Poems About Life

I know you're tired. I know the kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix.

Because the news tells you what happened but a poem tells you what it felt like.

Today is not special. No one circled it on a calendar.

Another year. The candles on the cake outnumber the breath

Even now, when nothing seems to hold, Nothing keeps the dark from pressing close— Dawn is just a rumor, barely told,

You have never asked me how my day was and yet you are the only one

I don't know what I believe but I know the feeling when the light hits the kitchen table

You are leaving. I know this the way I know weather— not from the forecast

We are forty now and live in different cities with different groceries. You buy oat milk. I buy the regular kind.

Someone told me once that poetry is for school. That it lives between September and June.

Saturday starts with silence, slow and soft, sheets still warm from sleeping in.

The house at three a.m. becomes a throat that hums with all the things we didn't say, and I lie still as someone in a boat

Beauty is not what you think. It's not the sunset. Everyone agrees about the sunset.

It isn't sadness. Sadness has a shape— you can walk around it, point to it, explain it to a doctor

Not the big things. Everyone is grateful for the big things.

June gives us the longest day and we still waste most of it talking about the weather.

I used to draw the map with more on it— the house would be bigger, the job would have a window,

You've spent thirty years trying to be quieter, smaller, more convenient—

You will outgrow shoes. This is expected. You will outgrow clothes, bedrooms.

You will not remember the quadratic formula. I know this because I don't.

There's a song that knows more about your life than your therapist.

When I was young, the afternoons were countries with no border known, and summer hummed its lazy tunes

Time takes the things you thought were permanent.