Dream of Sea Turtles

Last night I dreamt of sea turtles,

hatchlings housed in chicken

eggs making frenzied breaks

for breakers that forced

them backwards,

tumbling with

the water and

sand to

start

over

again.

After

working so

hard to attempt

the sea, most gave up

and dissipated into drip castle

mud, their tiny skeletons gently

scooped by the surf and carried away.

This Is How 2016 Dies (a prose poem)

(Disclaimer: this poem is the Day Nine entry of my winter break poem-a-day pledge, the complete list of which can be found at https://twitter.com/cam_jpg/status/809990713106722817)

On Christmas Eve, Kevin and I make a last minute trek to the grocery store for strawberry Pop-Tarts, an essential Christmas Day breakfast item that somehow didn’t make it on the frenzied, I-swear-we-only-need-like-one-or-two-more-things shopping list earlier in the day. We sing along to an Alton Ellis song and pass cars going slower than we’d like to be.

Later, we help the neighbors clean up after a holiday party and there is music and laughter and when everything is as it should be, there is a moment of reflection that we all share.

Yeah, it was a shit year, and it’s easy to dwell on all the shit stuff that happened to me and us and

the world in general. But the good moments, the little things, are what we seek to keep close to our sometimes heavy, always full hearts.

This is how 2016 dies: With a kiss. With Vine watch parties. With Steak n’ Egg dates. With hysterical laughter near the dessert table. With impromptu phone calls from school friends states away, just to check in. With graduation parties. With long walks to nowhere. With nonstop essay writing soundtracked by 80’s music. With 80’s music soundtracked by good conversations with friends. With a lot of crying. With late night waffles with a good friend. With trying to explain what Bojangles is to a person from Maine. With disappointing election results followed by The Worst Day I Have Ever Experienced preceded a few days earlier by The Worst Night I Have Ever Experienced. With too many untimely deaths. With a nearly-finished journal. With long, heartfelt emails from concerned professors. With polaroids that didn’t develop right. With the twentieth anniversary of Space Jam immediately followed by throwing up Auntie Anne’s Cinnamon Pretzel Bites into a bush (because I was really too sick to be out). With some really good concerts. With Goodwill shopping sprees. With another Star Wars film. With sunsets from the Chili’s To-Go window. With good grades. With Pink Moscato. With The Strokes graffiti on 14th street. With endless Spongebob references. With long waits at Reagan. With fire alarms. With heartbreak. With new albums and new movies. With pictures of my dog, from my dad. With sad, deep talks in the car, parked in the driveway. With reminiscence. With late metro trains. With graduation mortarboards. With realizing too many things. With a tattoo. With hours spent at bookstores. With a summer of reading. With making new friends in weird places. With a growing collection of dad hats. With Chick-fil-a dinners when feeling homesick. With not enough trips to the beach. With the saddest vacation to Disneyworld ever documented. With necessary goodbyes. With the ends of things. With cryptic notes to myself on my phone. With birthday hikes. With too much time spent on my phone. With too many late night pizzas and bowls of cereal. With books. With really fucking sad news. With anxious phone calls. With google docs and scribbled journal entries (because more poetry was always needed). With headaches. With unexpected kind words from friends. With grandeur. With celebration, in spite of everything. With love. With lots and lots of love.

Bad October on Lowell Street (a poem)

the day we broke up i

walked down Lowell Street

and watched as

a woman blew leaves off her lawn and

the wind blew them right back.

i passed an elderly couple on

one end of the street, turned around

and passed them again.

the lady twirled a leaf

in her gloved hand.

at almost every

eclectic little house i had to

stop and let out a little sob, staring at the pumpkins

adorning doorsteps,

wishing i could just walk inside and

join these people for dinner. i’d say,

“i’m having a tough day” and they’d understand

and make up a plate and i’d sit and eat until

i felt whole again.

i want to skip all this coming

of age bullshit,

live in a little New England house

with pumpkins

and a Beamer in the

driveway.

i had mentioned something like that to you,

on the phone earlier, said

“Doesn’t it suck how much everything hurts when

you’re young?”

you replied

“Everything hurts a lot in general.”

and that’s when i realized we

had become completely

different people.

Before Thanksgiving, When I Lost My Voice (a poem)

The blood spots on the bathroom floor are shaped like Hawaii.

I move my phone to my other ear,

examine myself in the mirror.

I’d like to tell my sister about

the boy on my floor who kissed me when

he was drunk and I was lonely but

I am thinking only of the boy

who’s life I saved after

he broke my heart.

Yeah, we don’t talk

anymore.

I think I’m supposed to feel sad about

what happened

although I don’t, at least

not really.

But I’m lying when I say that

I don’t care at all, and

mentally kicking myself

for speaking in half-truths.

I don’t want to fall in love again

for a while

unless it’s with myself.

So I say something

about the planetarium yesterday

and how shitty the metro has been.

Later,

I lay in my bed with the window open

and listen

as buses pass on intervals

in the early morning.

Things (a poem)

I have this list on my phone called
"Things."

It's mostly song titles and book titles,
YouTube links, articles,
ice cream flavors I want to try,
quotes,
phrases.
Stuff I jot down at work or school
or when I'm out to eat.
Stuff I've just got to remember.

I guess lists like this are typically
meant for journals but
my moleskine doesn't exactly fit
in my back pocket.

I like a lot of things.
Maybe that's my problem.

You see, I've assigned
some sort of romanticism to these
iPhone keystrokes,
to each thing in my list of things,
because it always feels
necessary and productive
at the time
and I am a sentimental
creature by nature
and a creature of habit at that.

Ironically enough,
this poem started out
in my notes app
where my list of things resides,
taking up at least
four good thumb swipes
of space.

It felt necessary and productive
to write this,
to write something about me,
because it's always about you, you, you
or them, them, them,
and so I am up writing this
as a summer storm manifests outside
my window, dark clouds toiling,
lightning illuminating
the photos on my bulletin board
every few minutes or so.
I am up feeling poetic
while you sleep with the rest of suburbia
in your twin-sized bed
and I,
with my king-sized range
of emotions,
am up
documenting everything I will miss
about this room and these walls
and summer storms.

I probably shouldn't watch slam poetry
before going to bed anymore.
It gets me too fired up.

But I was thinking
about a lot of things
and how exciting it is to be sitting
on this precipice of young adulthood.

Exciting that next year I'll live in a
district and not a state
and I can go see shows in the city.

But then I started thinking about me,
braving the metro alone,
and how I'll try to feel independent
and capable
while really still feeling rather small--
the collection of pins on my backpack
will suddenly seem childish instead of
eclectic and cool
and I'll shrink against the orange plastic seat
and want to go back to my dorm
and watch Harry Potter in bed.

And you know, I'm sure
some nights will be like that.

Others,
I'll embrace the cityscape
with wide open arms,
answering the calls of its
encyclopedic temptations
with a torrid vigor
for life and adventure and
everything.

Maybe I'll go to a party
and start a game of
Cards Against Humanity
and talk to someone about music
and at the end of the night
I'll text my mom
and tell her I miss her
and in the morning I'll text you
and tell you I miss you too.

I need to be catapulted into
an encomium of new chaos
in order to feel comfortable again.

I need something completely different.

That's not to say I won't keep
adding to my list of things.

Lists like that are important
so I don't forget what song
was playing when you drove me home
or the book title that my coworker
recommended to me or
the fact that I really, really, really
need to try Ben and Jerry's
Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch ice cream
(why is it so impossible
to find in stores?).

I like a lot of things.
That's my problem.

Suspended in a Sunbeam (a poem)

(This is the final piece I wrote for my high school's online literary magazine, The Inkblot, in my Honors Creative Writing II class. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class and had the opportunity to challenge myself to write about things I wouldn't normally write about and approach my ideas from all kinds of different perspectives. The theme for our final issue of the semester was "space", and I chose to write a poem about the Voyager missions launched by NASA in 1977. NASA sent two probes into space, each carrying a golden record with sounds and songs selected by Carl Sagan along with 116 images of life on Earth. I hoped for the piece to be a poetic exploration of this small attempt to sum up human existence and the necessity that we feel to communicate that existence with extraterrestrial life. So, here it is, the last creative piece I will ever write at Green Hope High School.)


The dictionary defines a voyage

as a long trip to a faraway land,

and a voyager

as the one who embarks, who travels,

who wanders.

Historically, an explorer.

One who navigates the unknown.

An adventurer.

In 1977

NASA sent the Voyager I and II probes

into space.

Because they would be the first spacecrafts

to travel beyond our Solar System,

a panel of scientists composed golden records carrying

messages for potential extraterrestrial life.

The records are a time capsule

of human existence,

and include photos of canyons,

skyscrapers, Olympic sprinters,

cells, diagrams of the makeup of Earth.

Songs representing different styles of music

and greetings in fifty-five languages.

The records will likely outlast all of human life

and possibly even the Blue Planet itself.

They will remain, navigating the great cosmic ocean

for millions of years.

I wonder if one can really be a voyager if

their destination is unknown.

It’s hard not to feel extremely small

thinking about those spacecrafts, hurtling through

the final frontier

at 35,000 miles a second.

We’re trying to talk to aliens but we haven’t

even finished charting our own oceans.

I looked up at the sky last night

when I took my dog out

and thought

about those records and the

fruitlessness of this existence--

my life, a microscopic blip on this

great blinking timeline.

There are potentially

134 habitable planets within thirty four

light years of us, but it takes

the Voyager crafts 17,000 years

to travel just

one single light year.

I find this extremely frustrating.

It will be 40,000 years before the crafts get anywhere

near another star other than our Sun

and I’ll be gone and everyone I’ve ever known and loved

will be gone and there might have been wars

and there might have been love and happiness

and new things that none of us right now could even imagine,

and maybe aliens will find those records and Earth will look

absolutely nothing like what it does in those 116 humble images.

All those airports and busy highways,

mountain climbers, cotton harvests.

Little university towns, computers.

Superficial wounds on our fresh-faced planet.

So here I am, driving in my car,

singing along to good music and here

I am going to the movies and going to concerts

and here I am worrying about college and my friends

and the rest of my tiny life and there are probably

other life forms out there and we’re probably not

alone and everything I am doing will never be

anywhere close to significant.

As of this moment, Voyager I is 20,073,807,603 KM from Earth

and I’m thinking about what cereal I want to

have for breakfast tomorrow morning.

I guess it’s hard not to feel like

a waste of time and space when you

know you’d never make it on a golden record.

I’m writing hasty poems in class

and learning about United States government and we’re

trying to communicate with aliens who are

too far away

for me to even fathom.

Those records,

that small attempt to sum up

human existence,

that sad little encapsulation of everything we hold near and dear

to our mortal hearts,

pays tribute to our need, our desperation to

communicate everything with others.

“Tell me about your day.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I want to hear all about it.”

“I love you.”

“Let me know how it goes.”

Most are familiar with Pale Blue Dot,

the image of Earth that the Voyager sent back to us

before exiting our Solar System

forever.

There we are, a tiny little smudge,

a nearly indistinguishable blob of pixelated blue

suspended in a sunbeam.

That’s home. That’s you and me

and everything else and seven billion

other people and all of our mostly

uncharted oceans and every single blade of grass.

None of us know what will happen next,

but we sent spacecrafts outside of our

Solar System,

outside of the heliosphere,

outside of anything we’ve ever known

just for the chance to say

“Greetings

to our friends in the stars.

We wish that we will meet you someday.”

All along I knew Earth was a romantic.

Election Year (a poem)

I realize I am always measuring my life in some
nostalgic version of 

“this time last year." 

Saving chopstick wrappers 

and cards and pictures on my phone.

Trying to hold onto everything 

while I still can,

trying to salvage the unsalvagable.

Believing this moment is more 

than just simply a moment.

Thinking about all the 

cool and profound things I want to do

but never getting around to them.

They don’t make memories like this
anymore.

This will be a good month.

And this will be a good life.

May came with a blue-gray streak of 

storm threatening the tree-line,

announcing its arrival with the 

roll of thunder, darkening suburbia.

There’s something that’s always 

been bittersweet to me about this time of year.

Friends leaving, friends coming home,

Mother’s Day, flowers, 

something sleepy and fleeting.

Prom, parties, 

everything, futures, wide and bright.

May breeds a place, a time for roots, a dark dampened ground.

Looking out the window I thought about how the trees 

outside my Gov classroom have 

been there for the past

four years, too,

but unlike me, they’ll never leave.

A kind of grounded impermanence, 

a kind of stationary necessity.

We’ve been working so hard

for the day that 

we’ll get out of this place since

the day that we arrived

without noticing the trees 

or the coffee smell of the hallways.

A post-grad curse. 

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Maybe I’m wrong and 

you’re not all as sentimental as I am.

Soon the tassels will turn.

We’ll move on.

This won’t matter so much.

I know it’s supposed to be a happy ending,

but is any ending every really happy?

I’ll probably miss

this the suburban safe haven
where fights don’t break out on metros 

and there’s no symbolic city grime

or museums full of weirdos 

and the distance between me and home 

is only a couple of

tiny miles.

And I know I have to get out of this town,

but part of me--

the wimpy part--

wants everything to last forever.

But there’s the necessity to leave 

this little comfort zone.

To feel nothing during the metro fight 

and to walk through museums 

with people I hardly know.

Because I made it. We made it.

Of course,

like any ending, there are

friends I made too late,

people I wish I’d known longer,

things I wish had happened.

The destinations of yesterday 

lost and forgotten as

we beat on, 

seniors singing songs for tomorrow.

But we’re just so young,

there’s still so much time 

to celebrate birthdays 

and to make the world we want

out of ourselves.

At that, there’s still enough time

to tell all your friends 

that you love them

and there’s always going to be
enough time 

for one more song.

And so we hope for tomorrow

and lament the loss of 

those who won’t make it to then

and laugh our last laughs

and tell random people how in love we are 

and then forget about it the next day

and face the future with big, beating hearts

because we’re ready.

We stand here,
facing a world
of silver spoons and soap boxes,
and we're ready. 

“Stop waiting for the right time,”

I say to myself as the sky breaks open 

and the rain starts to come down in great chutes.

“It doesn’t exist.”

For now I’ll keep writing essays about everything bagels

and listening to storms passing quietly in the night.

I'll keep saving chopstick wrappers 

and feeling sentimental and I'll believe in 

my youthful invincibility,

because maybe my art won’t get me to Jupiter,

but my lust for life could get me 

pretty darn close.