Tonight we are very proud to have our first featured poem for NaPoWriMo 2015. This poet is very talented, and he has this ability to create a poem that really sticks with you. His poems have always been impressive, and you all are in for a treat tonight. Without further ado, here is the one, the only, Jeriko Rose:

A Hopeless Romantic Coming Clean

16 is when I said yes for the first time

to love, to sex, to queer

yes to weed, x, and beer

and to my mother when she asked me,

“Are you still my son? I don’t recognize you anymore”

 

That last yes was a lie.

I was no longer the son

she raised into the sky every morning

with music more beautiful than the songbirds’.

 

Instead i was addicted

to a hypnotic, demonic, bubonic tonic
that spewed sewers through my veins
and skewers through my dreams.

 

There were craving rats

where my blood should have been

and my brain looked so much like moldy swiss cheese,

that I couldn’t tell what was real and what was rotten.

 

It took 6 years for her son to set,

down the drugs, and come home.

 

When I first got clean,

I felt Ripped like Van Winkle

torn from the delusions of perpetual sleep walking

and greeted by the pyrite eyes of my regret,

reflecting my deepest desires for a different past.

 

See, self forgiveness is something that I found ridiculously difficult to swallow,

Fuck rose-colored glasses, I rocked the

Self-obsessed, cesspool of expired sorrow shades.

 

But then a buddy of mine said something sublime… gave the David in my heart courage enough to face the Goliath of my regret

 

He said, Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past. Yes.

I was choking the present by trying to breath life into the past

To breathe in forgiveness and have any hope of victory and recovery, I surrendered my last vice… His smile.

His smile.

his smile

his anesthetic smile

my own personal jesus cocktail

warming, soothing, and verrrry forgiving.

 

It wasn’t long after

he slipped me that first grin

that I became hooked on the juice

that dripped

from his upturned lips.

 

I drank him in like bacchus.

Never quenched, perpetually thirsty for the happiness he poured into me.

 

But my tolerance grew too high and his too low.

And we slowly withdrew until all we had left to say was a word we promised to never to utter

 

Goodbye

 

And long after he had gone,

I was still hooked on the first time we said hello.

Hopelessly romantic. I needed to let him go,

by saying yes instead of no.

 

Yes to the hopeless romantic who has finally found the sobering honesty to say to him.

 

Countless are the times

that I looked into your wild eyes

and felt the Love that no language

can fully describe.

 

Only now can this magic meet my tongue to declare:

 

We are destined,

fated, reincarnated lovers.

The first time you kissed me

ancient music awoke the cells in my heart

that have always been beating for you.

 

We are the earth and moon

crashing into each other,

recreating the borders of our bodies

and typographies of our souls,

shifting oceans of emotions

and moving mountains of pain

 

Yes

You forever changed me

and I you.

Yes

 

I’ve done all I can to let you go

and I can still hear your heart beating in mine.

can still feel your fingers tracing the freckles on my face

can still hear you making animals noises to convey your emotions.

This is why I don’t have to miss you all the time,

You’re still with me.

 

Wherever you are,

I send my spirit in the winds to kiss your cheek

and my heart to whisper in your ear that you are so loved.

 

I hope you hear me

I hope you feel me.

 

and I hope, like my mother,

the next life or time in which you see me,

you will

recognize me again.

and you will say

Hello.