James Diaz- A Poem & Photo

Poem for M

The first time we met

and you smiled like a half moon

hugging cloud 

in the dark of night

I was a bit nervous

like a star that had recently imploded

with a thousand years left

in my corner of the universe

before the realization

the dispersal of my specific light

would hit

and begin to seed other possibilities

like becoming the ink for a future bible

or an unhappy man 

who would soon find out

that even farmers' gray beards

could make him smile

the little things

small fragmented moments

building into bigger 

more durable structures

'What is the one song that you cannot 

live without?' you asked me 

in between Jane Austen and French

simulation prattle

'You don't have to listen to it all of

the time, but it would be the one song that you

are left with'

'Sunny Came Home' I told you,

'how does it go?' you asked 

and then I sang it to you wrongly

and badly and you smiled again like a moon

filling out and chasing cloud scuttle away

and telling that imploded star to your left

to just embrace its god-damned dispersal's, its not knowing

'which is all, I think, just a roundabout

way of trying to say don't give up, you know,

it's not too late'

this was the last thing 

or the first thing

that I remember you saying,

and inwardly I cried 

but the ego is so stoic and prim

it must not bruise, bloom or crash so openly

and we were both a bit cold 

on that downtown park bench 

in what, now, seemed like a lifetime away

from Jane Austin and badly sung songs

and permissions of vulnerability

of infinitesimally small, but ever living-

ever durable hopes 

and though we are moon and star

and our worlds, 

our lives, 

are so respectively different,

through you I sensed a before-life,

not after, not 'it's too late'

but 'it's never too late'

'it's only as late as you think it is'

and 'you are only as old as you feel'

and what I am trying, failing to say, 

is that for the first time, in a long while,

I longed to be young, open, once more,

I am open once more.

 

 

 

Bio: James Diaz lives in upstate New York. He is the founding editor of the online literary arts journal Anti-Heroin Chic. His work has appeared in Indiana Voice Journal, HIV Here & Now, Chronogram, Cheap Pop Lit and Foliate Oak. http://heroinchic.weebly.com/