FOUR POSTS AT ONCE? You're Welcome (Plus: Summer Poetry)

Well, you may have noticed that I missed four posts. I'm very sorry about that. I am a lazy person, and also, school coming up is stressing me out, so I... watched Once Upon a Time instead. Just a word of advice, don't watch Once Upon a Time. It's a quick shortcut to ruin your life.

But anyway, I decided that to make up for this, and to end the summer with a bang, I would do FOUR BLOG POSTS AT ONCE! WHOO SO EXCITING! Now that I've just spent like three hours writing those blog posts, I'm kind of regretting this decision, but the show must go on or something. So let me link you to those other blog posts first thing:

BLOG POST NUMBER ONE: Summer Wrap-Up
BLOG POST NUMBER TWO: Fifteen Ways to Relive the Summers of Your Childhood
BLOG POST NUMBER THREE: How to Transition from "I'm Writing a Novel" to "I Wrote a Novel"
BLOG POST NUMBER FOUR: This one right here!

They're not a series or anything, so don't feel the need to read them in order or read all of them. It's literally just four amazing blog posts.
The fourth and final blog post is me sharing all the poetry I wrote this summer. It's pretty exciting. I didn't write a lot of poems but I thought I should share the ones I did, since I think they're all fairly good. (I also included a bonus poem which I found while cleaning my room today. I wrote it a year ago but I never published it anywhere so I thought I'd add it here). So without further ado:

Verdant May

In my mouth, the taste of mango
I had for breakfast.
White blossoms of spring
strewn on the margins of the parking lot.
Waft of honeysuckle on the air.

The rain,
liquid sky of grey clouds,
streams around me,
curtain into forgotten dreams.
I enter it,
waking haze.

Green wilderness
creeping at the edges of our
constructions.

Worlds upon worlds
in the woods-
coming alive like a tiger's breath
to the noon of summer.

I crack open an edamame pod
and examine its sticky skins.
Life opens petals infinitely,
releasing the scents
wildly out with the rain.

Fear of the Unknown

I) I used to be afraid of the dark,
my mind drawing horrors
on the blank canvas of my sight.
But now I lose myself to the emptiness;
now I like the surrender,
how all the furious objects of the world
melt into shadows.

II) I used to be afraid of the wild;
what strange and foreign teeh
could have clawed me apart.
Now, though, I can hear its melodic patterns,
feel them twist around my ribs,
take me down into the ground
to become soil, turning over
and over again.

III) And I used to be afraid of dying,
of sunlight burning through the whole wick
within seconds, taking my breath away.
But sometimes now, I think it'd be best
to suck all the air from my lungs,
fill them all up with water.
I'd know nothing anymore.
I wouldn't even know enough
to say I'm sorry one last time.

IV) I used to think I feared the unknown.
But I know everything now.
I know where I am in the dark.
I know who I am in the woods.
I know exactly how I would decompose
if I died.
I was not afraid of the unknown,
but I am now.
I don't know where I'm going.
I'm too scared to do anything
but stand still.

Picking Sour Cherries

After the rain,
the sky is still heavy
steel-blue.
The air here,
in the grey fringes of the city,
is like a capsule of the ocean.

Cement can't hide
the soft grasses of spring
I once walked on.
Broken fenceposts,
broken shards of time-pottery,
cut the skin of the sky
and make it bleed
water.

Now I'm in the twisted arms of the tree,
dripping in green rain
and good dirt.
Cherries hanging like irregular gifts
all around and above me,
red globs of paint
shining in the brown and blue and green.

Handfuls come off at once,
soft and slippery and firm.
Raindrops that clung like solids
disappear into my palms.

I can't get away from the cherry tree.
Like the bower of roses over the door
that hypnotized me,
it drinks me into its limbs.
I pick sour cherries,
then suck away their beige meat
and scarlet skins.
Sour wine covering
the inside of my mouth.
Sticky pits and tiny ponds
litter the grey cement
where the grass
and my bare footprints once were.

What I Saw

I almost saw them through the trees-
the ghosts of things I'd lost.
But then they disappeared again
to that place that I forgot.

Picking Flat Peaches

You have summer here
in the palm of your hand,
flat peach your father handed to you
from the ladder where he is suspended against the sky.
It tastes
sun-drunk,
like the bluebird who glides
down into the forest.

Goldenrod flesh
dripping, yellow-bloody as the heart of July.
Surrounded by the wild mess of dancers-
between branches, the sky is thrumming with heat,
sweating pale blue;
a sigh rolls in from over the ocean.

"To get the fuzz off,"
your father says, "rub it on your shirt."
So grey dust litters the navy-blue cotton
of your t-shirt,
while you stare up
in the surrounding, swelling heat
of the sun,
in the tiny orchard
you planted long ago.

When you were still as young
as a deer in spring.
When summer stretched its yawn
far over your arms
and your hands
full of peaches.

Now you want
to run after its ball of string,
swim in the blue of the sky.
Unwind yourself
into the roots of the earth.
Eat the sun,
right out of your hand.

Bonus Poem: Untitled

If it sounds like something that would work as a movie,
then I don't want it.
I don't want it
if it could be set to good music
or written about in elegant prose.
If it could be quoted on pastel photographs in calligraphy fonts,
then I don't want it.
I don't want a fanfare, or fireworks. I don't want spilling color that fades,
because it never seems anything but fake.

I want mundanity. Dim light, long afternoons, dull pains.
Other people's things, coffee and talking and laughter, mundane.
All I want is to be a part of it.
All I want is to leave the sidewalk.

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Thank you so much for reading! It was fun, though tiring, to write four blog posts at once. I hope you enjoyed the poems and check in next week for a Wednesday post.
And finally... BIG ANNOUNCEMENT:

I know I don't have tons and tons of readers, but for those of you who do regularly read, or who even occasionally read, I want to make sure that the blog updates on a regular schedule so that you aren't disappointed. I realized over the past few months that posting twice a week is too much for me considering my busy schedule. So I'm cutting out Saturday posts. I may occasionally do a Saturday post if the mood strikes me, and I will still be updating my list of new experiences. But for right now, it's going to be one post a week, on Wednesday. I hope this will help me be able to post more consistently.

Thanks for reading,
Ariel