Harvard Poems

(Fall 2024. After 5 years and 3 months of life as a Harvard Dropout, I went back to school for my Senior Fall. I’ve changed a lot since I was last here in 2019. When I left Harvard, I was only just beginning to get into poetry. To this day, I’ve still never taken a poetry class.

Yet, through four years of living in a bus with hundreds of books, I accidentally became a pretty good poet. Every once in a while, I’d be alone in nature thinking when all of a sudden— BAM— this crystallization of ideas would come together, I’d feel some bucket of meaning overflowing my brain, and I’d have to write a poem on whatever medium was closest to hand. This became more and more frequent over the course of 2021, my first year in the bus; the quality increased along with the quantity. There are over 200 poems on my Poetry Map written all across the country through September 2023; over 100 remain unpublished. My California Poems collection is a great group of recent poems.

Anyway, that urge to write poems hasn’t gone away since returning to school; here are six poems I’ve written around Harvard these last few months. Interestingly, many of them are still inspired by nature, despite my urban surroundings. If you’re reading this on your phone, some may benefit from landscape mode for the full line breaks.)

~

Old Water, New Light


Weak I can still go
			           to the river.

Weak I can still let
	                           myself
Go
		where the river flows.

This is the freedom I needed—
				              to return
this adventure to well-worn waters.

Skinvessel I am pulled
			together
as but one temporary
			            wetness,tightly.

This is to witness, this
			window
on the other side of the soul’s telling:

old water and new light
			                     flecting
off the fleeting, only waves now
	        under the Weeks Bridge.

Nature


Nature is what becomes.

This becoming progresses through balance, the breaking
of balance, and the discovery of a new and wider balance.

Nature starts with starstuff, and descends or rises
to ever more novel variations all
the way to us and through us.

It is an undisentanglable touch, 
which cannot help but create.

It loves the edges of itself.

Externalities


Optimize my sin's emission

Body held in tragic common

Breathless stretching skin on fire

Externalize internal tension—

Angelclaws ripping flesh from this back

Rend of my spine these unwilling wings

Littauer Tree

The notebook pages open splayed around the spine
of this wide tree branch, ghosts of trees
marked by the meaning of my scratches, spread
like my legs wrapped around this branch, inner
thighs evolved to squeeze myself together safe
in this wedged seat between branch and trunk,
freeing my hands to reach possibilities.

Heart

Map of our blood upon the world
Imprints the soil with importance—
A past, a heavy web with
A beat at the end and
Beginning—
One more squeeze,
Despite all suffering,
Saying again, again,
Again I will open
A new path like a door
Outing myself into
A tunnel of dark blue sky

there is no mind in a world without friends

hands that could reach to me from eyes
towards an object, this wedge of darkness
behind the wet film of my eye

what is wondering if not reconciliation
of all these potential touches?
what are these words if not touches
love could understand?