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Best Poems Written by Emily Backoo

Below are the all-time best Emily Backoo poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Emily Backoo Poem

My Face, My Secrets

There’s one thing that bonds animal to man,
That unites the wild with the caged,
Those captivated within bondage and those roaming free; disengaged.
At a first wandering gaze or slinking inquisitive eye,
One may be misled in the assumption that this feature perhaps is a metaphorical good-bye;
Maybe a symbolic nod to our differing upbringings through parallel surroundings,
But, alas, this feature has no relation to our species’ housing.
It’s not the way in which we all lay our head down at night to rest,
Nor the sweet milk that flows from a mother’s nurturing breast.
In fact, its a collection of things,
A collection of features placed ever so gently upon the brain from which we think,
The throat from which we speak,
The nerves from which, with clear and distinct picture, with curiosity, we peek.
As I ponder this conglomeration of perfectly placed skin,
I look to my own and contemplate the secrets held within.
This face of mine is a map of where I’ve been,
And if you look long enough, you may find some buried memories hidden in my grin.
My hairline, set slightly back upon my head,
Has been pulled a little tighter every goddamned day.
Throwing my curly chocolate hair into a tight tail on my scalp,
I shoved my hands in my pockets and looked down, insecure and unpronounced.
My eyes are a journey from the desert sands of India to the snowy ice caps of Ireland.
Protruding ever so slightly from my face,
They paint with gentle strokes a love story born within a medical school embrace.
Let me lead you farther through this trip down memory lane,
Your hand in mine as we traverse towards the features that remain.
Thus, we stop at the nose, curved outwards and extending north,
A fixed mix of my mother’s slim Caucasian heritage and my father’s ancestors in India,
My nose not only smells the American cuisine we cook,
But exists symbolically on my face as a marriage not always as perfect as those I used to find in my Cinderella story book.
The two pinky plush lips perched upon my chin,
Soft and delicate hold the words I want to scream out loud within.
They keep me locked, guarded, safe.
They are the sacred dam upon my face,
Holding my secrets, my woes, my various mental illnesses I must not advertise for fear of public distaste.
They open to breathe and to speak,
To breathe and repeat.
Repeat and repeat and repeat,
Until, like most dams built by an unskilled architect,
They will break and they will spill, and you may be surprised at what words will then fall at your feet.

Details | Emily Backoo Poem

Where Shall I Go

The moons and the tides
Strongly coincide,
Pulling up and away,
Tugging the sand from the bay.
My mind is a lot like the sea in that way.
It dips and it falls,
It falters and it crawls,
But then sometimes learns to just be.
To exist in my mind is a paradox you see,
An absurd conglomeration in actuality.
The grace of the waves and the glow of the moon,
Hold their cosmic connection betwixt their midsummer monsoon.
I tell my tired thoughts that they exist as a metaphor,
As a final weak attempt just to breathe.
To find some purpose in these days is the truest tragedy,
To wander this world without aim.
Your words sweet like honey tell my mind not to worry,
To find comfort in solidarity.
They take place in my head,
Turning from sound to shape,
Spindling their fingers over my nerves as I shake.
How I wish that I wasn’t born this way,
But what could I quite possibly do?
Every soul I’ve ever known has abandoned my side,
Taking my absence in grace and in stride.
I’m not a loss to them but they are to me,
A piece of my wrist hosting a new seam.
These are the days in which I wish not to breathe,
To push my head underwater and let my tired lungs squeeze.
I wish to struggle for air,
My body not willing to let go,
But to force myself to slip into the unknown.
For my lips to turn blue and my blood to go cold,
Would surely be better than the scornful gaze that you hold.
It surely must be better than my sliced wrists bleeding,
Dripping as I clench my white teeth, seething.
O’er the rainbow is the place in which I’ll go,
Even if the rainbow is black.
For black is better than living with myself,
And one day I’ll finally take the road less travelled and never turn back.

Details | Emily Backoo Poem

Stifling the Flower Brings Rain

When growing a flower there’s a few things you need,
Water and sunlight and room for the leaves.
If you tend to your flower with warmth and with care,
It will one day sit tall with assured debonair.
But if someone plunges their hand and plucks its root,
It will shrivel up and perish under their unthinking brute.
Their one little tug on its fragile, soft stem,
Will tarnish your hard work with a righteous condemn.
But what’s more than your hard work gone to waste,
Is that they were the architect of your own distaste.
You dreamed and you wished to see your little plant grow,
But someone took their fingers and dug out its soul.
In one fell swoop of their unthinking mind,
Their gratification took hold of your flowers intertwined vines.
Their compulsion to see that patch of dirt bare,
Has left you reeling and lonely, filled with despair.
How did your flower,
So small and so fair,
End up lying shriveled and wilting in the hor summer air? 
It came to be something to rip out and then toss back into the dirt,
Only to be a second of entertainment for an act in its lack of meaning, overt.
You watered it and basked it in light,
And it got torn from the grass, too helpless to fight.
For how can a flower fight against a man,
Who decides he can rip it from its life before it even began.

Details | Emily Backoo Poem

Protection

How do I capture a fleeting moment,
If in the moment I don’t know it will slip away?
A memory that will slither out of my mind, turning from color to gray.
How do I hold with tight grasp an intangible otherworldly bestowment?

I ponder the woes of letting the good days go,
And clench my eyes with determined tenacity,
Willing my muscles to remember her vivacity.
Oh, how I do sometimes wish I had a camera whilst the memory still glows.

But if I contemplate long enough,
And will my mind to free itself of the mysterious Father Time,
Perhaps each second can be protected.
Each bouncing laugh will no longer be given up.
For with each passing rhyme I open my mind,
And instead of a camera I protect my moments solely with my introspect.

Details | Emily Backoo Poem

Free

I want to be free, with the birds and the bees,
Singing my offkey remedy
Of their beautiful melody.
Let me fly 
High above the sometimes gray but more often blue sky,
Let me soar along with the wind,
Each gale sweeping me closer and closer towards the brink.
Isn’t that cliche?
So ing cliche,
But that’s me.
Every suicidal teenager labeled as an attention whore and angsty
Sitting alone in their room falling apart where no one can see.
It’s been three years now
Of falling down a hole with no end in sight,
Each moment getting closer to the day I take flight.
My blood I pour down my bathtub from time to time,
Is like looking at the brochure for an upcoming trip, getting more and more excited with each of these passing rhymes.
Soon you’ll see,
That my contagious laugh and wide grin spread across my face
Was the cloak concealing my inevitable fate.

Details | Emily Backoo Poem

Rose-Colored Duress

I stay up all night and away I fly,
To the field in which to me, you convoked your goodbye.
I’m standing in a flowing white dress,
My ankles deep in rose-colored duress,
And I stumble without you to catch me.
And I never stop falling.
But sometimes there’s a falter in the way that I feel,
And for a moment everything is quiet.
The sky turns black and you disappear,
But still in the field I wait for you, right here.
Because waiting for you is like waiting for rain in a drought,
Disappointing without a singular doubt,
But still giving me the comfort of hope.
So i think that I’ll stay,
Standing in this white dress,
Ankle-deep in rose colored duress.
For waiting for rain is better than dry leaves,
Sinewy and weak, catching the first lick of flame.
Waiting for you and hoping you'll come back,
To remind me that I’m alone in a room full with people,
For deep down we know that right for you, I’m not.
I’ll stay in the field looking for the girl,
Who left me in the cold, frozen to the bone,
Clutching my own hand in a desperate attempt to feel less alone.