I’m ten days late to Poetry Month. So, in penance, I’ll be posting poems every blog this month and a few more on my socials. Because if the world needs anything right now, It’s poetry.

Here’s an odd little collection. Read, sift through, taste them on your tongue, roll them over your neurons and let them…sink in.

Poem Speaks

She scribbled me down
in the depths of anguish
The sharp lines that cut through 
conventions of writing forms
and cursive norms

uncaring of limits or margins
for there were none to her suffering
no lines could contain
the horror that poured
fresh blood on the page

She died on that page, over and over
for nights on end
awash in loneliness
visions of failure
longing for the final epilogue

and all I could do was trail behind the pen
powerless to stop the deluge
helpless to stop the stabbing wounds 
of ink and metal
I was merely the blood spattter
the aftermath

sometimes a river of words 
flooded over with her tears 
until she lay spent across the page
a traveler unable to cross that river
unable to battle the current
but unwilling to stop fighting
for safe shore

I loved her every word
her every dark thought and
the possession of her passion
that overtook those nights

Because at least when the damaged words flowed
and their messy calligraphy 
misspelled itself across the page
there was breath to her

there was fire within
and she burned bright

in the blackness of a cold world
there was enough fodder of love to suffer
to ache
to ignite

The pause of me meant the death of her 
the blank page was a heart 
too weary to go on 
a silent pen was a life ended

I persisted in the days when I was her written world
survived while she lived
in all her aching splendor

When she lies still, 
pen laid to rest against desk
I will only breathe 
if her words pass through 
new eyes, ride across new tongues
I will be the fire she leaves behind.

S.E. Reichert

Tiny Speck Wanderer

Hey, tiny speck wanderer,
no more than a bird’s heart beat
A flutter of space dust,
careening out of control
headed into the black abyss
along with all the other 
stardust heart beats.

What’s one head of a pin
drumming on a thimble mean
to a galaxy of celestial beings?

Don’t you ever feel small?
No matter to your matter, at all?

The moon takes up a quarter’s space
to those tiny bead eyes
Jupiter—the mighty giant
just a hole in the dark night’s skin,
pricked by needle tip.

Yet there you spin, 
the world in orbit around you
The cares of your heart
the temperature of your feet
the hunger or fullness
weight or lightness in your belly.
The love worn or tossed away,
Suddenly the concern of the cosmos.

Tiny speck wanderer
The universe beats for you.
in the petite coils of your
Underrepresented brain junk.
A flutter of space dust—
with universal ego.

S.E. Reichert

Untitled 1-24

I swing from suicide
to bird song
in the hair-breadth
of a star

one shade dark
now light
but...

When I have purpose
the pendulum halts
the need for center
a string of balance hangs
my sanity
and...

When unrequited and impossible love 
teases the fluttering edges
of this tattered heart
I forget that I want to jump 
off a bridge
in the small moments of 
polite conversation
so...

Even when
its all just illusion
the empty purpose,
and impossibility of love
the light from a star
billions of years ago
now dead and gone...

They are the precarious 
threads of hope
from which I swing.