James Diaz- Three Poems

The task of odd angles

Manage me Buddha

figure me out God

I have a small pit 

along the curve of my back

where psychic debt

has been charged

with the impossible task

of keeping me aglow 

writ in seven different languages

how much I hate the term 'work ethic'

how easy it is to slip

and fall into someone else's bad day.

If there is love

it will not go until it is has bruised

every corner of drywall

you attached soul to

a song is still a song

even when it's a poem.

Then there was laughter

There is why and there is why

there is

here you have no family

no beef with

anyone

in person

in particular

the way the world can spin off its axis

the way you undress

like there is no tomorrow

no rescue dogs

no safe words

bare cupboards broken things

inside broken things

reaching for receding salve 

you and I alone

before the day even begins

heavy thought beside sleeping objects

beside/besides who can know this?

I ask

then just stay silent

while we both ache

with misplaced memory

shelved near 

nada. 

A conversation between friends

Wounded sick 

long line of flame

previously I held onto light

until my body was an organ bursting into number

a feather trigger sprouting

migratory diagrams underneath the table

O universal reprimand

I can hear you breathing

this is what happens to insight when it fakes its own fortitude

a strong wind can break a house

in two

and you will wonder whose road home

drew you out of the shadows

the distance is inside of you like an experience you cannot shake

fog pouring in around the broken stem

I live here, I sleep when I am able

almost never

you pass the self so that we can watch

language like a cloth

scatter toward the sun

we travel and we dwell inside of our childhood homes

because the word that we are after

is hid inside of these walls somewhere.

Author Bio: James Diaz spends his time writing poetry as if his life depended on it, because it does. His forms of survival can be found in Ditch, Calliope, Cheap Pop Lit, Pismire, Collective Exile, My Favorite Bullet, and The Idiom. Do not follow him. He does not like to lead.