Last of my 2021 poems
This poem is the final from my 2021 poetry class. I created an unintentional theme with all three revolving around the end: of relationships, time, or loved ones. The pandemic shaped my anxiety into fear of this unknown entity.
Gravitational Collapse, The Last Standard Time
Nature implicates time in the crime of living
a pull that swirls like water around
a matrimonial ring of bark and hourglass sand
until the billow detects life and extirpates.
My first brush was with water
invading my lungs to meld with spare oxygen
maternal arms ripped my sleeve
taking it with her as she spun closer and closer to the bottom.
Moskstramen took my mother leaving my impotence at shore
liquid torrent limbs trawl for life
swallowing her soma and left me moored
to lose what little warmth I knew.
Contusions spread over my skin and my heart
till I am pigmented with mulberry
my Helios, my mother, now in hydrostatic equilibrium
at the substratum of the innominate.
I look in the paradoxical mercury that shames me
while inflating my ego with the curve of my cupid’s bow
my visage is the paradigm of my vanity
my retinas saccade towards weakness of movement.
She’s there if you look,
her face brought yours to its shape,
her body decays to inflate your muscles.
I am the configuration of achievements that have no meaning,
the spelling bees, the matching games, the dodging detentions,
the grades in subjectivity matter little to the cyclicality of a vortex
of survival. My maelstrom of macaroni art
Create the jaded picture that aggregates her hope and my self-loathing,
all in the hopes that my mother would be proud.