Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

I’m not much of a poet, especially in that I let poems “come to me.” That happens about once per year. Lately I’ve begun to deliberately sit down to write poetry. These are the latest results. The second feels a little more like spoken word to me.

Coffee relationship

Every morning I ask of you
Where you bean?

It’s not that I don’t trust you
But that I need you
To feel something
Anything
Everything

And so I break you
Grind you down and nearly drown you
Bathe you until you dirty the waters
Breathe you in until my tongue is Lust

It’s true that I am a greedy lover
But isn’t that sometimes the best kind?
One whose lips burn for want of you
Who, before you are quite ready
Welcomes you inside

And as the first light of morning rises
The day becomes warm

I shake my damn head (SMDH ya’ll)

There is a crick in my neck
not from an oversized pillow
or a well worn-mattress
but from a well-worn world
at which I can’t stop shaking my damn head

I shake my damn head
at a world that raves “the market is up”
while the whole of humanity is down
a world where fear is a winning investment
but not food and shelter for the cold and the starving

I shake my damn head
at a world where the wealth of the few is
more valuable than the health of the many
where you’re an outcast for suggesting otherwise (you fucking commie!)

I shake my damn head
at a world where you and I are the rags by which the polish is applied to the riches
a fairy tale that leaves us all the poorer for it
crawling on our knees after just enough scraps to believe
nibbling a trail of dirty breadcrumbs in search of the land of make believe
a world where everything trickles down
I shake my damn head at the sheer naivety, its longevity

In a world where the rich who’ve inherited wealth and managed to keep it are praised as self-made
—so say the media empires they own,
the history books they and theirs have written—
so says the American Dream
for which I shake my damn head

As though this world were not rightfully both yours and mine—ours—
simply for being born into it in the same fashion: slick, terrified, screaming…
though some of us were set upon clean linens
while others were sunk in the mud, drowned

I shake my damn head
when out there beyond our borders many have it even worse
and so we are told not to venture far
and when they come in search of us
we close our doors and nail them shut
and work to make them from stronger stuff

So clutch your purse close,
lest the thief of humanity steal the prize you’ll otherwise bring to your grave
Where I shall be standing over you
Shaking my damn head