05-apr 2018
It Gets Better (Haiku)
Thought I was a lone
Freak as a kid but no
Now I have real love.

 

14-may 2015
Ocean
After the road and air traffic have died down,
and before the birds start their cacophony,
you can hear the ocean – its waves thundering as locomotives –
even several blocks away…

07-jan 2015
Desert
Desert winter is a short, brutish force.
The afternoon light: stark, brilliant,
reveals life dormant or thriving.
You rush forward as I dither…
reach back briefly, but the light blinds me.
I grope.
Nightfall: black with hope.
Will life reawaken?
Will love?

14-nov 2011
Winter
Winter whispers a crisp secret
as the moon stands sentry
in the bright blue sky,
over thinning pine boughs;
a riot of red and gold maple leaves
blankets the icy lanes.

04-Oct 2014: I dug out this little collection a few months ago and thought, why am I hiding it? If I’m truly trying to be a more creative person, why not share? So I bundled it off to the US Copyright Office, and it’s now registered with the Library of Congress.

Stripped – A collection* of poems

Tattoo
The tiger roars from the wave,
leaping toward the bloody rose,
such sadness his countenance,
music resounding in his soul,
he is relentless, he has to be.

Monster of Love
We all seek, some consciously
We all hide, some unwittingly
We can’t survive without
We can’t survive it
This love
This monster

Intimacy
You don’t yet know me, well
and while I seek your presence
your attention, I fear your
discovery. My shadows, my
secrets lurk hauntingly, times
menacing. How will you find
me, shy, wanton, bored,
captivating? Beautiful,
dark, shallow?
Will you linger a moment,
Will you delve and smile,
Will you leave? Will you love?
Will I let you?

Elegy
Your eyes pierce me,
They slice through the surface
so easily.
What are they seeing,
What do they seek?
Why is it I want them
to find beauty,
to find my soul,
Yet I don’t know you.

What do you wonder,
do you even wonder,

And why must I feel
so vulnerable?

Your energy calms me,
yet your glance stirs my butterflies
Your ability
intimidates ~ fascinates

What can I say to you,
what should I, to assuage this?

Would I take it all back,
were it mine to?

I started to let you in
and you wanted me to.
Now you can see more than you ought
As if I were stripped,
as if I laid myself bare,
then walked away.

Open
I know you only see a hard shell,
But I have loved!
With my whole heart and soul,
Wide open and joyous, reckless.
I have flung open my arms,
And with them the doors to my depths.
In those moments, fleeting
I had all I needed.
And though I have lost,
Still I do not forsake the thought
That I might love again.
That you may even hold the key,
And one day it may occur to you
To turn it, and see the shell
melt.

*Copyright 2014-2017

Stripped by Jennifer Theaker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at mahalogy.com/musing.