Coffee Stains
we hold the world in the palm of our hands. it’s time we take a step back. deep breath. see the bigger picture.
I am a seed, I suppose. The chemicals that compose me will decompose and bleed my life force into the ground. My roots reach down, spread out, and surround me in a fortress of solitude. Let the earth, which resides in the depth of my iris, be imbued with the virus of piety. The paradox lies in the sense that in this unstable and uncertain society we leave no room for dubiety of any variety. Cling to me. I am a deity. I will hold you tighter than the grip of addiction from the nicotine in the cigarette sticks I slip between my rose red lips. While like Atlas of old I spin on my axis and hold the two poles of this realm in calloused rough palms, and direct you to follow the stars as you sail across my sun-kissed skin and find there in, within this wrinkle of time we call life, my reason for living eternally. I am diurnally hoping my internal stains are from coffee not sin. I am akin with the nature of time and its flow, but, for reasons unknown, I’m not bound by it. I stem from a place before the beginning. Yesterday I was, I am, and will be. Today I am me. Tomorrow the world will keep spinning and my garden will bloom. Roses entomb my core as their thorns draw out of me a river of tears. So, cheers with a coffee mug that will spill down its side to restain the inside of me. In hindsight my open third eye could always see that time and me are cognate. We are intimate. I am infinite.
About the Creator
Youri Joseph
just a kid who thinks in ink and speaks in rhyme
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I Don’t Know
I’ve experienced many things the few years I’ve grown on this globe that have led me to an undeniable truth and it’s this: There are a lot of things that I simply don’t know. And don’t get me wrong. I’ve craved understanding on a universal scale. I’ve searched far and wide for the holy grail of knowledge, but I’m not sure it exists. I tend to convince myself to insist that I resist to live amidst this mist of obscurity that shrouds me from reaching concrete conclusions about life’s greatest confusions. I’ve wanted to know with a surety whether or not God is real. But what can be used as indisputable evidence? And I don’t mean to speak with disrespect or irreverence. That said I also cannot conceal how I feel, and I have felt a presence. Whether we’re presented life after this present one I may never be sure, but let me assure you I have felt the essence of pure energy before. But the question ‘was it God or a ghost?’ I have no answer for. Is God a metaphor to cope with my unyielding ignorance? If so, should that make any difference? I don’t know. I just don’t. But I won’t tell a believer they’re wasting their time because as far as I know I’m wasting mine. And who’s to say that we can’t both be right. Light and night exist simultaneously all be they contrasting. The shade we’ve been casting over opposing beliefs causes nothing but grief and conflict. We’re convicts. Prisoners to a fixed mindset that derives from our primitive nature. This way of thinking is crazy. Got us going ballistic. Guru Sam once told me the nature of man is animalistic and thinking realistically he’s gotta be right. Did you know most mammals are color blind? And like animals we tend to see in black or in white. It’s either or, we refuse to even consider the ‘and’. We draw a line in the proverbial sand, seek not to understand our fellow man or try even to comprehend how we can go about things in a better way. We fear what is foreign unless it’s cars or chardonnay. Pay no respect to the perspectives that differ from our own. Our directives are home grown in our own respective motherlands. But why can’t home be Mother Earth? Are our differing opinions worth world war or resentment towards what some girl who’s pregnant might think about abortion or child birth? To me being liberal, independent, or conservative should have as much clout as using jam, jelly, or preserves in your pb&j it’s not fucking important. And no, I’m not down playing the stresses or consequences of issues such as abortion. I’m only asking what all the endless debates have accomplished. We’re allowed to think differently. And yes, we’re allowed to express it. I’m only suggesting we attempt to stop all the hate. Entire countries and states are becoming irate over news that is fake. We don’t have to allow the government to create these illusions or dictate the confusion through their oral pollution all because they state nonsense with a straight look on their face. Hear me out. I think there’s a reason they silenced the letter ‘K’ in the word ‘Know’. To make us think ‘Now’ is when we have to figure it out. That’s not true. If they can quiet the ‘K’ we can erase the ‘W’. ‘Now’ becomes ‘No’ as in no mother fucker we will not remain under you. No longer will we be suppressed or falsely impressed with your staggering ability to digress our nature back to men in their caves. No. We will no longer blindly behave as if we were your children. We’re not. You’ve fathered nothing but rage while Mother Nature has taught us to evolve and to change. And we have. Having all the answers and being right is not all it’s chalked up to be. Living life with love and understanding brings balance and harmony. So go on. Ask me why gravity doesn't turn all clouds into fog. Ask me what colors are duller in the eyes of a dog. Ask me about the heavens, the cosmos, the gods. Ask me if it matters to whom, how, or if we pray. Ask me if there’s life after life or just endless gray. Ask me when mankind will find it high time to turn from its ways. I don’t know. I just don’t. But I know that’s okay.
By Youri Joseph5 years ago in Poets
Foot Bindings
I asked my grandmother how she knew she'd fallen in love. I am not sure I ever did love him, she said. This was before I met my husband. I was naive, a naked spring, a raw nerve of a thing. That cannot ever be me, I knew. Sadness swept in gently like a Moscow thaw. It is no simple thing, looking into a woman's vast soul and seeing its foot bindings. Now, in Italy divorced with my skin singed off, when I say I don't love him mean: I have succeeded at feeling nothing most days and it mostly works. Do you want the comfort of Nothing? Do you want Nothing, too? Be warned: you'll never be free, even when you are nothing. Here is what doesn't work: Accepting the stages of grief. Talking about it. Sitting with the feeling. Missing him—no, the person you were when you believed in death do us part. Writing poetry. That, too. When I say I don't love him I mean: I feel capsized in an endless, starved tide. What sometimes works: selective memory. You must forget ripe tomatoes and his beard and feeling perfectly sheltered in a big blue world. Forget coffee in bed, laughter watching TV, blowing out the candles on the birthday cake and the quiet all-encompassing knowledge that you are chosen. Remember only how love turned to a banal everyday survival act, a trapeze act unsure whether he will catch you, how the warmth stagnated and became sour, remember the foot bindings and remember the resentment boiling in your veins as you stick it out for the kids. Six-hour Netflix binges help, too. A man's fingers tracing your spine. Frozen pizza at 2 a.m. Random trips to the museum just to stand near things that last a while. The realization that crying won’t change anything. Seeing that life is just a dream, and refusing to participate in your own suffering. Bite your fist. Walk on eggshells around joy. When I say I don't love him, I mean he didn’t break my heart, he just stopped touching it and it forgot how to beat right.
By Ella Bogdanovaa day ago in Poets
The Lesions of Devotion
Every day I set myself down on the freshly cut lawn and strip myself bare. I take my guitar and finger the frets and pick at the strings, listening for dissonance. My life is dissonance. I twist the tuning pegs until each string sounds bright. Then I kneel, calves pointing behind me, kneecaps facing forward. All exposed to the breeze. I close my eyes and play the melody.
By Paul Stewart3 days ago in Fiction
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