Two Poems|Cole Kelly
The brook
Going home tonight
on the baking pavement and soft orange peel sky,
its slices lay on sidewalk and flutter branches
sometimes warm the tips of my toes.
I walk the bike tonight, I do not ride
because I have nowhere fast to go.
My heart is full
not because I shut the door while it was brimming
and locked all those dearest dips of love and beauty.
So afraid I am of being empty if I find them missing.
My heart is not full from trying to hold that which is fleeting, no.
It is now because I laid the walls down,
flattened them parallel to the ground
that this river could run freely through it,
that I could loosen my grip on the water and drink the abundance,
That this dried fruit sky and the cold shadows of fading light
are as much a season of my life
as this chapter of grief and birth has been,
That I am like this water now,
strong and quiet, ever moving forward,
that I am both the trickling in the river bed
and the power rushing through it.
Bitter
You and I and the large divide
Between what I get and what I’d like to find,
You and I and the drought between my legs.
You and I on comforters, chesterfields
Beaches, blankets, concrete.
You and I between counters,
divided by 8 hour days and 4 hour nights,
you and I sedated by funnels of beer and arguments
about ex-lovers. You on one, and I on the other side.
The you that needles into my daydreams
to fit in the shape of options,
to branch out onto my world and
make comfort in that greater expanse.
The you I taunt and ridicule in passing,
the you I hate because it’s not what I want.
The you that indicated my failures,
and I eat, live and sleep in it like my mother.
In everything you are not,
it’s because I am not good enough.
The you that I deserve.
The you I lost and I give birth upon birth to inadequacy,
miscarriage upon miscarriage, failure upon failure.
All of the yous that left, those that are
and those that are meant to be,
I live in a house with your children and their graves—
a spinster queen of debt and inability to repay it.
I choose you for the place I think I deserve
and then spite you for damning me to it.
Photo by Carson Vara on Unsplash
BIO
My name is Cole Kelly, I’m a journalist and aspiring poet and documentarian living on Vancouver Island in BC. While I have been writing poetry for most of my life, I have only recently begun submitting anywhere and so I have not yet been published.
Author Photo: Cole Kelly.
