Empty Skies
clouds roll, billowing
dreams once gripped with joyous heart
blown from vacant skies
This is my entry for this weeks Haiku Poetry Challenge BLEW and Skies.
There are details in the prompt on how to write a Haiku.
© 2014-2022- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.
Surf
by Ronovan Hester
No peaks, valleys, or destination points.
Never was a road map pointing the way.
No guarantees the fall will eventually end.
The trek back to the top not blazed or marked. Lost. Alone.
Unique in your success, and one more number in the failures.
Dreams ride the random undulating waves.
The crests unstable and never solid for long.
The high only lasts a moment before the crash.
The climax ends in a churning trough of descent, expected, unknown.
To climb this mountain your vision is vast and wide, planning, and watching.
Carried by the past dashed dreams of others,
and the burning saltiness of millennia of failures.
Just one unbalanced breath, and your ride in peril.
And your next, you slip, not along rough terrain to the bottom of dirt and stone.
But down the wall of see-through glass, life on the other side. Predators of players?
Or the dramatic plunge, less graceful than chaos.
Watching the greeting sun reflecting surface below.
Chest raw from the impact through the vanishing hopes.
Pushing through, chin, knees, shins, scrapped with sandpaper of pulverized dead things.
Bloodied and bruised, but not the end, tumbling over and over, gasping for breath. Dying?
Your limp body washes up on the sand, choking.
You join the other eons of unrecognizable rejects.
No one to help. No roadside assistance. No guardian.
People walking along, heads down, looking for empty shells, and finding you.
But you’re not enough, not quite dead enough, you stink of fresh disappointment.
Their heads refuse to look out to the horizon,
never seeing the sun-soaked crests of possibilities.
None of those tumbles, those survivors, or those joys.
They always walk safely on dry sand, toes dry, just out of reach of adventure.
The chance, the opportunity, of living. Heads not in the sand but forever bowed.
Lives only change with empty shells of the living.
Polished with time to the point they all look the same,
yet the wary keep up their search for the next perfect vessel.
Only inches away, a vibrant and exciting life calls with a roar they no longer hear.
But you’ve survived, and you tremble to your battered and pain-filled knees, again.
You stand, turn to that uncharted, desired filled world.
Wading in up to your chest, deep in the sting of the past.
Now dive and swim to fight the tide, or others will drag you.
They’ll help you along or drown you with their own failures, sinking before they’ve crested,
back to those footprints in the sand, now another empty shell to add to their dead collection.
Turn, wade, dive, scan the playing field, and wait for the swell.
Each fall, each ripped open chest and scrapped chin, battle scars.
No success without trying, nor without appreciated amounts of failure.
With each toe that leaves the sand behind, it dips into the salty dreams of ancient warriors.
You learn to descend from those crests in control, with less in chaos. With more success than not.
© 2021- Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.
4 years? Yep, that’s how long I’ve been running this blog as of today. I’ve learned a lot during that time. I’ve gone through phases of being this person or that person in Blogland as I call it. Or did I used to call It bBogworld? Maybe now I’ll stat calling it the Blogiverse. Yeah, I like that. Anyway, I at one time was writing multiple articles a day about how to blog, poetry, writing, and anything else I could think of. Then I hit the wall. I made a mistake and didn’t even know it until way too late.
The mistake I made? I took a break from blogging except for my weekly haiku challenge. Even the challenge was a challenge to get out each week. Sometimes it would be 7:45 AM and the haiku is supposed to go out at 8 AM and I am barely able to find the energy or will to get the laptop and log in.
At first, I took a break to unplug for a while. I wanted to experience a bit of what normal people did. I wanted to watch at TV show, take a nap. I even wanted to work on writing my next book. Up to that break I had a daily habit of not only writing my blog but also being creative in working on book ideas. Then I developed new habits.
One habit was a good one, I read books. But then that turned in to an obsession almost, an addiction. Last year I read over 300 books. Now I can barely read a book. I start one and within a couple of chapters I already see where things are going, and I stop and then move on to the next book.
Oh, and then there were the naps. But then I have Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia, so I just end up sleeping whenever and often don’t sleep for a couple of days at a time.
Then there is the manic binge watching. I have this addictive nature, it runs in the males in my family, it’s why I don’t touch alcohol. Once I watch the first episode of something then I must see them all. Or if there is a genre of film, I just gotta see whatever else I can find in that genre or by that movie star.
Now here I am a year or so later and I’m trying to develop that writing habit again and thus find my friends once more. I did a little reading about developing habits and some of it is a bit daunting. According to actual scientific studies it took people in the studies anywhere from 18 days to 254 days to create their desired habit. Now some habits are easier to achieve, and people are all different regarding ability, strength of will and determination, but it really is realistic to expect a habit to take anywhere from 2 to 8 months to create a habit. So, if you are as couch potato and you want to run an hour every morning before work, well look forward to a long haul but just realize that it’s normal to take a while AND if you skip a day you don’t have to start the months over again.
So here I am on day one of my new habit, or should I say old habit? I tried to do this last year, but I bombed. I chose to simply do a haiku in response to my challenge, just 3 little lines of poetry, and I couldn’t do it. Now I have no idea where to start except to write SOMETHING at least once each week.
I’ve put this out there to let all you newer bloggers and perhaps even some of my veteran friends know the dangers of taking that break. If you do take a break, set a time to start back up and stick to it.
The one good thing I realized after my break from blogging is … YOU CAN SURVIVE WITHOUT BLOGGING! So all you addicts out there, just remember, the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. I did, and now here I am better and more sedate than ever.
See y’all next time.
Forever in dreams,
I am awakened by you,
In final failure.
Ronovan~Writes~Poetry
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