Mike Marks
Tasting My Emotions
The trek through the desert,
a bland diet of stinging sand
blinded until I reach
the fruit trees by the shore.
Too often I engage
in a battle with my feelings—
they are famished,
vying for every morsel.
Love is my hot sauce,
seeking adventure,
still pain is the hottest pepper,
demanding attention.
Fear is sour grapes,
an enemy of success,
yet satisfaction is my ketchup:
it makes everything better.
Guilt is always a menace,
hanging around like spoiled milk,
jacketing me with its bad taste
without explanation.
But confidence is the chef’s special,
forcing good things to happen,
turning midnight into sunshine,
storms into jubilees.
I drink the juice of tomorrow
from a cup fashioned by promise,
sharing my meal with my competition,
the peacemaker of myself.
Mike Marks is a Midwesterner, the middle of five children born in a six-year span. He was taught writing structures from poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks in Chicago, later earning the first Creative Writing bachelor’s degree ever awarded at Kansas State University. With over a hundred of his poems printed in literary magazines, Akron is Mike’s home where he and his wife Anita have raised their own five children, now raising a mixed woodland of tropical bonsai trees to, in a small way, reoxygenate the world.
The author gazes light years away and squints beyond a microscope lens, blurring distinctions of what is and what is not. Best read aloud, he questions our placement and significance in the ever-expanding universe with rumbling imagery intertwining rhythmic symmetry.