Poems by Jordan A. Leturgez

There is a drum in the chest -- not asking permission,
only keeping time with the slow tilt of the world.
Morning folds itself into the palms of your hands,
coffee cooling like a promise you almost kept;
the city exhales, a map of small fires and small mercies,
and somewhere a child learns the fierce geometry of falling.

The river does not consult the stones before it passes,
it remembers every grief and every name
and carries both like pebbles in bright mouths.
Light finds cracks in the ordinary and pours through,
insistent as forgiveness, as stubborn as a lighthouse
that has no business still calling ships home.

Love is kinetic -- a language of repeated gestures,
notes returned in the margin of a day. Loss is kinetic too:
it arranges itself into the furniture and the silence,
sits in your chair as if it had always lived there,
learns the cadence of your hands at the sink,
keeps visiting at the hour you thought was private.

It never stops: the turning of seasons, the folding of maps
we thought we'd read through. It never stops:
the naming of things, the singeing of hope and the rescue,
the ringing of keys, the making of beds, the letting go,
the beginning and the small remaking after ruin.
We are paper boats on a rain that insists on rising.

Sometimes it is tenderness that will not pause,
a stranger's umbrella given without explanation;
sometimes it is the ache that rehearses itself at night,
a slow metronome beneath the ribs. Both keep time,
both insist on being lived through. We are not finished
with what we are learning to be -- not yet, not ever.

Stand, if you can, with your palms open to the noise:
the endless work of love, the stubborn chorus of sorrow,
the quiet repairs, the sudden laugh that undoes you.
There is a pulse in everything that breathes and breaks,
and even in breaking, something decides to continue.
Listen: it never stops -- and for now, that is a way to live.

Midnight breathes like a softened bell --
a hush of smoke and hopeful glass raised to the sky.
We fold the year into the palm of memory,
watching old mistakes turn to ash that glows
a little warmer than we expected.

Streetlight confetti, socks of laughter,
someone's tired song made bright by strangers' voices.
We count backwards and then forward, a small miracle:
seconds unhooked from regret,
seconds rewired to possibility.

There are pockets of grief we tuck beneath our coats,
buttons sewn over cracks -- not to hide but to keep warm.
Resolutions arrive as quiet visitors,
bearing simple gifts: a promise to be kinder,
a vow to listen to the soft things first.

A child unfurls the future like a paper boat,
and in the steam of hot coffee, futures steam too --
some will sing, some will stumble, some will arrive
with maps of scars that read like constellations.
New cheer is not the absence of pain;
it is the courage to light a match anyway.

So we step across midnight's thin line,
carrying last year's lessons like careful luggage,
and release what refuses to bend.
The sky fills with tiny suns of laughter,
and for a brief, shaking moment we believe
in beginnings as if they were prayers answered.

Hold this cheer like an ember in your palm:
tend it with truth, feed it with small acts.
By morning, the city will be ordinary again,
but something in us will remain brightened --
a single room lit from within,
ready to meet the quieter miracles of the year.

We stoke them like small rebellions -- palms cupped
around sparrows of ember, feeding breath until
the hush refuses to stay. Night bends closer,
curious as a cat, and the first sparks remember
their names: longing, ruin, tenderness.

They do not burn politely. They roar
through the corridors of ordinary days,
igniting the curtains of routine, leaving
maps of light on the floorboards. We walk them
like pilgrims, barefoot on coals that glow
with old maps of what we swore we'd become.

Sometimes the blaze scours us clean -- a bright
surgery that leaves scent of cedar and salt.
Sometimes it devours the furniture of habit,
leaving only ash and a single, stubborn ember
that glows like a promise we forgot to keep.

Love is not a candle: it is a wildfire that learns
to read our faces, to chase the syllables of our laughter,
to tender the bones that feared to be touched.
It feeds on the moon's reflection in your coffee,
on the silence after a storm. It is both anthem and warning.

So we hold each other like flint and tinder,
knowing that to strike is to change forever:
to walk out incandescent, to walk home rebuilt,
to carry, beneath our ribs, a geography of light --
hearts on fire, not to consume us, but to show us what will still burn.

Not when the sky is perfect,
not when fear has folded,
but in the half-light of trembling hands
you strike the first small sound.
A single nail into the wall
holds up a future--quiet, stubborn--
and the room remembers how to echo.

Make it happen: whisper it to the marrow,
to the hollow places that learned to stay small.
Feed it with plain tools: coffee at dawn,
a list, two breaths, the courage to begin again.
Build like someone who knows how to heal--
one careful stitch, one stubborn seam,
until the garment fits your living skin.

There will be storms that practice drowning,
voices that map the route of retreat.
Let them pass like weather. Plant your feet
in the soil you've chosen; let roots answer the rain.
Remember the river does not wait for permission;
its insistence carves mountains into maps.

Make it happen not by grandness alone
but by the patient geometry of doing:
small acts, fierce as sunlight through blinds,
pieces gathered until a shape is formed.
Call your fear by name and set it to work;
teach your doubt to carry stones.

When the night asks if you are tired,
say yes--and then say still--go on.
Because making is a kind of mercy:
to yourself, to the people who will warm themselves
at the fire you started with trembling hands.
Make it happen. Let your life be proof
that a single, certain step can become a road.

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.

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.

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.

Beneath the lamps, the maps lie still,
their rivers blue, their borders red;
a dozen hands command the hill,
while somewhere far, the sleepless tread.

The radios breathe in broken code,
the clocks divide the dark by two;
each brass pin bears a stranger's load,
each silence hides what men must do.

No thunder enters through the door--
only a cup, a chair, a name.
The war is measured on the floor
in distances too small for flame.

Outside, the rain begins to fall,
soft as a hand upon the glass;
inside, they lean above it all
and move the pieces as they pass.

At dawn, the room will lose its power,
the maps be rolled, the lights grow thin;
but somewhere, at that very hour,
the first command will settle in.

The board stands still beneath the light,
a quiet dare of grain and pine;
I raise my hand, prepare to fight
the fear that says the strength is mine.

One breath, one shout, one sudden crack--
the world divides beneath the blow.
The splinters never strike me back,
but pain has ways a board won't know.

For wood is kind: it breaks, it yields,
it keeps no score, it bears no scars.
The hardest battles wait in fields
where hearts can answer who we are.

So train the fist, but guard the heart;
let courage learn what force can't prove.
A board may break beneath your art--
the living do not have to move.