Poems by Jordan A. Leturgez

We unclasp the small, rusty bones of yesterday--
fingers tasting the cold iron of old promises,
and lift them like explained maps,
learning at last the names of our wounds.

Sun arrives as a patient witness,
burning the thin varnish of fear.
It finds the places where we hid our voices
and stains them gold; the songs spill out
like water from a cracked pot, generous and surprised.

There is a language that only unshackled feet speak:
the soft percussion of steps that do not ask permission,
the hush of breath that no longer counts its cost.
We trade the grammar of survival for an accent of daring,
and the world, for once, listens.

Liberation is not a single door opened;
it is the rustling of rooms within us,
the slow uncoiling of a bird's wings after winter,
the way a river remembers the sea and rushes toward it.

We plant our names in places that once forbade them,
root them deep as anchors and light as prayers.
Hands that trembled learn the shape of holding--
not to grasp, but to offer: food, truth, forgiveness.
Laughter becomes the currency of mornings.

And when the old gates fall--no clatter, only a wind that carries away the last lock--
we step through with pockets full of small, ordinary brave things:
a child's first clear question, an apology that reaches across a table,
the courage to say I was wrong, I am learning, I will stay.

Freedom tastes like a door left open at dusk,
like salt on lips after long, earnest travel.
It is not spotless. It bears the scab of every healed cut,
the history of every hand that pushed and did not relent.
It asks patience, vigilance, the willingness to repair.

Still, once unbound, we move: a sea of soft uprisings,
a chorus of feet, of seeds, of promises, of truth.
We become the small miracles we were taught to fear:
unafraid of light, unafraid of loss, unafraid to be tender.

Tonight the stars seem nearer, as if on purpose.
We lay our maps on the grass, trace new lines with bright, stubborn fingers,
and name the places we will not leave to shadows.
Liberation is the work of living whole, of being honest with our hands.
It is the music we finally allow ourselves to dance to.

They call it silence, but it is not empty --
it hums like a hidden loom where meaning is woven.
A single lamp trims the room into a small sky,
and dust motes are galaxies being born and dying
inside the slow orbit of my hands.

Outside the street shouts and the city breathes loud,
but here I learn the language of careful motions:
the soft knuckle of a pencil against paper,
the patient stitch that holds a seam together,
the low arithmetic of decisions turned to habit.

Silence is not a void but a kind of listening --
it opens like a window when the world closes its doors.
My breath keeps time; my heart is the metronome.
Every small task becomes a constellation:
seeming fragments that, in this hush, are named and guided.

I work as if something is waiting just beyond sound,
a truth that needs the slow polishing of attention.
When the day finally leans back and the lamp goes out,
I carry away the work like a quiet harvest --
fruit that tastes of dusk and a steady, wordless faith.

They sell paradise in glossy pages--smiles laminated,
palm trees like friendly swords, sunsets edited for perfection.
We fly in like moths to a neon mothership,
carry our quiet in hard-sided suitcases, check it at the gate.

The first day tastes like champagne and permission:
salt on our lips, strangers' hands that feel like borrowed warmth,
laughs clipped to camera shutters, promises stamped with sunscreen.
Under the boardwalk, the sand is a slow crowd applauding our forgetfulness.

Night blooms fluorescent--cocktail umbrellas like tiny flags of surrender.
We toast to freedom and call it courage when we swallow our doubts.
The bar keeps our names in receipts and our voices in the grout;
arguments rehearse themselves between the ice and the ashtray.

Affection is a hotel key--glossy, easily lost,
left in pockets with cigarette butts and consolation candies.
We trade apologies for sunsets, make bargains with the tide:
I'll pretend I don't hear, if you pretend you won't leave.

The tide takes everything it can--rings, notes, a pair of sandals--
leaves behind broken shells that gleam like accusations.
Morning arrives with a hangover of cheap perfume and cheap talk,
and the ocean keeps its secrets in the white foam it spits back.

We return sun-kissed and hollow, souvenir shops full of calm lies:
magnets that say "Wish you were here" and postcards for shame.
The pictures are sharp; the memory corrodes--soft edges at first,
then a slow rust that eats the frame until the smile is just a question.

Toxic vacations: sugar-coated fractures, postcards sealed over breaks.
We pay in credit cards and borrowed courage, counting sunsets like a debt.
Yet next year the brochure arrives, glossy new, humming like a temptation,
and we fold up the map of our better selves to fit inside a carry-on.

Sometimes the cure is small and brutal: unpack, open each pocket,
and let the sand sift like truth--grain by grain, it finds the floor.
Sometimes the lesson is mercy: a bruise that fades beneath a different sun.
But most often we keep the tan and pack away the ache,
book another flight and call the wound "a story worth remembering."

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.