Poems by Jordan A. Leturgez

I deserve better -- a small verdict I learned to say aloud,
like lighting a match in a room that taught me to whisper.

I have swallowed crumbs of affection until my hunger
became ordinary; I have made my voice polite, then thin.
No more. I am unlearning the grammar of keeping quiet
so someone else can be comfortable.

My tenderness is not rent money for a temporary bed.
My time is not a currency to be spent on excuses.
I refuse to catalog my worth by the frequency of your return.
I will not measure my days by how well I fit into your absence.

I deserve better -- not as punishment to you
but as a home I build for myself, brick by reclaimed breath.
I will plant mornings where my name blooms first,
where promises are not fossils but living trees.

If love is a map, I will redraw the borders.
If patience is a seed, I will choose where it is sown.
I will set my feet where my heart is not apologizing,
where my laugh is full, where my wounds are tended.

I deserve better -- this is not anger, it is stewardship.
It is the quiet revolution of learning to keep my own light,
to walk out of rooms that dim me and into days that match me.
I deserve better -- and finally, I will answer to that.

Say it once like folding an old letter--
the edges soften, the ink blurs,
a confession turned into paper boats
set out on a late-summer river.
Nevermind, and the current takes it,
not cruel, not kind, simply moving.

Say it soft as moth wings against a lamp,
a small apology for wants that burned too bright.
Nevermind becomes a lullaby for the stubborn heart,
a quiet room where arguments unpeel
and sunlight finds the dust in forgiving ways.

There is a strange mercy in the word:
not erasing, but shelving--putting the ache
on a high shelf where we can see it, not live in it.
Nevermind teaches hands to unclench,
teaches mouths to close around the sharp things.

Sometimes it is a door left ajar,
sometimes an ocean swallowing a name.
It is not surrender to the night--more like
learning the map of your own soft places,
tracing the seams where sorrow and relief meet.

Say it when you must: to a fault, to a friend, to the mirror.
Let it be small and human, a bell rung for passage.
Nevermind--three syllables that carry a cross and a key,
a weathered hush that somehow clears the room,
and leaves you ready, at last, for morning.

We live to see the day -- not as a promise
but as a small, stubborn miracle.
Night folds its palms and hides its eyes,
but we keep watch: breath against cold glass,
fingers tracing the map of where we were.

We live to see the day when the sky
learns to be generous again,
spilling light like an apology
across roofs, across the rumor of streets.
There is a language in the way dust trembles
as if remembering how to be gold.

We live to see the day for quiet things:
a cup warming a palm, a child's laugh
peeling like sun through the laundry,
an old song hummed into a doctor's waiting room.
We live to see the day for heavy things too--
for names spoken without the clatter of tears,
for graves that become gardens under our hands.

We live to see the day because someone
laid down their fear like a bridge,
because someone else dug their knees in and would not move.
Because the past keeps sending signals: ashes that still warm,
letters folded in pockets, the weight of lessons learned.
We carry them forward, not as anchors but as fuel.

We live to see the day to fill it: with repair,
with stubborn kindness, with stubborn laughter.
We live to see the day and learn again to trust
the small mercy of morning: that light arrives
even when we have nothing left to bargain with.
We rise anyway, shoulder to shoulder with dawn,
bearing the quiet stubbornness of survivors.

We live to see the day -- and when it comes,
we do not hoard it. We open every window,
let it move through us like wind, let it wake the seeds.
We lay our palms on the world and say, here.
We are here to meet you. We are here to keep you.
We are here to make of this bright terrible gift
a life that remembers why it wanted light.

There is a humility in the size of things:
a cup cradled in two hands, steam
that remembers the shape of your palms.
Think small, and the world fits --
a porch light, a book opened at midnight,
the slow exactness of a single, ordinary day.

To think small is to learn the grain
of wood, the contour of your own patience.
It is noticing the way rain scolds the windows
and then forgives them. It is keeping a map
of the streets that lead to your mother's kitchen,
memorizing the sound of laughter in one room.

But small thinking can be a fence, too --
a line that narrows horizons into neat, safe boxes.
It trims the wild edges until only the comfortable remains,
tethers wonder to routine and calls it wisdom.
When fear lives in small thinking, it shrinks the moon,
makes risk an expensive superstition.

Still, there is courage in choosing small:
to plant one tomato and watch it learn sunlight,
to hold one hand through one long conversation,
to refuse the constant roar that promises more.
Living small can be a radical act of focus,
an economy of love, a devotion to depth over display.

So let your smallness be generous:
pamper detail with attention, let tenderness grow,
allow the tiny things to teach you scale.
Keep room for sudden expansion -- a kindness that widens,
a door left open to the sky. Think small to sharpen sight,
live small to feel everything close and true.

They call it talent when lightning strikes once,
but skill is the slow keeping of fire--
a patient bellows under the ribs,
a hand learning the hymn of its own work.

It is the hour repeated until muscle remembers
what thought forgets under the weight of fear.
The edge that shaves away the useless,
the small gestures that tilt fate's heavy wheel,
the quiet sharpening of a single motion
until it sings true in the dark.

Skill is not thunder; it is a seam
stitched through days of stumbling and return--
scars mapped like constellations across the palm.
It converts doubt into a steady currency,
turns clumsy hopes into instruments of light.

See the maker bend to wood, to code, to clay:
each breath a syllable of apprenticeship,
each mistake a tutor who refuses to leave.
Power blooms where repetition meets attention,
where the ordinary becomes miraculous by care.

And when the world needs to be remade,
it asks not for raw force but for hands that know
how to coax a stubborn thing awake.
This is the power of skill--silent, relentless,
the small, fierce music that reshapes the world.

They are the quiet pillars beneath a trembling sky,
not laws that bind but cartographers of possibility --
lines drawn so builders know where to trust the ground.
A code of common rhythm that lets many hands keep time.

Think of a bridge: bones measured, bolts known,
so two strangers can meet in the middle and cross
without asking the architect's name. Think of language --
letters paved straight enough that a hope can travel miles.

Standards are lighthouses on fogged coasts:
they do not steal the shore's mystery, they promise ships a place to aim.
They are the grammar of bravery, the scaffolding of wild invention,
a map handed forward so a child may climb farther than her parents did.

When we agree on measure, we make a stage for trust.
When we choose clarity, doors hinge wide instead of closing.
A rule kept is a seed planted in common soil;
standards are the weather that turns seed into orchard.

They pare away the needless options that drown momentum,
and in the space left open, new shapes take root -- surprising, tender, true.
Standards teach us how to walk together, not how to walk the same.
They give us roads so strangers can become collaborators,
and in that joining, opportunity wakes and sings.

So hold them lightly and hold them well --
not iron cages, but frames that let color and motion live.
Let standards be the promise we leave to those who come next:
a shared light, a steady plank, a language that says,
Come. Build. Begin. The world will hold you.

On the skin of a curve I lay a single silver thread,
not to trespass the arc, but to learn its breath.
I touch once--no more than that--and the world tilts,
a precise, soft geometry: the slope of wanting.

It fits the moment like a whispered definition,
a straightness that understands the curve's secret bend.
We are maps in motion--one line that leans, one line that leans away--
a punctuation of contact where infinity feels finite.

This is not ownership but recognition:
to meet and mirror the tangent's angle for an instant,
to read the derivative of a life and know the direction
without swallowing its compass of possibility.

The curve keeps its becoming; the line keeps its clarity.
Between them, a tiny miracle: a single shared point,
a language of touch so exact it could be called faith.
Here, approximation becomes intimacy.

How tender to be allowed such a perfect glimpse--
to count the slope and carry it like a secret home.
For lovers, for moments, for truths that refuse to loop,
we are always learning to be that straight, that brief, that true.

The tangent leaves as it came: straight, honest, inevitable.
But the touch--oh, the touch--bends us toward new horizons.

You close the door on yesterday's noise --
the clatter of shoulds, the static of doubt.
A small ritual: a kettle's breath, a pen's sharp tip,
the screen soft as a horizon. You breathe in the room
as if it were a living thing waiting to be spoken to.

At first the world crowds the edges -- emails, chores,
the future's impatient knocking. Then one sound thins:
the steadying of your own pulse, like a metronome
beneath a lighthouse. The margins shrink.
Attention becomes a lens and the lens grows hot.

Time pulls inward: minutes fold into one long seam.
Hands remember what the mind no longer needs
to remind them of. Errors fall away like loose stones;
only the path you are carving remains. Thought
isn't thought now but a river your will steps into.
You move with its current, not against it.

Outside, clocks count. Inside, sentences, stitches, beats
arrive as if delivered from another room.
There is a strange generosity to this place:
it trades loneliness for belonging, panic for craft.
Joy comes quiet, not triumphant but complete,
a small bell rung inside the ribs.

When you surface, light is different, familiar and new.
You hold something between your palms -- a sentence cured,
a chord that rings, a shape finally true. Your hands remember
the way home, and your heart keeps the map.
For a while you were both cartographer and sea,
and the ache afterward is only proof you went deep.

We meet in the small porch of a screen,
where sentences arrive like evening light --
soft, immediate, folding into the lap
of whatever day we carry home.

Your laugh is a kettle I can hear boiling
across the distance; my silence a warm shawl
you drape without asking. Names and weather
turn into meaning: a shared slice of sky.

There is no grand reveal, only the slow work
of two hands drafting a bridge from ordinary words.
We patch the loneliness with small kindnesses --
a recipe, a memory, a condolence sent like bread.

Sometimes the chat is a river: quick, bright,
skipping stones of gossip and dreams.
Sometimes it is a hearth, low and patient,
where we roast our fears until they're tender.

No prophecy here, only presence -- the steady light
that makes the margins of our days readable.
A friendly chat: a light left on in the window,
an invitation that says, Come as you are.

I stand at the crossroads with a pocket full of questions,
the map of my life folded into the crease of my palm.
Around me, voices bloom--soft, sharp, muffled--
each a lantern swaying in the night with its own small truth.

I ask the river for counsel; it answers in currents,
teaching me how to let go of stones that keep me anchored.
I ask the old tree for counsel; it answers in rings,
teaching me how patient grief can become a steady trunk.

Neighbors hand me phrases like smooth pebbles:
"Try this," "Don't," "Wait," "Leap."
Some glint like fortune, some bruise like warnings.
I hold them up to the light, trying to decide which will fit my pocket.

Advice smells of other people's forks in the road--
the taste of their victories, the ache of their regrets.
It is not a map but a mirror and a compass:
it will show the shape of a hand that has gripped a knife,
and it will point, faintly, toward a direction that once served.

I learn to ask with a soft mouth,
to invite the world's counsel without swallowing it whole.
To sift the gold from the gravel by touching it to my tongue;
to hear the thread in each story that vibrates true in my own bones.

Sometimes the clearest answer is a silence,
a pause where no one lays a stone on your path,
and that is advice too--permission to listen to the hollow
inside you that already remembers the way.

Advice is a lantern offered by a stranger,
a quilt stitched from many hands, a borrowed coat for cold nights.
It will warm you for a season, guide a step or two,
but the road asks you to walk, and your feet will learn the shape.

So I gather the lanterns, the rings, the river's soft lessons,
and fold them into the pockets of my coat.
I will carry others' light until my own ember glows enough,
until I can make my own map by burning midnight into dawn.

If you have something to say--speak it like bread handed across a table.
If you are the one who seeks--receive it like fire, with care.
Advice is love in fragments; choose what fits, and let the rest go.
The rest--like rain--will find another thirsty field to bless.