Category: poetry

It feels like…

It feels like –

I’m in love!

I wanna dance in the kitchen,

and scream as loud as I can until I can’t breath in anymore.

Not because I’m angry, but because I need to

move.

It feels like

JUMP!

Dive!

Spin ’round and ’round in circles

until I can’t stop laughing

and I can’t see straight.

It feels like

grab all the people I love

and squeeze them

because we’re all dying.

But no one else seems to see it

except for me.

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, 1/15/2016

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I don’t even know if I should call this a poem. More like something impulsive I had to write and get out this morning. Maybe someday I’ll refine it and it’ll be pretty but, meh. It is what it is.

Old Places

Old Places

For those places
no longer home.
Kept safest
in your minds own.

Heart aches for trodden roads.
Soul weighs with forgotten ghosts.

A hum whose words are lost,
of curtains drawn,
and bridges crossed.

The streets recede
twisted and strange.
I know this dream
if only by name.

This Avenue’s familiar.
The gates –
The doors –
In another world similar
I’ve been before.

They beckon from pictures,
from over my shoulder.
Yet once I’ve turned,
they slip even farther.

Someplace traversed
and somewhere fond.
I can never return
once they’ve gone.

– Rachel R. Vasquez, 11/11/2015

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“If I come back, it will be a place, but it won’t be home any longer.” – The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

I’m learning a common pattern in my life. From old jobs to old schools, once you’ve left a place in that point of time, you can never return. Even if you do, it will never be the same. It never feels the same. You can miss what it was, wish for it to become that place again, but that place is just a place once it’s no longer home.

Child’s Fairy Tale

When I was a child, I saw with blinded eyes.

White sheets by my side down my living room aisle.

Human porcelain came to life and lip-gloss gave me years.

Plastic plugs clipped on my ears, a lollipop took away tears.

Pairs of socks stuffed into my shirt, toes sink into giant shoes.

Little pink frills upon my skirt and a piece of rubber to chew.

Pink cotton fluffs propped up on sticks, games that I never lose.

Magic tricks and vanilla splotched cheeks,

No sickness a mother couldn’t soothe.

 

Sunflower fields and golden wings around my head.

Bare feet pitter-pattering, when I believed everything said.

When a penny was a lot and money had colors.

Boy was the world nice then!

Tucked into bed with a goodnight kiss,

to awaken to a reality without mend.

 

Empty spaces during dark phases,

the world just cries and wails.

No white horses, just fifty percent divorces,

a world full of broken fairy tales.

Ripped pages and dried ink, the fantasy is now the past.

Tears at the brink from this reality, breaking the heart like glass.

Dying trees, unknown disease, and an education that always fails.

So next time you see a little girl with wings, underneath her golden veil.

Just keep passing by; it’d best be wise, to not say a single word.

Just hope she doesn’t open her eyes,

peaceful and undisturbed.

 

For being a child is a luxury,

she deserves the sugarcoated lies.

At least for a while, at least for some time,

Let the poor girl taste the sweets.

Because as she lives and the pages all end,

that’s all it’ll ever be.

A sweetness with a bad after taste.

Just a nice sugar coated dream.

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, 4/30/2006, edited 4/30/2015

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Wow, I wrote this almost an entire decade ago! I found it and realized I had written it the same day as today, except it was 2006. I thought it was meant to be published here today. This was originally inspired by a quote from the bible and my dark afterthoughts at the time. I was purposely aiming for that nursery rhyme feel.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, felt like a child, reasoned like a child: when I became a man, I put from me childish ways

1 Corinthians 13:11

Untitled

Like tryna’ to catch water.
Could never win, no matter how much I fought her.

A pointless carousel, I watched it dissolve.
Those revolving doors,
couldn’t take it anymore,
as they took us round and round,
and I wound up a deserter.

Couldn’t pretend, couldn’t float on the deep end,
felt like an accessory to murder.

Whenever she defiled her worth, didn’t matter what she deserved,
but I couldn’t weather the rewind.

Had to repeat history, had to re-loop misery,
Couldn’t remain blind.

I tried to be hero, tried wise mediator.
Instead I became a powerless spectator.

Maybe my shoulders weren’t strong.
Like slow motion she willingly leaped off
into an ocean of sharks.

Like rolling under a the wheel of a truck.
Like running through a fire.
Poking an electric socket, she was dead set on drowning –
Wired.
No matter the life jacket, what advice she gets,
the only place she could live
were those thorny roads I abandoned.

When a part of you gets gangrene,
you cut it off.
There’s nothing more helpless
than loving one who doesn’t love herself.

And so I swept it under the rug.
Saved myself even though it hurt.
Had to release her from my clutch because I loved her too much,
and I was done being burned.

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, 3/12/2015

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I once had a friend who was more like my sister. She was a part of me, but she was no good for me. And she was no good to herself. Sometimes when you love someone, you’ve gotta let them go. It’s one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make in my life, and sometimes, I miss her… I hope she’s out there, and I hope she’s finally learned to love herself.

Beloved Stranger

Beloved Stranger
I knew you in the dark
Where the depths
Blind us from one another

I knew that gaping hole
That swallows more and more of you
With each passing day

I knew the wandering in the desert
When the sun blanches our eyes
And it’s too cold at night

Even though I knew you
I never found you
Beloved stranger

– Rachel R. Vasquez, 2/12/2015

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Was thinking of a cousin of mine who would have been the same age as me, but she passed away years ago. We were a lot alike, but living states away, we never realized it. Long story short, she suffered from depression, hung out with the wrong crowd, and passed away getting drunk one night with friends before their car pitched into a lake or river. She gave up one day, and God took her.

Sometimes I wonder how I was never able to find someone in the same darkness I was fumbling around in at the time. I wonder sometimes, what if we would’ve found each other somehow? Would she still be here today?

The penguin on a recent episode of Gotham had an odd moment of wisdom. He said, “Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light”. Could I have been her friend in the darkness? I will never know now…

Pigeons

Sopa de paloma.
Does mama pluck them?
From the fence?
From the street?

Before she chucks them,
not from the sky,
but brethren
with feet upright
into the pot.

Does she fetch a price for their beaks?

Do the eyes get so hot,
they burst?
Not chicken,
the birds?

Do they come from allá?

The pigeons in the soup
perched on roof ridges,
not pollo,
but bludgeoned herds,
not frozen,
but all bones and sofrito.

No lo entiendo.

Mama looks to mommy being told
“Deja la niña,” as she cooks.

Tell me quick!
With haste!
Do they know what I sip?
La paloma, not poultry.
Will I ever be forgiven?

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, ?/?/2014

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My mother once teased me as a kid that “mama”, an elderly woman who I loved as my grandmother even though she wasn’t, was actually feeding me pigeon soup and not chicken soup. Of course, this was a lie, but I might’ve believed it a little at the time. This poem was inspired by that tall tale. Thanks, mom. 🙂

A Country

Somewhere in me,
a country rises,
of cobble-stoned roads,
street lamps like raised eyes,
3 panel windows on brick,
of blown glass, wind chimes, and freshly baked bread.

Somewhere where it’s winter.
Somewhere I only find
when I’m taken from everything else.

A man I don’t know,
but is the type only I could ever truly know
on the other side of a barely cracked door split to show
heavy wooden furniture, sofas and curtains,
answers in a defeated tone to his cynical father,
“She’ll probably go back when the winter’s over anyway.”

I know he means me,
but I’m not sure where it is I’ve come from to return to.

He has dark hair that whips in the front the way beaters fold cake batter,
glasses, a long sleeve sweater on his long arms –
red.
I push the door open with my breath not being the only thing I leave behind.

Dusting a layer of snow from my red coat,
I tell him it’s cold outside
before inviting myself to his flank.
If he was surprised,
he only let it slip for a moment before he secures me against him with one arm.
Warm.

Does he know I heard?
A shop owner,
a woman I apparently know who knows us,
but only him individually,
asks him a favor to which
he answers with a grumble.

He looks at me look at him
and changes his mind.

“Let’s go.”

The kiss is as quick as the dot of an exclamation.
I’m not sure it happened,
But my face senses the intrusion and bares teeth.

She gives me that look.
The, “I know you’re staying whether or not it’s winter forever,” look.
Out in the winter,
my coat and his red scarf,
he reaches for my cold fingers
before country sinks again.

I open my eyes to the
winter that hasn’t gone,
but I’ve left against my will.

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez ?/?/2014

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Dead Silence

Pastel halls sound like hinging basketball courts
Beneath tapping feet on rhombus patterns
Accordions hiss up and down measuring cups
Roller coaster beads tie together lie detectors
Next to the man with the white squared collar
Who likes to recite a sutra mantra
Tempo machines beep with ticking tocks
That pump with pulsing hearts under flickering fluorescent
The busboys squeak restaurant carts
By the neon jukeboxes
After you pass the Hallmark next to Times Square
Where stocks scroll over lottery tickets
Attached to a crowd of waiters
Who never win

– Rachel R. Vasquez, 4/9/2008

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Wurzelbrot

I like me a man with a bit o’ boyish charm
who smiles from his cheek
has Andes chocolate mints on his huff
and a scolding as hot as firebrand
arms that can gently swing a heavy jackhammer
a name with rolling R’s and lulling L’s
who’s baritone can ace the Richter scale
a hide like the ha’s on frostbitten mittens
a bull dog mug
who shows culinary care in getting the rise
out of hissing yeses and the grease from fatty hips
coat hangers for shoulders
because they carry my burdens
and a preference to sleep in Wurzelbrot knots.

– Rachel R. Vasquez, 2/15/2010

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School Bus

I
hinggge and hissss
at every red
where all that is smaller
than I
come to screeching halts
before bumping nose to ass
And those that are smallest
are the only
smalls I stop for

I bend every corner
like I’m trying to stretch it
Break it
Make a hole in it
Rip it
Make myself a cringe-worthy memory
They dread my visits

And I spin
like a stalling toy top
about to lay furiously
but passively
lazily
to its side

ready to die
I squeak and rust
with every movement
because every mile
is a protest

my face
a
bright
yellow
warning
morning

my mouth
open wide
as I eat your children
frappe
and
crush
with every
bump

before I spit them out
just a tad
influenced by
exteriors you have
no
control
over

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, 2/7/2010

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PS: I hate school buses with a passion. Rode them as a kid and I think they’re terrible…