“For the Love of Poetry” and “On Denver, Colorado”

Mario recently graduated from the University of Denver with a master’s degree in English. They miss all of their friends, but are having a fun time making new ones in their new home of Washington, D.C. Mario is currently working a variety of odd jobs, running the D.C. open mic circuit, and perfecting the skill of bumming cigarettes off strangers outside bars.

Instagram: @callmemarioplz

For The Love of Poetry

Poems are a funny thing.

They take seconds, weeks or sometimes eons to write

but they disappear

as soon as I finally get to read them.

I’m not quite sure what to make of that.

I don’t think it’s fair—

our hard work just down the drain—

but neither is life.

Therefore, I suppose,

just like ball,

poems are life.

But how would that work?

Earlier today I had the following thought:

love doesn’t vanish, it simply moves on;

reshaping itself, kind of like matter,

into a more suitable form.

For example,

I wrote this poem in a notebook an ex got me:

one collaged with shows we loved and characters I adore.

I still geek out over Spider-Man—obviously—

and cherish Wagner Moura in Narcos.

I just do these things alone.

Well, not alone.

I do them in this notebook.

The one with pages built by someone loved and lost.

The same one currently being filled with these words

On Denver Colorado

The snow doesn’t stick the same way. Not to me, not to the ground.

It still falls though. Sometimes it falls slowly while others it cascades,

Coating the cars and the streets and the trees.

The snow makes me think of burials the way it covers up death;

It might not stick to me but to the dead squirrel I see on my runs,

The snow is the last thing it saw.

I know that I’m writing right now but, I promise,

I really wish I wasn’t. If I could focus on menial things like:

Milk and cookies or Musical Dance Experiences and

Severance and my roommates’ dedication towards getting me to watch Severance,

I would.

In other words, copy and pasted from an earlier draft of this poem,

“I don’t want to write this poem but these feelings want to be felt.”

Life can sometimes be like the small flakes or the white halls or the perpetuity wing—

Unbelievably endless and stuffed with stuff, baggage, and some more stuff.

More and more and more and more and more is writing a different poem on another day,

Almost in perpetuity