Category: My Dead Language

I was always falling

You were always catching

Those pieces that didn’t stick

There is so little left

And I am little more

Then your most gentle touch

Despite my ever growing

Always underestimated determination

I spend down

I let down

Each day

Every day

In any way I have ever known

I have never found up

Still, you make my innocence bloom

Driving away

Chasing away

The most penetrating gloom

That holds its life

Its fortune above my head

You make up for what I am not

For what I will never be

Perhaps you glimpsed

Maybe you knew

The all too eager truth in me

JBW

Mercy never knew anyone so true

It pleads for humanity to see

To understand as more than one

To be, to feel, to act collectively

This founded way of living

Never seemed so unraveled

And suddenly has no meaning

We tried to build on the shoulders of equality

That is why we left and that is how we arrived

We don’t embrace the history

We run

We hide

And when we venture out

It’s to point the finger

To assign the blame

To get to the root of justice that hasn’t begun to grow

Do we really fear the unknown

Or a past that was never acknowledged

So how can it belong anywhere in time

If it exists only in our mind

When it is not our problem

When we suddenly don’t understand grief

We are so doomed

So condemned to disbelief

We won’t find mercy

We won’t find relief

Our future, fathered by mistrust and doubt

Oh what a place to bury a growing spirit

There is no greatness

Just insignificance

If that is where we live

If that is the truth we conceive

How will we ever earn the country we deserve

A country we can believe

Jennifer Barajas

If I am and not were

I could be for both you and myself

But I can’t and I’m not

So I choose me

I would love to love you

To bring truth to your humanity

To touch the deepest part of you that remains unseen

Instead I will melt away – evaporate

Almost as if I never existed at all

No memory I told him

No certainties he asked

Just a hopeless case of love gone wrong

Or possibly gone right

But I’d give it all up for selflessness

To let you become bigger and better

Than what might come to life in my imagination

The beauty, the sensation of your touch

All I want is to be remembered

Not too little

Not too much

Jennifer Barajas

I’ve never been much of nothing

When this was there and that was up

I have let my own shadow

Cover me in darkness

Even a good life can go unnoticed

A grand life can live unsung

I feel unknown to everything good and warm

Once I was here

Once I was present

When I learned a moment – a word –

Can break you apart piece by piece

Never whole again

You learn to manage

You learn a new way to live

It’s not about the going,

It’s all about the give

JBW

Life remains untaught

Unafraid of consequences

But somehow wary of chance and circumstance

I didn’t need to learn

I already knew

Just enough lessons to know without regretting

You shattered and pieces of you cut me deep

Have you ever wondered
Are you hardly aware

This is my broken heart singing

This is the song that I bear

Wounded & Weak

This is not what I wanted

It’s not the ground that I seek

But If I’ve settled into you

This could be longer than any hopeless wish

And it does not do to dream

So everything I hold, really

Falls apart, ripping at the seams.

There was this hope of living

But where I come from, you learn to soldier on

And really, this is the hell I built with my own two hands.

So here I am

So here I stand

On my own two feet

What will happen when they find me out

When all my fears and demons

Become living beings with a life of their own

Suddenly, all I am is what I have left behind

So the stars know what the moon will never say

And I let the grief mourn and wash my pieces away.

11/26/18 JBW