JOHN MAURER - POEMS

John Maurer is a 21-year-old writer/student working on getting his degree in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa.  He writes poetry, fiction, and everything in-between, things that aren’t boring to read, hopefully. He has been previously published at The Foliate Oak.

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                                  Reverse Synergy


Crepuscular sadness at epochs in an epic
that doesn't seem to embody the word.
A raindrop is a tear to God,
a flood to an ant,
but an infinitesimally small detail
in the setting of this story.
Eyelids rise with the day and
fall with the night to no end
and with no end in sight.
Upon the close if you look close
enough everything can be found in seemingly nothing.
If you’re a bull you don’t frequent china shops.
Morgues are more your venue.
Whether your lips are loose or sewn shut.
You get mad. You scream at me.
I remember that I exist. I run in place.
I fall awake.
Sleep is the dream I have.
You are a freshly coined collection of morphemes,
fresh off the mint of your falling breath.
A neologism on the dark side of a glass prism.
Newly transfused blood flowing through the heart.
Blood cells with bars incarcerating words yet to meet their definitional soulmates.
You are on the tip of my tongue but lost in my mind and never to be found.
 

 
                          Destroy Me Gently


Fry my brain in a skillet and serve it to me for breakfast
Chop off my limbs and corsage them to my breast
Tan my skin and make me into a jacket
Wear me
Call me expensive
Follow me nowhere
Scars on skin indicate landmarks
For what am I but a map to getting lost?
For what are you but a traveler adopting my baggage?
I gargle razor blades as I speak
You tell fortunes in your sleep
Take me to the stake
Burn me
Inhale me
Hang me like a Babylonic garden
For when I cry my tears will turn to fruit
Eat it
God has yet to forbid my wisdom
 

 
            The Solid Foundation Of Rock Bottom
      
 
Drop a bouquet of cut roses in a dumpster
Grow a garden on the dreams sleep stopped giving you
Self-administer shots that can only make you sicker
Bring an infant’s casket to a baby shower
 
Finance a divorce attorney’s mansion
Never give anything your all; for you already have so little
Do not return a smile, just make sure to save the receipt
At your mother’s funeral, they can’t see you cry
 
Even God makes mistakes, you are one of them
Exist in a way that no one notices, especially your reflection
Be the death of the party; better yet die at the party
Become baptized in the very water you are drowning in
 
You will not be a memory less bitter than honesty
Never sing in the shower, water has known sounds more sonorous
Don’t forget that being heartless also makes you light hearted
You are nothing more than nothing
 
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