I’m still not fully human, not fully you.

5:
I don’t have time to make cookies.
Or the money to make fudge,
I’d rather just buy something,
Or have someone make it for me,
Mom come make something for me.

Ten Poems of Jumbled Mess

1:
I do not have a big singing voice,
I have this little flitty thing that sounds better with other people.
I will sing with you and make you sound better,
I’m breathy and weak on my own.
I’d really prefer to sing with you and the tape,
Really,
Actually, for most things, I’ll do it by myself, I can do it with a recording if I have to,
But I like it best when I have you there with me.

2:
I like to move through my sliding screen door as quietly as possible in the morning.
Making so little sound,
Socks on the carpet,
So as to not bother the world,
With more sound it doesn’t need.

3:
There’s enough room in there.
There’s got to be enough room, right?
You can love us all enough,
Well, me enough,
You can still love me.
Even after you’re married,
We can stay friends,
And you’ll still take my 2 A.M. calls,
When my family member dies and I don’t have anyone else.
There’s enough room there, right?

4:
My therapist had to tell me,
In effect,
It doesn’t bother me when you share bad things,
You’re not a burden, part of his job,
And that he thinks he doesn’t know how I’m still going on doing all this, meaning life.
Half of me doesn’t believes him, half of me thinks that if I believe him I’ll turn into a monster.

5:
We went on a road trip driving through Idaho.
And I saw the rivers with rocks running below the little thin twisty highway.
Rafting suddenly makes sense. Given how beautiful it is.
I’d sit on a fat, yellow cushion to get an excuse to stare, and tow a beer cooler behind me.

6:
I have so much to do.
I want to spend all morning making a complicated chocolate cake,
Where I’ll have to go to the store twice, once because we didn’t have the right oil, the second because I forgot I was almost out of brown sugar.
But if you told me I had to make the cake,
Suddenly Batman on tv would sound so much more interesting.

7:
I told you, that I’m worried being me will make me lose more friends,
More friend’s wives will ask me to stop messaging them,
Telling me long messages about crossing boundaries, text paragraphs, single spaced.
You say I wouldn’t want to lose you as a friend,
And I cry a little more, because right now you’re not lying, but you will be later.

8:
Introspection is contagious,
I tell someone I think too much about how loud I laugh,
And I can see on their face they’re doing the same.
That’s no good.
Laugh your obnoxious laugh!
Scare those birds!
Don’t mind me with my circle of critical nonsense.

9:
I bought fifty dollars worth of clothes two days ago, and now I can’t buy groceries for a month.
But mom I got a blazer, a real blazer that fits and it’s brown and I’ll look like a real professor,
She says that’s good you deserve it you’re always so good with money.
Fine Mom, I’ll judge myself then if you won’t.

10:
How do you explain the subtext of what someone is saying when they’ve just met them and haven’t known them all their lives?
I called your brother after you,
Is code for, why didn’t you pick up your phone?
You must’ve been out drinking,
Is code for I was worried about you but I don’t want to say anything, and I can’t believe you forgot me, you terrible daughter.
But if you asked, they probably wouldn’t say that, oh no, that’s not what I meant at all!
How do you go about writing that down?