 James Nichols is an emergency medicine physician and father of five children who has been writing poetry for twenty-one years. “My early poems are locked away and don’t deserve the light of day. I can look back now and see real progress, however, and that’s the only reason I look at my earliest writes now. To not be able to look critically at your own work is a poet’s death sentence.” He says poetry and writing are his therapy and balance the stress of his “day job”. He was a student athlete in college and consumed with the demands of his education and career for the first thirty years of his life. He now finds the perfect balance in being able to escape in his writing as well as process the difficult times he’s encountered. He says reading a great variety of poets and writing has allowed him to understand people and just how diverse the world truly is. He has drawn inspiration and influence from poets across the spectrum including Plath, Bukowski, Dickinson, and Angelou. “Great poetry is that which provokes an emotional response on an almost subconscious level that drives my own creative process. The Land of Eternal Sun A certain gravity defies the lightness of that moment. Pale light seems to fade but you know better, for the moon always smiles at lovers and tragedy. She's not having it, not tonight. Too much booze, too few hours, and a tomorrow that promises nothing fuels an impulse from a place few know and fewer will ever see. She's seen it. Hell, she lives there most days until she can drink her way sober, just enough to see the sadness for a second that she swears she can screw out of you. Hell, let her try. It's better than a bullet and cheaper than Prozac. And here you are, full circle. All of this a moment of thought turned regret. The lunar laugh is mocking. The summit reached and just as quickly gone. Descent is gravity's bitch and she's got her claws in you. Surely you will awaken soon, but the sex-sweat and her snores eliminate that option. In a few hours that will seem like days, she'll creep out before the dawn and you'll feign sleep to avoid conversation. You will drift eventually to where she's beautiful and you're happy and there's no moon to tell you otherwise in the land of eternal sun. Bumping The Glass From here it's beautiful, but I always loved silence. Brownian motion, isn't that what they call it? All the slaves to capitalism swirl in the crucible of the city without direction. Occasionally they bump the glass and withdraw as if they've touched fire. They are reagents with an unlimited catalyst of competition, the unnatural fear of failure melting their souls into reflexive clones. From here it's obvious that thought is the discarded by-product of this ghoulish experiment. Still they grind, claw, bite and tear at the very safety net they woven. Circular, blinded, and dark-ages fearful of the nearly invisible yet suffocating glass. Such a sad and silent sight it is. I wish I could tell them how infinite and beautiful it is beyond the beaker below, but I would be lying. I only have to look heavenward and see the poor resolution and shimmering diffraction of the stars to realize I'm simply trapped between panes. I always wondered what jumpers thought at that very moment. I'm pleasantly surprised that mine is rather selfless: Perhaps I'll shatter the glass they can only bump. To Emily I think you may be springtime when the seedlings reach for sun. Something fresh is in the making. A new verse you have begun. As the years began their march, you found your summer's voice. Midlife had left your pondering. Did you ever have a choice? By autumn you were somber with some stanzas more resigned. The path ahead's much shorter than the one you left behind. Here you are this winter's night when your work's complete at last. Your voice echoes in the seasons dividing all the years since passed. The Filthy Flame Dirty nights fall. Blazing stars smolder. Gravity wins. I know. I catch the falling sky. Humanity cinches the wire, forgets the net. I endure for now, though the load is staggering and the human condition terminal, asphyxiated by hatred's filthy air. Smoke looms ahead as my vision dims. I fear the fall to come, for Hippocrates illuminated insight when the cross bore a savior, not a flame. I Am I am a prisoner of a mind obsessed, discipline’s demands diluted in delusions of invincibility. I am failure’s slave, obediently I lie until the truth is all I hear. I am a conduit of guilt, fear, pain, and hope, each clawing to be the first hostage released, oblivious to the ransom that is never paid. I am easy. I commiserate with sinners. I don’t believe in saints, Temptation is but a beautiful rose on my coffin. I am a thirty-third year senior in the school of mistakes, top of my class. I am all I feared and nothing I regret. Uncertainty Suspended dust, Brownian-like, it doesn’t make much sense. How it must in random flight evolve to intelligence. Infinity of space, dark matter’s loom, parallel universes arising. Yet light erased, forever doomed upon event horizons. Life codified, nucleic acids define just who we are. Do we die, firm to flaccid and recycle through the stars? Where are we? There’s confusion and undefined dimensions. Perhaps we’ll see parallel illusions through wormhole extensions. Man’s capacity remains primitive, yet still we cast conjecture. The veracity is that we’re limited until some future lecture. But is it time or is it space that fills the cavity? The missing sign, the saving grace may simply be gravity. We may find we’ve disturbed our fleeting reality. As defined by Heisenberg, there’s always uncertainty.
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