Sometimes you don’t die

when you’re supposed to

& now I have a choice

repair a world or build

a new one inside my body

a white door opens

into a place queerly brimming

gold light so velvet-gold

it is like the world

hasn’t happened

when I call out

all my friends are there

everyone we love

is still alive gathered

at the lakeside

like constellations

my honeyed kin

honeyed light

beneath the sky

a garden blue stalks

white buds the moon’s

marble glow the fire

distant & flickering

the body whole bright-

winged brimming

with the hours

of the day beautiful

nameless planet. Oh

friends, my friends—

bloom how you must, wild

until we are free.

Copyright © 2018 by Cameron Awkward-Rich. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 30, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

Were it possible, I would be naked. Of the nude philosophy:
consider the globalization of the expensive american sound. 

Should we worry? We should work. I believe you’re right.
I distrust the word “white.” It’s sanctified propaganda. 

Repetition is my language of origin, the highest technology. Anyway
the body is only mine provisionally. For reasons that I’m not sure of,
I am convinced that before becoming music, music was only a word. 

I prefer to destroy the composer, renew the concept.
Extraordinary limitation playing freedom.

Copyright © 2019 by Taylor Johnson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 26, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.