Poetry for People
Who Don't Read Poetry. Spirituality for Me
and Maybe You.
Chris Spark
"[Spark] definitely has something going here: the quick take, unexpected turn-arounds, lots of playfulness... delightful in many instances." —Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate
Poetry
You’ve been perhaps
​
wanting
normal people to like you.
Otherwise you think you’ll die
lonely and poor, because normal
people have all the love and all
the money.
But you are not normal and nor
is anyone else.
Say it a lot, until it just becomes
a funny sound—
Normal. Normal. Normal.
Normal, normal, normal, normal, normal—
or a small, furry, burrowing, blind creature.
You are not a straight rod; you’re a bent
and arching branch of the one
great tree.
Read More Poems
from Advice for Me and Maybe You
Advice for Me and Maybe You
The poems in this collection are different from those in my other two (see below). At the beginning of 2018, I read through my journal for the previous year and pulled out words that felt important to remember. I formed those words into poems and collected them in a book I call Advice for Me and Maybe You.
(excerpts below)
Your life
​
is as bountiful
as you
can tolerate.
Tolerate more.
Probably every
​
person around you
believes and will tell you
with great
assurance
that you must think
of others, compromise, do things
to make them happy.
It’s tricky because this is in
the vicinity of truth
and yet off.
You can feel it.
What isn’t taught
is that you already want
others to be happy.
That’s part of you
being happy. In fact,
you love it.
Oh, except
when it feels
imposed.
Sleep in.
Find your footing.
Eat the last
donut.
Don’t gather
wood for
the fire. Be it.
The Morning I Married the Sky
A collection of poems
(excerpts below)
i tripped
i tripped
i tripped and fell
but as i fell
i invited everything
i passed
to fall
with me
for running almost
for running almost
every day barefoot
on asphalt for standing
in my driveway to listen
to wind
for averting
my gaze and not greeting
you with sufficient
effervescence for all this
and more i am proud
to be named this year’s
“neighborhood eccentric” i said
to an empty veteran’s hall
i love the sounds
i love the sounds
that small creatures
make the scratch
of a sparrow’s feet
on palm fronds
i suppose i love more
that it’s quiet
enough to hear them
Read More Poems
from The Morning I Married the Sky
Free this Morning
A collection of poems
(excerpts below)
born again
“born again”
we get this phrase
from Luther, who thought it happened
not once, in a church, but each
morning when
you rise
soundless the sun
​
soundless the sun
this time of day.
i walk so slow-
ly not needing
to turn
my awe into words.
not needing even
to call it mine.
and i think of Vincent
and believe
that having died
he’d be now more
at ease and walk
with me as slow
as this.
i’d like to show him
the tree i stopped
in front of, the one
whose leaves i loved
and will
not describe
except to say they turned
each one
in the wind
like tambourines turning
light green dark green light
green dark
and we’d walk
past the tree shadows long
across the lawn
note the mallard
couple oddly
in the grass along the path
how the sun
splatters paint so thick-
ly on the picnic
tables and
i’d ask him
what color he’d say
the wind-
ruffled pond was
and it would take him
forever to answer
it’s my privilege
​
it’s my privilege
to be watching
a huge stretch
of the bay outside
this window,
noticing more
the sheet of water like steel
pocked by a trillion
hammers than
the two coots floating
in the foreground;
that is until a third
breaks the surface
without a sound, just
appearing—then
a fourth, a fifth,
and a sixth, all popping
up—seven,
eight, now nine of them—as though
the ocean—ten—
were hatching birds.
until i count twenty-three—
floating there,
as if nothing
had happened;
the orange-grey smears
and daubs
of a new day
behind them—just floating
calmly
in their ragged brotherhood,
as if they couldn’t give a shit,
as if the world
were not remarkable
Read More Poems
from Free This Morning
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