why poets die young

don't they inspire you?

all these people with all their dreams

all their clumsy solutions

the fears they wear like tattered cloaks

to keep you from seeing the needs

that are eating them up underneath

they always do

they inspire me to despair

they still think life will be fair

that one day we will all fall in love

that dreams lie in reach tomorrow

that they don't have to be alone

one day they will beat sorrow.

Just look at them.

and then look again

these people and their passions

their hopes and their homes

so separate from us

they shake their heads and say

oh these poets and philosophers.

all children are poets

poets who survive adolescence

with all its clumsy dreams and stumbling vocabulary

grow into philosophers

who sit and wish and wonder

why the world works works works away

then the philosophers gather together

with all of their nothings to say

stand and say good bye 

and walk into the night

they wander and fall by the wayside

how the statistics lie to us

telling us about the homeless, the hopeless,

about the philosophers and poets

not in so many words.

The mortality rate is high

when you look to humanity

to be inspired.

Peter and Ariel

dont forget, as you have forgotten,

that i am the sea child

i will bide my time and you may come to see me

tame and easy to bind

with your rude rudder

you may put me aside in your sandstreaked mind

like an old toy, an old love

but remember, you will remember,

the way i swept you away with my long fingers

that reached beyond what you understood

and took you away into the depths

of what humanity, and the sea, dares to be

in the secret caverns where all is dark and light

where you reached for the sun

and i lifted you with all my swirling strength

and threw

and now there you are

standing on your silly shore

looking out at the waves as though they were a backdrop

for the more important shot

you'll never see your shadow slipping away

sinking into the salt water with your soul

I'll sew it back on with my needle and thimble

in your dreams that you cannot forget

and you will wake up and remember

what i told you in that last moment

I was the sea child. until we met.

Now I am a woman grown

I charge you. do not forget.

Neither you nor I were made to live alone.

sh.

today i have nothing to say

the wild crush of humanity and its noise 

beats against me and i am too weary

to thrust my individual voice into the fray

every striving voice  stands alone

against the swelling crowd for all those solitary voices

will always band together against your own

because there is no sense in cacophony

nothing but noise in the wide world

there is nothing but noise in the world

so today i am silent

today i have nothing say

they have said it before and louder

they love they despise they prize they hate

they beat against me like a thousand echos

sometimes i realize why i am so afraid of humanity

it is because it reminds me of me

self.

this is my secret soul 

in the center of who i am 

behind the similes and smiles 

comes a scritch-scratch pain

the increasingly blunt tip of this safety pin

this pen of safety scrawls the truth

into my membrane into my weak brain

and they wonder why i weep

why my eyes roll back into my head 

they must read

they must read the truth 

my poor eyes that have spent

their whole life looking outward

watching the world wander by in its wicked way

to suddenly be set free

to stumble like philosophers towards the burning sun

and it burns it burns it blazes

it brings me to my knees

and makes me wonder who i am praying to

when here in this sentient center

i find that there is nothing but this nightmare

my face alone scratched on the surface of my skin

again and again. again and again.

this is my secret. that at the deepest point

there is nothing but me and my safety

nothing but the screaming stanzas

and the chorus that pleads

'me me me me

i i i must survive' 

Enlightenment.

I am washing my hands. Again.

Some of them are beginning to worry, not out loud, not yet, but I can see their eyes flicker to my hands when I enter a room. They don't realize that I notice-that I can see right through their cream caked faces-that I probably see through their eyes more clearly than they ever did. It would make me laugh if I could remember what that meant.

It's amazing the things you forget when the world changes.

Like colours. I think that there used to be more colours. Some were brighter. Some made statements or soothed the people. I think that's how it worked anyway. Trust people to depend on something that doesn't exist to tell them about the world. I don't need them anymore. The colours the smells. The people. I don't need them to tell me about the world.

I already know. 

I think that maybe I always knew. Like one day I woke up (it was such a loud awaking. sounds like metal breaking and the flash of heat all against me) and understood that everything will peel away. I took my hands and pulled. I pulled at the sky and the ground and anything i could reach. I could reach everything. And the world fell to pieces for me. Big coloured chunks that fell like ceiling insulation across the floor and i kicked them aside and kept going. I got to the great grey bones of the earth and knew that this was the end. 

All my life I thought the dark was in my head and the light was outside. Now I know better.

I pulled the whole world to pieces in one day. No one noticed. They kept walking on streets that I had just thrust aside like old building blocks. They spoke about the rolling sky and the chance of flooding when I had peeled the sky back and left the metal framework it was plastered to standing bare. I would have cared except that I knew. 

I can pull the people to pieces too.

They just sort of fall. They lay across the floor casually, clumsily. And then they break apart piece by piece and then there is something small and skittering in the pile of well maintained wax. It is afraid of me. It moves sideways amidst the camouflage it has used for years hoping to avoid my attention. I don't care enough to look anymore.

All this tearing has done something to my hands.

I cannot keep them clean. I used to keep my nails long. they were smooth and well polished and generally genteel. I cannot anymore. The dirt gets under, stays under, won't leave. That's why I wash them. again and again. Its amazing. The filth in this world. Its everywhere under and in everything. I scrub with the filthy soap trying to strip it from my skin. Again and again. 

The cracks are appearing. They are red and swollen but I cannot stop.

My skin peels away in long sticky strips. It litters the floor in piles that coil around each other. I cannot stop pulling, tugging, tearing. I destroyed the whole world in a day. I am the only real thing left. So I continue to scrub. 

She entered the bathroom carelessly. Then she screamed. and screamed.

I skittered across the floor panicked. I ran for cover. I tried to disappear. 

The pressure and the screams melded and melted. The last scrap of sound came from far far away.

"I hate cockroaches."

Glad Tidings!

This is a note to inform the world that Hannah Minick is now a published poet. The Phoenix, Baylor's Literary Magazine, has generously accepted my submitted piece "Call Disconnected" and published it in their Fifty Year edition. I am completely and totally over the moon right now and do not expect to come down for a good three months. Next year I will compete again with my ambition being this: to have my name spelt correctly. Sadly the name Minick is apparently an unreasonably complex one and therefore the "c" was graciously edited and removed, most likely for reader accessibility. I do not, however, intend to continue with this Anglicized version of my illustrious name of German heritage and would contemplate a letter of righteous outrage if i were not so ridiculously happy right now. Thank you to all of you who bullied, browbeat, bothered, bugged, and in other forms, encouraged me to submit because I know that my terribly tremulous heart would never have been able to hit the 'send' button without you.  Especial thanks to my Dad who, for the price of five poems a week, rented me a laptop and instilled in me the discipline that now helps to keep me sane in the midst of life. Another thanks to my Mom who loves me no matter how badly I write, and is also bold enough to tell me that she has no idea what in the world I am trying to say...at which point I get to practice revising. I feel like I can now stand and say "I am a poet." I need not apologize, apostrophize, amend, nor add appendixes to that statement. This is not to make the claim that this contest has in any way defined me but rather that it has validated my position as an artist. 

Currently I am watching the adventures of Brave Princess Amy and Sleepy Ogre Rebecka. Life is good.

Call Disconnected

I'm reaching for you
through these narrow wires
Can't you see me
My fingers squeezed so thin
like shadows on a wall

And you can't hear me
Don't turn around
Walk past this swinging receiver
'cause all that's coming
is the dial tone

and maybe today's the day I realize
we all grow up alone.

the art of being mute

i love the way he talks

the half sentences with verbs missing

his hands that fall half-heartedly

as if to supply them 

and then with a shrug abandon the effort

but I catch it every time

sort through the sentences and shrugs

and emerge with the sense of what he says

clasped tightly in my palm

in exchange i spill a thousand synonyms

a torrent of sounds to balance the silence

that you stretch between your syllables

its funny.....you know....speaks like bending

and even then he leans on me

like the wind pushing itself past his throat

is too much for him to bear

and so he will collapse the words into whispers

and then again into gaps and ellipses

waiting for me to twist these absences into sense

and shape them again into strength

to be his voice i sing

with all the words i've ever known

its no wonder i suppose

that his dreams sounded so much like mine

when it was my tongue

filling in his silences