The World

The poet who wants to express the world
ends up writing a sentence
broken into small fragments
like an insect
leaping
from place
to place.

This work by Scott Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Balboa Park, August 2011

Settled in the shade of a tree,
next to tourists talking of Istanbul,
I trek with my pen and mind
through the imagination before me.

Baudelaire, my backwards companion,
guides me to the depths of pain.
I rebel. The children swim in the fountain.

I am distracted and detracted.
A woman asks me, in a thick accent,
to use my mobile phone. Her boy
sits close to me and he jumps up to leave.

Two men play the guitar in the distance.
I cannot hear them, but I assume it is beautiful.
"Right there! Right there!" a child yells and points.

And I am right there, absorbed in it all.
The wind gusts and I am lost.
Teenagers laugh maniacally.
I can hear the music now.

In this park, it is easy to sit
and reflect on humankind -
constantly in a state of movement
and rest, a mix of language
and cultures, united under one mission:
to be joyful in this moment.

This work by Scott Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

I Clothe This Page

Slowly, letter by letter, I clothe this page.
I have given it a bath, carefully washed
off the cliches, and dried it in the sun.

My hands are soft and pruney, yet calloused
from years of writing on virginal, milky white
paper - each word plucked from the shadows.

Three ships

Three ships come in at night,
protected by a bank of fog
over the bay.

The ships are silent. The wood creaks
like the wind in a forest.

It reminds me that time
is infinite, but we continue
to decay without thought.

The three ships anchor and are still.

My breath, my breath remains.

I want to write a poem

I want to write a poem,
but my legs won't reach the ground.

I want to write a poem,
but there's iodine in my coffee.

I want to write a poem,
but he never smiles back
and the air is too polluted
and the band can't play
and my curtain's always closed
and the inspiration isn't coming.

I want to write a poem
so bad in my heart
but my brain says stop.

I want to write a poem
but Prince already did it
and some other people wrote
a poem the exact same way
so I might as well give up
before I even start.

This work by Scott Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.