I need to unlearn your touch
The sound of your breathing
Next to me in the dark
I need to unlearn a lifetime
Of everything about you
-gws
Unlearn
Tag: wordswishesandwisdom
She is a Poet
She is a poet
An enigmatic storyteller
A word-painter who colors outside the lines
Who sometimes rhymes
Language her artistic medium
Manifesting nouns and verbs
Seeking nuanced shades in adjectives and adverbs
Crafting simile and metaphor
Manipulating personification and hyperbole
Until a shape evolves
This scaffolding for allegory to be called a poem
A golem built from meticulously chosen words
Watercolor emotions
Empathetic evocations
The work imbued with the DNA of her life experience
Powered by hope for her audience to feel at a visceral level
A fraction of the tsunami that lives in her
-gws
Making Friends
She dressed for the night
Draped in shadows and silver
Making friends with the darkness
-gws
Getting Over You (and Other Divine Interventions)
The Universe intervened
In our amber-trapped lives
Cleaving us asunder
Now that your umbra is clearing
I begin to see the Universe has
Gifted me infinite sunrises
Bursting with innumerable possibilities
After half my life with you
Standing you up
Holding you up
I find myself suddenly free
Of the responsibility of you
I delight in the joy of doing anything
Without your judgment
I relax remembering that there are no
Relentless expectations to navigate
I revel in a full night's uninterrupted sleep
I relinquish more and more tension from my body
As each day passes without you
A single divine gift containing
All the possibilities I can dream of
I will not get over you in a day
You have left me a moonscape
Desolate and damaged
I will redeem and reclaim myself
Both shadow and light
Ever shifting and changing
Just like the magnificent moon
-gws
This is the Poem I’ll Never Write
Holding hands in matching rockers
Laughing about when we were young
You reminiscing about record stores and ska shows
As I tell our grandchildren tales of magic
Spending our sunset days in loving conversations
Each other's best bestie
Strolling into the ever after that follows the happily
-gws
The Glory of Rainy Days
Deep gray clouds cover the sky like a heavy blanket
Rain drums relentlessly on the shiny gray asphalt
The world is a tapestry of gray
Gray is beautiful
This is the glory of rainy days
They leave the world to its quiet contemplation
Its deep introspection
Rain cleanses more than the greater world
It penetrates into the soul
And washes away the dust of living
Rain awakens a simple joy
With renewal and rejuvenation
The meditation of raindrops on glass
Droplets colliding into each other
Reflecting the world in a new perspective while
Drawing meandering paths across glittering window panes
-gws
The Cage
Inelegant and rough hewn
Invisible to all but me
Oppressive and injurious
This prison of grief and fear
Holds me fast
Arrested
The key to joy held tight in my hand
I wait for the guard to look away
So I can fly free
-gws
How to Eat a Rainbow
Glittering seeds that sparkle in winter
Much like a geode cracked open
Textured spheres like palm-sized suns
Perfume the grove with citrus tang
Oblong bunches entice with
promises of creamy, tropical sweetness
Tart, crisp heralds of autumn
Ready to move from bushel to Thanksgiving pie
Baskets of chewable night-sky pearls
Fresh from bush to muffin tin
Plump globes hang heavy on the vine in the tea-colored afternoon sun
Destined for bottle, jar, or a snack popped between a lover’s lips
-gws
Liminal State
I exist in a liminal state
A being
And not a being
Grief ebbs and flows in king tides
Emptying me
Submerging me
Stealing away my breath
With its pressure changes
Feelings grow in question marks
Within my hollow chest
Proliferating like fungus in the fall
Inside of my being that is not a being
Emptiness overflowing with nothingness
Destruction and restoration
Warring to fill the immeasurable void
Shaped like my cremated heart
Pulsing with unfathomable aching
Testing the tolerances of
My being that is not a being
It is surreal to be and not be
To experience the reality of the question
Posed by Master Shakespeare
In rhyme and sonnet so long ago
To understand that one can be both
A being and not a being
-gws
Spring Rain
The first spring rain falls from a darkened sky
Washing away the heaviness from the air
Bringing deliverance of spirit
Offering itself as balm for my weary heart
Through its steady patter beyond my open window
Petrichor rising to ground me
Cool and damp air greeting too hot skin
I close my eyes
Imagining my complete surrender to it
Making an offering of all that scars me
All that weighs so heavily on my shoulders
I welcome this renewal
This forgiveness
This peace
I invite this healing
Surrender to this gentleness
Allow this act of cleansing
Readying my world to reawaken
Readying me to bloom again
-gws
Words Wishes and Wisdom 