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Best Poems From
AMANDA SAVELEY
(December 29,1987)
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33.
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Bad Dreams
Door swings, and it's off to life,
Swinging hinges and broken dreams
And fading shadows of ghost-like memories
That pass between my heart and mind
Guess I'm not the fighting kind...
But I should have.
I should have fought to make you stay
And be that which we can't seem to grasp
Because of my failure, I now sit alone
Where will I meet my fate?
My mom married a man I was born to hate.
And when will I meet my end?
In a better time, I could have found a friend.
Somewhere I cannot reach you
The lines of communication run too long
And are too short
Severed at the elbow of sound waves
Most unpleasant
You break my heart
Jammed in my throat
As recollections bubble up fast
Too fast for me to stop them
Spilling over into formations of water and salt
Cascading from eyes seemingly empty
You're long gone now.
Amanda Saveley
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34.
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Buyer's Remorse For The Anti-Divorce
Eyelids like anvils
Like falling rocks fluttering
Down past my pupils
Dripping like oil
Bleeding into the earth of my irises
And pleading for sleep like a man in the desert
During monsoon season
Too much and too little
My brain is torn paper
Taped over and glazed
With ideas barely conceivable
Drunken slurs like a ten-car pileup on one line
So many broken fender tears
Naivete was my old coat
Patched over with fixed mistakes
Though some holes were just too big
Or awkward
And the ugly clock-gift of time could never break me
In my perpetual spring
Now it always feels like eternal Wednesday
A Nebraskan summer with too much rain
Flooding my already washed-out memories
Regret, you are the intermittent rash
Ever so conveniently present
Should I forget
That fairy tales are simply dusty pages
Best forgotten on broken bookshelves in the attic of my mind
With glass slipper shards and rotten apples
And narcoleptic princesses too hungover from sewing binges
And my broken childhood heart
Now freshly laid in my chest
With the stinging reminder that Santa's not real
And neither are charming princes
No matter how hard they try
Amanda Saveley
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35.
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Cartography of a Relationship Almost Lost
Trying to pinpoint moments in time is like trying to graph the human psyche.
No matter how hard you try, it cannot be done.
Yet, we try to point out specific moments in history
Places where we though something went wrong,
Desperately trying to isolate it in order to avoid an encore
A reoccurrance of sorts
And yet, though I know this simple fact of life
It does not stop me from trying
Trying to figure out when phone conversations shortened in length
And the time spread farther between them
In an effort to compensate,
Just as we make a special effort to compensate on the occasions
That used to be an everyday thing
It's like changing the pattern of breathing, really.
What used to be natural enough to say
Is suddenly supposed to be implied
As if all the declarations at the beginning were meant to be stored like grain,
Waiting for a time when nourishment would be needed
But words aren't grain.
And time can't be marked
Conversations don't get longer the less they occur
They only dry up like a well in the hot desert heat of remorse and regret
No clouds pass by to replenish the source,
Only blazing fires of anger and redemption that further deplete the flow
That used to pass in currents from one being to the next
No longer moving,
But still
And silence haunts these halls,
Building thicker the wall of disconnected lines and things left unsaid
Creating a wall so high we cannot see over it
So solid we cannot break through it
And so steep we have no hope of climbing it
And our resolution to pretend it does not exist because we can't see it
Only enforces its strength,
Pushing against you
Pushing against me
Pushing us apart
Until that small well almost dried up,
Vastly expands into an ocean
One which neither you nor I can cross,
No matter how hard we try.
Amanda Saveley
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36.
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Dear Mr. Former President Caeser
I can't seem to help but think...
What's going on?
I say, what's going on
When every morning I wake up fearing for my life
As if a great bomb could fall from the sky
Knowing I've done nothing wrong
Only tried to understand...
Are you proud
Of the things you've done
While we've waited for salvation
Oh why hath thou forsaken me?
I've done nothing wrong!
I've striven
Fought
Struggled for the right
And openly shunning the wrong
It looks like someone doesn't have your back
Why are people starving in our streets
In the land of opportunity?
The place where wealth abounds?
This is not Rome, sir,
We are not detached from our people, sir
And if you are,
I say stand and fight for your right to govern!
There is no Mandate of Heaven here.
And you have the dozer where Jesus has none
The divine One who have not but his bare hands
In which to stop you
Yet you strap Him to your cause
And tear through battered lands like you have the right!
Slapping Allah in the face with Muhammad's own hand
How dare you try to claim that you understand!
We're a hypocrisy posing as a democracy
Throwing our beliefs in others faces
In the name of a religion not all of us follow
Who do you think you are, Nero?
We can't strap poor devotees to media-based pillars
And light them afire with the blazing torch of atheist view
Can you really look anyone in the eye?
Can you see them from behind your tall podium,
In which you can't even see yourself?
Do you speak for yourself
Or are you simply a puppet,
A figurehead,
Something to be manipulated like putty
While stiff neck politicians back you with words
Their words
Not the words of the people
But of the elect
You know nothing of hard work
Being a child of welfare
A kid of the system
In which the government you so depend on
To get you your food stamps
Make your mother's ex-husband pay child support
Fails you miserably,
Forcing you to live on ramen and bologna
As staples for your diet
While education falls through the cracks slowly
And you think you can fix this?
You've only made it worse
Amanda Saveley
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