Category: poetry

Neatly packaged

Mason LaiLeave a comment
Image by Nicky ❤️🌿🐞🌿❤️ from Pixabay

The critics build their little forts,
preparing their beige, bland retorts
which, of course, they’ll use
to keep you neatly packaged
for shipping, easily managed.

They step back,
and as it should,
the scale makes them dizzy.

But then they forget to look closer,
where we find ourselves busy.

They forget that the world was built
for one simple, brave desire;
to tend our small, very human fires.

Aka our mission,
the whole damn composition,
split into manageable parts.

Why bother with golden schemes?
The world was built for one messy, brave,
and ridiculous dream.
Multiplied.

To stand in the shadow of the infinite night.
And be, for a moment,
absurdly bright.

Patch of lovely grass (sonnet version 1)

Mason LaiLeave a comment
Image by Susann Mielke from Pixabay
Your pulse is just a high-stakes, predatory loan,
A strobe light’s frantic glitch
In a collapsing pit, so leave the "shoulds" alone—
Those leaden boots that make your spirit itch.
Stop watering the plastic, look at the crowd:
A billion ghosts all clutching
Their leaking bowls, wondering (quiet or loud)
Where the soup went, while they were judging.
The soil is a blind and neutral gut
That mulches down the CEO and the creep,
The Great, the Who?, the "I-wanted-to-but."
They're all the same shade of clover, six feet deep.
F*ck it, the lease on your breath is ending. Don’t be pinned.
Go graffiti your name on a passing gust of wind.

A patch of manic, lovely grass

Mason LaiLeave a comment
Image by Ruslan Sikunov from Pixabay
Your pulse, a high-interest loan
of carbon and spit;
A frantic strobe light
in a collapsing pit.

Kick off the shoulds,
those leaden, orthopedic boots.
Stop watering your plastic at the roots.

Why offer a no
vacuum-sealed and dried
To a joy that’s finally hitched a ride?

Among a billion ghosts
in rented skin,
Clutching leaking bowls,
still wondering where the soup has been.

And the soil, yes,
a blind, impartial, gluttonous gut;
Digesting the Great and the Who? and the What?
It mulches throne and beggar’s cup
Into a patch of manic, lovely grass.

Don’t worry,
the prince and the fool
are the same shade of clover,
Once the lease on their breathing
is officially over.

Take a breath, take a breath;
Life’s the only thing that’s not like death.

Graffiti your name on a passing gust of wind;
The only sin is staying neatly pinned.

Ignite the ego, the hemp,
the existential spark
(Light a match under your own backside
if your world seems too dark);

It’s too cramped (ouch!) in the coffin
to start playing the part.

One day

Mason LaiLeave a comment
Image by Annette from Pixabay

You’re going to die one day,
so start acting in such a way
that you don’t have to apologize
when you’re having fun, even if there are a million eyes

on you.
They are people too.
You’re going to die one day
so do me a favor, okay?

Live, fight,
Take your canvas, your candle and burn it f***ing bright.
So that no matter what they say
the path that you take, you can call your way.

Who doesn’t love someone with a little fire?
Rub them wrong, let them declare you the fool.
Trust me, you can afford to raise your chin a little higher.

the ravenous bloom

Mason LaiLeave a comment
Image by Tatyana Pligina from Pixabay

A flower heaves up from the silt,
a soft violence split from the dark
without a word of apology.
It rises because it is hungry,
and for a heartbeat
it is the only thing
the sun can see.

It exhales.
a debt,
not a scent.
The bloom,
a surrender
to the light
that invited it out.

Why?
Because the sky gives only
what it intends to take back.

Is this the measure?
That beauty is the briefest distance
between birth and burial?
A burn in the eye
that asks to be remembered?

We do not love the rose.
We love the vanishing.
We are drawn to the flame
because we are made of wax.
Stand still too long,
and it will eat the air
around your lungs.

You will chase it
into tall grass.
You will reach out your hand.
But can you ever catch
what is already
turning to heat
in your grasp?

worldscapes

Mason LaiLeave a comment 
it clicks into place while everything else moves
click
click
c  l  i  c  k
like bones rearranging themselves inside your chest

it moves away while another moves close
so close you can feel its gravity
sucking your fingers through themselves

you cannot hold
you cannot
cannot hold what is already
falling through your hands

the sand is screaming
your hands are bleeding
and still
you try

there are too many moving parts
for either of us to love just one
every focus a blur
melding
m e l d i n g
MELDING

every hand you clutch
vanishes
as soon as you move one
the rest
rotates
erupts
slips

laughs
at you
at you
at    y  o  u

and the quiet truth
is that you
you collapsing little observer

you think you're watching
(I did too)
we witnesses
gnawing our own shadows

the worldscape
worldscape
w  o  r  l  d  s  c  a  p  e
doesn’t notice you

it doesn’t stop
it doesn’t forgive
it doesn’t even care

it only moves
moves
m  o  v  e  s

and you remain

the one thing
that cannot

quite

keep up.

if nothing stays,
what will you hold?

That Which Catches Light

Mason Lai1 Comment

Dark flecks drift into the wind;
ravens scattering against a pale sky
a sky bruised raw
by thoughts unspoken.

Raindrops wander on fractured glass,
uncertain where we’ll meet
or when we’ll fall.

I have been the shattered thing:
shivering on cold stone,
left in pieces beneath
the weight of my own dreaming.

A constellation of mistakes:
wants and needs
glittering like fallen stars.

I have burned that way.
But fire, bolder than I, taught
how to rise,
still flickering,
and hold close what glows.

So I gathered all the blaze spared:
singed edges, crooked hopes,
trembling shards
that remembered light.

I stacked them, stone on stone,
and though the seams still show,
I called it a beginning.

And I—
I am not whole,
but held.
Suspended in the ache
between what was and what longs to be.

Because
a leaf remembers the tree,
a spark remembers the flame,
I remember the world
that razed and remade me.

So here I belong.
In the trying,
in the fragments,
in the hands that rebuild.

To live
is to keep becoming.
To lift again and again
from the ashes of almosts.

If I am but one shard
in all this fractured glass,
then let me be the piece
that catches light.

That remembers the sky
even
as
it
fell.

Written by Mason Lai, a California high schooler. I hope you felt something when you read this.

if i am with you

Mason LaiLeave a comment

days fold inward upon each other,

imploding yet exploding; incomplete and fragmented.

seen but not felt;

whirling,

raging,

but – if i am with you,

sunlight slips through the trees

and leads the dance of silhouettes across the soil.

it is golden –

like you

and your voice

uprooting doubt,

silencing the muttering leaves above.

the soul speaks

a thousand words –

yet the voice captures so little

while the rest are lost

to infinity.

even so,

i feel you;

your ebb and flow.

but when the wind dies

and the trees are still,

the last echoes of eden fade

to shadow.

the sun sets

ever so softly;

rainbow ink

spilling upward into the heavens.

cue the obsidian drapes falling over the canvas,

as lofty ideals

subside to cold repose

but the light has not left yet.

with you,

the soft pinholes in the sky open up

and the stars sigh.