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.