Sunday, December 20, 2015

New Poetry by James Diaz










Anyone Can Light A Match In The Dark

Some say that I never really knew
the things that I needed to know
in order to survive

but if you are reading this tonight
it means that I exceeded 
more than a few low expectations

that I went uphill on my knees
year after year
undeterred 
and that all of the shouting
from over my shoulder
was no angry God
just a few hungry ghosts
that I refused to feed

and when I look back on it now
nothing haunts me,
I stood the test,
not of time,
but of the emptiness that sits between time
what gets filled with the light
you learn to hide from all of the death eaters

the cheerleaders of nothing and nowhere
whose hands 
at the end of the day
have no real creases of their own
no signs of having survived
with only this:

the will and the need to go on.


- James Diaz 2015


James Diaz lives in Upstate New York. His poetry can be found in Chronogram, Calliope, Ditch, The Voices Project and A Long Story Short.







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