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Best Poems Written by Rachel Maran

Below are the all-time best Rachel Maran poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Rachel Maran Poem

Meditations On the Existential and Artaud

Speak to me until your words become meaningless.
The sound of your vibrations becomes a gesture of the metaphysical.
In our human confines its fruition is as fruitless as salvation.
Your mouth becomes a prism of incantation
Chanting meaningless literal meaning
Conceived of Eve,
The endless desire for purgation
All lies
I will not condone a god that condemns me
Give us the sacrament, expelled to eternal chaos
Embrace!
There in lies harmony through acceptance.

Details | Rachel Maran Poem

For a Departed Lover

There are dead flowers and used condoms in the garbage 
Next to the bed in my room,
Scraps of paper with your handwriting 
On the desk,
On the floor.
I notice that strands of your hair remain on my body.
For a moment I confuse them with my own.
Your smell lingers on my skin in places where your sweat used to be.
You forgot it there, 
Left it in this place along with the stains on my sheets.
And I miss you when I close my eyes.

Details | Rachel Maran Poem

The Lioness

Don't wake the sleeping lioness
She breathes moist  breath into the cool of the shade in the morning.
Wide eyed child that liked to watch her sleep,
Wanting , though fear full, to lay beside her warm body,
Peered through the door and sat on the corner of the bed,
Crept closer and lay her head on a vacant pillow;
Face facing face, not too close, never too close.
Composing herself carefully into the position of the lion's body ,
The child would bury her head beneath the adjacent pillow 
And listen for the rhythm of a heart beat through the sheets,
Trying and trying to sync with the rhythm of another's heart.
Inhale,
Exhale,
To fill, to empty, 
To repeat again.

Details | Rachel Maran Poem

Maybe Later

Maybe one day you will be able to stay with me,
And we will think great thoughts together.
Maybe sometime soon I will have the courage to cross the divide— 
The courage to be weak for you,
But the stability and balance to be the partner you deserve.

Maybe if we are patient we can try again,
Perhaps then I will learn patience 
And be content.

Slowly, slowly 
We will come to know the intricacies of the others flesh,
But only after you have learned to blink with my minds’ eye.

I would love to make you happy,
To find wisdom with you,
To learn about intimacy,
And to let go of what I think I know 
And what I expect.

I think that I could love you,
I would be your compliment 
And maybe your completion,
Perhaps you could be mine.

Perhaps this is just the beginning,
Perhaps I am insane.
But I will never regret you. 
I am only happy to know you,
As I am just beginning to know myself.

Details | Rachel Maran Poem

The Spirit of the Gaurdian

Show me the ink on your body.
I remove his shirt and lay my hands on his chest,
My face at his navel. 
I trace with my nose the image of the spirit that follows him,
Kiss the tear in the elephant’s eye,
And draw my  body up to look at his face.
I reconstruct the image with my fingertips
And now it has become a part of my soul,
Transmission.

Elephants mourn their dead.
They know the bones of their species
And when encountered stop to examine their remains.
They embrace their bones and hold them
As though with human arms and human thoughts.

Emotion is universal,
Not limited to singular beings and singular bodies
In transient time or transient space.
When I feel, then, 
I am unifying myself with the eternal.

Just now I am so small in his arms,
My fingers curled in his hands.
There is dirt under his fingernails
And I want to wash his hands
And hold them close in mine.

Details | Rachel Maran Poem

A Linen Universe

Today we can get lost in my bed.
We can build a fortress of pillows and sheets.
Today we can think up whole worlds beneath my blankets,
Worlds with people who have lives that I cannot yet imagine.
Maybe if we get lost there we might find someone I could be.
Then when we leave, 
Maybe,
If we leave,
It will no longer be pretend.

Details | Rachel Maran Poem

Reflections On a Suicide Note

Where does the writing become illegible?
I cannot reconstruct the thought I have tried to compose in ink.
They bend the pages 
They are not quite so simple as you might think.
So I find a pen in this unsteady hand
A hand writing for a mind plagued by confusion,
A mind confused by its own construction,
An affected constructed that plays on its ailments and its cures
And can't decide which poisons it more. 
Can you tell where the drugs set in and the urgency faded into a hum?
And the words wrote themselves as though I were dead or maybe just numb.
And its empty, 
Its all wrong,
It lacks depth.
And so I cry out
What is this life to me but what it does to my insides?
Oh Elliot!
I measure this life in weight, in wrinkles, in scars and sometimes broken ink.
I mix our blood and write in its memory,
intimacy.
If I effectively filled a vile with a memory 
It might  satiate some quilled desire to purge.

Details | Rachel Maran Poem

No Regrets

I love you now in the calm of this summer evening.
I love you in a way that no torrid waves of passion need express.
I love you now
And I love you completely
With my hands in your hair 
And your cheek at my breast.
And that is not to say I would not fight for you
And that is not to say I would not cry,
Should loving you somehow deceive me
I  will never regret that way I tried.

Details | Rachel Maran Poem

Woman In the Darkness

Don’t look at the girl with the holes in her eyes.
She sees through the darkness 
Beyond the disguise,
And the emptiness burns with her silent disdain,
A sound that is uttered in silent refrain
Because the syllables spoken, 
They can’t penetrate
The things she shuts out with an unspoken hate.

Beyond questionable murmurs of pleasure and pain
The strobe light repeats 
The smile she feigns
And the moment is defined by the things she can’t say
But she only sighs
Before looking away.