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Best Poems Written by Jessica Hambrick

Below are the all-time best Jessica Hambrick poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Jessica Hambrick Poem

The Introvert

Darling—
You strung together useless trinkets of imagination,
And pinned me up inside your head. 
With dreams that stalked me across the night,
But were too big to drag out of bed.

You clung to the savior you rashly mistook in me,
Like a lover clings to her dead.
When I never meant a single word,
Of whatever I might have said.

Verily, I wasn’t rummaging for anything at all;
I certainly wouldn’t have begun in you.
The god you saw, I have seen, as well, 
But only in the self I pursue.

And so I rose from shards of the mirror,
And snatched away from your fussy little hand.
For as I slept beside you, I slept nonetheless alone,
In a dream you could never understand.   

I never used you because you were useless,
Never belonged to you because I don’t belong.
Couldn’t fulfill my emptiness with your own,
And could only pretend for so long. 

But now I can’t gouge you out from within me,
From a place that never was there.	
From a bottomless, unquenched solitude,
In which you simply could not fare.  

What you wanted to see wasn’t in me;
I can’t give you what you think you need.    
We’re ever alone, yet we try to outnumber our loneliness,
When in turning inward, we are freed.

Details | Jessica Hambrick Poem

Scientist Atop Mountain

I stood at the top of the mountain
Giddy, grinning— panting like a fiend
And thought of O2 sat., 
Allostery,
Polyporphyrin rings

And, in time, I thought of bottomlessness,
Half-filled glasses 
Stars exploding through the ineffable blackness

And thought, underneath it all,
What’s the vastness even mean?
I began climbing slowly down from the ego of my dream 

And asked 
What for?
Nothing more
But a flag stuck in the ground?
To calculatingly defy gravity 
As it mercilessly tugs us down?

And then I wondered, ponderously:
Am I a prophet
Or a god?
Is there a defined mind to our brain? 
Dimension to our façade?

A man behind the curtain?
A voice within the sky?
An ultimate time and place?
An adequate answer to “why?”    

I sat on the mountain, tortured
Like the archetypally wise
And knew then that all life’s purpose 

Had been imparted through desperate lies.

--
Note to those not familiar with Biochemistry: 
The first stanza refers to hemoglobin's decrease in oxygen affinity in response to high altitude/ low atmospheric pressure. This is accomplished through the molecule's allosteric conformation change. Hemoglobin's molecular structure consists of a porphyrin ring.

Details | Jessica Hambrick Poem

While I Dreamt

Long hair, coal, coiled
‘Round fingertips, bone white.

O, my diffident lover,
How I waited for that night.

When I held you as you dreamt,
And kissed your quivering lips.

When we bathed in the uncloaked moonlight,
In an everlasting eclipse.

Sky, the blankest façade
Lit by nicks of white.  

I carry you into my dream;
I carry you into the night.

Details | Jessica Hambrick Poem

Paradox

I went off into the night again;
No one forgives me when I have sinned.

I am a paradox 
Leading
The blind to believing.
They found me
Screaming
About the paroxysmal feeling.
The voice fell off like a spirit leaving;
The ash
Seeps out of my being.

Tell me something wild you did;
Tell me something you’d never miss,
If you and I weren’t caught up in this.
If I could I would do it all again.

I was wrong to ever assume;
The darkness seduces as it bleeds through,
The stitches, the resurrected wound.

I opened up again and bled;
“Carry on,” is what they said.

I hold the gun against my head.

And call out to no one again tonight, 
I was wrong to ever get it right. 
“Drown it out,” said the voice inside.

I don’t care anything about being alive.

Details | Jessica Hambrick Poem

I

I belong to no one else.
I am my own— hardly,
A blinking aggregate of macromolecules
Staring down from the edge of a black hole
That they tell me is eternity.

The preacher told me he would pray for me;
I don’t know what for.
I am everything I could ever need;
They fumble for something more.

They are aligned in
Archaic allegories,
Paradoxical ceremonies.
I sit at the edge of the deeply unknown 
And am not afraid to be my own.

What do I believe in?
Disbelief,
The scientific method.
Entropy,
Explanations for the reverent.

I am the prophet of my own dissenting,
A martyr risen for reinventing.

I am degenerate; a random genetic repetition.
Yet both my fate and inhibition	

A sentient sieve's distinct nerve endings,
A protagonist that chooses my own beginning.


--
For the "Religious Poetry: Non-Christian" contest, Atheism

Details | Jessica Hambrick Poem

Absurd

To me, you are purely ephemeral;
We are irrelevantly real.
And I am left with no one but myself,
With this hollowness I feel.

And still, I am hardly here,
Just a mass of scattered free radicals.
A steady-state cascade;
A time-killing fanatical.

I laugh because it is absurd,
And carry on without a word.

She was blanched,
Scuffed like an epiphyses.
Gritted between molars,
Eyed blind,
Her body curved in magnificent sacrilege;
Flagrant,  
Inexplicitly mine.

My secondhand thing,
That some dub love.
I just gawped
Whenever she took it off;
And seeped 
Into the ground at her feet.

I woke up and remembered that there was nothing else;
I woke up and wondered why I hadn't killed myself.

I was dead set
On something but nothing and everything yet;
All meaning unmet.

All the null that added up to self;
All the lives that lie to blindly dwell.

I laugh because it is absurd;
The others dare not speak the word.

--

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." 

-Albert Camus, absurdist

Details | Jessica Hambrick Poem

Athena

You sleep ashore with longing eyes wide,
Consciously still to swell with the tide.
Late night before the endless, black sea,
I found you wavering there for me.

But lost you against the sky above,
And woke up mournfully in love.

Sunrise I found you in the garden, streaming,
With flowers in your hair, sprawled out and beaming.
You were warm like skin in summer rain;
We kicked across the fields you reign.

You seized my hand; my head still spins,
My love, you teem to merely exist,
And conquer means to infinite ends.

I take you in like roots take up rain,
Like a needle pricks an untapped vein,
Like a candle strips a savage flame. 

You are the absolute ecstasy for which I distend,
The sun to which I tirelessly bend.

And I lust so much it burns me up;   
When you see that dreams are not enough,
In a garden alluring, obscure, and lush—

The forbidden will awaken upon our touch.

--

9/5/14

Details | Jessica Hambrick Poem

God Given

It was nailed up at the huge door,
Where people dishonestly balked.
I wondered what for.
I walked up to watch the shuffling flock.

There are too many people in the crowd,
For anyone to notice now.
The silence here is far too loud.

95 could never describe,
Why I couldn't walk in. 
Like I was doomed to be forgivable,
And on earth just to repent.

She told me
In another life it might make sense,
For things to explode with a single glimpse.

I watch them live to see the end.

I am not something picked off of the wreckage,
A vector for your epidemic.

The highest abuse is the great lengths 
Repeatedly reached
For defeat;
To keep yourself down on your knees.

A lost soul is a soul set free.
I saw god when I saw the riot in me.

And if you'd rise, you also would see;

God is who you let yourself be.

Details | Jessica Hambrick Poem

Abiotic

This is not life
Façade-glossed eyes
Spilling out
Keeling from inside

This is not
What I traded for a pay check
A calendar space
Insentience

This is not dilated pupils
Suggestive smirks on long open nights
Sidewalk flocks through the blinking city sights

This is antithesis
A nihilistic spectacle
Handfuls of myself
Slung at some meaningless backdrop
Of tedious, grievous facelessness

I am dead weight
Basking in a womb of ruin
DIY
Self-inflicted holocaust,
Ashen, laughing    
Swearing that I’ll rise

This is not life
Lying awake      
Vexing over lost, losing, perpetual time
Abiotic, unborn
Pressing through groupthink, Stacholm syndrome,

Wondering when I died

Details | Jessica Hambrick Poem

Gibbs Free Energy

I am teetering at the brim of progress 
The self I spend to be of worth
Is the same self that I had to earn

And to what end? 
I ask,
At what fee?
The ones that stand down do so for free 

And all that’s left is work for me
(Fr , 

         PdV)

I hauled up, masochistic Sisyphus  
All they did was balk
Scatter, Jack and Jill   
Emptily talk 
About how hard, how far
Never
I could not

And then for an instant I was on top

[King parenthetical]

They stood with their calculators
Screaming

But negative RTlnKeq ???
Kb T times ln W   ???
Enthalpy minus T entropy,
Gives us the standard energy ???

I saw the people finally sap
It was halfway forward to halfway back

I felt something snap

And I fell unfathomably far 
To a different bottom
A different problem

I stood intermediate at the foot of the unknown
Before a taller peak to dethrone

--
Note: Gibbs Free Energy (delta G) is a thermodynamic parameter used to describe reactions and stability in chemistry. It is common to see a diagram of delta G vs. reaction progress. These free energy diagrams consist of continuous curves with peaks and troughs. The lower the energy, the more stable. 

Unfortunately you have to have significant background knowledge in chemistry to understand every reference.