anyone can write poetry you just have to be poetic. if you find the way the light falls through your window and onto your bedroom wall pretty, write about it. call it soft and golden like the sweet taste of honey. if it makes you glad to be alive then it’s not silly. you look for the beauty of things, be proud of that. always look for beauty in the little things in life. if you’re feeling sad, describe how you’re feeling with writing. use your sadness to create something. say the heavy rain is kissing you. write about the glow of the moon, the dancing of flowers. make your world magical. collect your metaphors and treasure them forever.

No more


In darkest gloom we wander still.  In a midnight hour we fall.
As the light begins to fade from our eyes, we are breathing still.
In the end, in our darkest hour,
All we can do is fall…


We climb out of the hole and naturally search for the light
And the warmth that engulfs us and breathes into us.
In every dark hour we pray to see the light
And still we search for the reasons that made us become us.


Without this search, mankind would lack a true meaning;
Without a goal, we would remain less than we are.
Throughout our lives we go off in search of new meanings
And as we rise and we fall, we become all that we are.


New experiences rebuild us; our experiences define us.
Still we are searching for what it is that makes us.
What are we to you and what will we become?
What were we to you and what have we as a species become?
In hope we march onwards, wishing to make a change.
In fear we advance no more;
Their steps forward are full of the fear of change.


With age we learn to love and with age our love will grow;
With age we remember more or less and still we continue to grow.
Thoughts without feelings only hurt those we love;
Actions without thoughts will lose us their love.
Through a valley of broken hearts, onward we walk;
When you have walked all over us, will you continue to walk?


In pieces you leave us, shattered into dust;
In time we learn to repair ourselves in rooms covered with dust.
With strength we come back and live our lives once more;
Forward into the future!  Forward once more!


Forever forward into a big bad world;
Onward, forever onward!  We become one with the world.
No longer taken for granted; our lives shape us and refine us.
We morph into what we were meant to be when they gave birth to us.


Mother Earth and Mother, Mom, raise us up from the ground.
When we are lost, they will find us
And teach us how to stand our ground.
Believe in what you believe and fight for your rights;
Because in the darkest of nights, their might will either crush us,
Or make us prove to them that we are right.


With words we can change the world.
What are words without a pen?


In love we let go and give ourselves away;
But when our time has done its ticking, we all fear being taken away.
Desperately we cling to any kind of heart beat that we can keep;
It was ours once, so it shall remain ours always.
This is my life, my castle, my keep.
A man’s thoughts are his own and taken from those he has heard;
We are slow to realise what we have lost, when we let go of love,
Because of what we think we have heard.


Then this life is over and the clock ticks its last tock, one last time.
If I could do anything differently, I would change it all!
And I would still be left begging for more time.


I would remain blind to all the opportunities I had to do things better,
But I would try; I would try!
And I would try once more to make things better.


In the silence we fall, once more to the floor.
In our darkest hour we are lost
And we become no more.


(C)2016 Aa Harvey. All Rights Reserved.

And like a stone I fell.
Nothing quite the same.
Knowing stillness, I paced myself.
Falling fast.
Head first.
The best thing I've known.
It's not so bad.
Falling.
The fear of crashing, crumbling into pieces.
This seems the way to go.
Missing the experience that brought fear to life.
Stubborn.
Like a stone.
These cobwebs thrown to the wind.
Finding each breath more desirable than the next.
A feeling that I've waited for.
Sitting still.
Like a rock.
Afraid to fly.
Until you came along.
Shattered into a million pieces.
The expectation of anything else.
Without need to hide your hand

Sketching surveys of desolate dreams,
purveyors of private property plots,
their impatient greed,
ignoring purple spray paint warnings.

Six feet under, resting next to Grandpa's coffin,
live valuable minerals, their rights forgotten,
a farmer of soy beans, wheat and corn,
oil & gas law to Grandpa was foreign,
but he knew why our creek's current flowed north,
upwards, defying gravity or reason, why these men had come.

One time executive cowboy hats descended on the farm,
in pickup trucks, just purchased from an oil lot in Odessa,
Grandpa took aim and raised his Beretta,
their unfit hats lost to the blast, the only harm.

I was only five, when I saw his lengths of protection,
he took me on hunts for deer, boar, quail, dove,
would always aim his rifle, fire and miss,
blamed it on his eye sight, yet hit bullseyes on paper targets.

It took me 20 years to understand why, with swallowed pride,
he purposely missed killing these animals,
cursing his eyesight instead, winning an Oscar for his humble acts,
was he blinding me from death?

There was no vision impairment, I found out in hindsight,
probably the trauma witnessed, as he died with 20/20 eyesight.

You only live life once, they say.
You only have one mom, one dad, and you only have one first car.
Well, I don’t care.
You only lose your virginity once, have one firstborn, you only have one death, they say.
Well, having *** for the first time is no different from having *** for the second time
Despite both archaic views on biology
And the backwash of a society that values peaking by young adulthood.
Children are neither here nor there,
And I don’t care about death.
Youth has been romanticized to the point of fetishization.
The plethora of coming-of-age novels and films represent this.
We live in a culture obsessed with youth,
It’s connotations,
Innumerable “firsts”,
Peaking by young adulthood.
Is it simply because children and teens are more easy to market to, being a perpetually existing group?
Is it because in a culture with such drastically differing generations, youth provides a connecting wire between them?
Is it because of the amount of people who look back from their mundane lives and fall into nostalgia’s pit?
Or something else?

At the age of 10, I had a conversation with a woman.
I remember asking her what games her many children played.
Did they play as I play?
She told me they enjoyed roleplaying games, and I asked what she meant.
Dress up, she elaborated. Acting, make-believe, telling stories.
I remember telling her that I felt I had wasted my youth, my childhood, and this, as if I had forgotten I was 10.
There was a seriousness to my tone, stoic-like, and a mighty dignification must have kept that woman from chuckling.
That conversation was closer to half my life ago, and I still meet with that same unrelenting sadness every other morning and every other night.
I remember the half-dreaded birthdays that followed, the recent ones the worst.
And every year that passes merely confirms the suspicion that I’ll live with that yearn for the rest of my life regardless of what else happens.
Yearning and I. Whose to say we don’t have 10, 20, 30 more years together?
But it’s nothing to worry over in the end.
I’ve turned into a person who has high-highs and low-lows,
And I’ve found that the highs are worth going down under for every once in a while.