Poems by Jordan A. Leturgez

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.

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.

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.

Every dog has its day,
a small sun rising where the pavement cracks--
a gnawed slipper baptized in morning light,
a tail that learns to count the world.
Some days are thunder: sprinting down alleys,
nose like a compass to the vanished scent of dinner,
others are hush, a bed warmed by remembered hands.

There is the streetwise king with dust for a crown,
who finds a spilled sandwich and is royal for an hour.
There is the champion in the backyard--leaps like a yes,
eyes bright with the grammar of fetch,
who comes back every time with the whole day's praise caught in his mouth.

There is the old dog whose joints keep ledger,
who remembers every door that ever opened,
who dreams of running and wakes to the ache like a bell.
When the child drops a slice of toast, his tail--slow as forgiveness--answers.

There is the small one under the shelter light,
nose pressed to a cool, hopeful window,
who waits through seasons of goodbyes until a hand arrives,
and the world tilts, a plain made new as a bowl of water on a hot day.
For some, the day is loud with applause; for others, it is a single soft hand.

Every dog has its day,
not always the headline, but a holy quiet: a lap, a leash, a laugh,
the warmth of one familiar voice reciting the same silly name.
Sometimes it's a road that ends in a porch where the moon lays its silver paw.
Sometimes it's the simple miracle of being seen.

So let mornings be patient and let sunsets keep their secrets.
Listen for paws like small metronomes on the floor--count them.
Because when that day comes, it will be a bright thing:
brief, ordinary, fierce as joy, and it will make everything else forgiveable.

It cracks the night like glass--an animal, a bell,
a throat unzipping to pour out a sky.
It spills, a red river down the face of the moment,
flashing teeth at the steady, indifferent stars.

NOOOOOOO!!!!! echoes in the ribs of buildings,
boomerangs off distant, sleeping houses,
finds the small room where hope had been folded,
unfolds it roughly, leaves the paper thin and trembling.

It is the sound of a hand pulled from another's,
of a light blown out in mid-sentence,
of a name that will not be buried politely.
It overturns the tea, it topples the faith
you had arranged like trophies on a shelf.

But listen: the scream is not only ruin.
It is also a beacon, raw and incandescent,
a flaring refusal that clears the fog.
In its wake the air tastes new--sharp, honest,
like rain after fire, like breath after being held.

NOOOOOOO!!!!! breaks open the sealed things inside,
lets you see the hands you thought were steady--
trembling. It forces the dress to the floor,
reveals the wound that was meant to be contained.

And from the jagged heart of that sound
a quieter music is born: a no that is a wall,
a no that is a door slammed shut against harm,
a no that makes room for the yes you might not yet know.

So scream it if you must--let it peel the paint,
let the neighbors think the world has ended.
Gather the pieces, count the cost, and choose:
not every NO is loss; some are the very shape
of the life you are still building.

NOOOOOOO!!!!!--a thunder that finally clears the sky.

There are moments when the throat becomes a glass--
too thin to hold the shape of a thought,
too clear for the tongue to frame a single syllable.
A silence like winter settles behind the ribs,
and words, like migratory birds, swoon and pass the horizon.

The heart keeps speaking in a language of knocks,
each beat a small drum calling maps into being,
but the mouth is a sealed bay where ships cannot anchor.
Eyes pick up the slack--harvest light, gather the tilt of a smile--
and hands begin to speak in the slow grammar of touch.

Speechless is not empty; it is a room hung with echoes,
a laundry of moments drying on the line of breath.
It holds what cannot be caught by consonants:
the tilt of astonishment, the bruise of grief,
the hush between two people where forever is negotiated.

Sometimes speechlessness is awe--an old tree opening its arms,
a sky so full of color the tongue forgets its work.
Sometimes it is fear, a mouth barricaded by frozen rain.
Sometimes it is love so vast the map of names unravels.

Listen: the silence speaks in the small currencies--
the press of a palm, the tilt of a head, a laugh let loose like birds.
If you learn that language, you will find whole oceans
where the world had promised only deserts.
Speechless, then, becomes a poem that needs no spoken rhyme.

Neon hum, a quarter moon over green--
chalk dust like dry snow on the tip of fingers,
the felt a small country of its own,
pocketed with hungry, round promises.

A glass catches the light: amber, forgiving.
One swallow, and shoulders dissolve,
tongue loosens the little verbs that hold you tight.
Confidence arrives on soft feet,
a borrowed shape of courage that smells like citrus and oak.

You stand over the table and the world rearranges.
Angles grow generous, the cue feels longer,
your elbow unbolts, your breath slows to candlelight.
The cue ball answers like an old friend,
the break sings and for a heartbeat you are brilliant.

Then the second shot comes with tremor.
The world tips. Distances swell like mirrors.
Your eye that once read geometry now reads ghosts.
A straight line becomes a rumor,
a bank shot a superstition--what was sure is suddenly slippery.

Alcohol is a kindly thief and a cruel teacher:
it hands you a mask of fearlessness,
and behind it your hands may forget the lessons
paid for by practice, patience, repetition.
It smooths the edge of doubt and the edge of judgment alike.

Some nights it polishes the ordinary into art;
some nights it muffles the clue-scent of precision.
It can quiet the critic that stops your cue,
but it also quiets the small, precise voice that measures distance.

So ask the table, ask the felt: does it help?
The table answers in clacks and silences,
in the luck of a roll, the mercy of a pocket.
It tells you this--sometimes the drink is a lullaby
that lets skill awake for a while; sometimes it is a fog.

At last the cue lays down. The glass breathes its last.
You tally wins that taste like someone else's name,
and losses that feel like old weather returning.
Better? --for a night, perhaps. For a life at the table, rarely.

Aim, they say, is more than courage: it is steadiness of hand,
the long apprenticeship of counting angles, of falling and rising.
If you must bring a spirit to the game, let it be the spirit of practice,
of patience, clear eyes, and a hand that remembers the geometry of truth.

But when the neon is soft and the pool hall hums,
there is a kind of grace in the first, warm sip--
a temporary truce with your own doubt.
Just be careful which you pocket: the ball, or the bottle.

In the dim-lit glow of the stage, he stands, 
A figure cloaked in dreams and shifting sands, 
With eyes like windows, deep and wide, 
He wears a thousand lives, each one a guide.

His heart beats to the rhythm of applause, 
A symphony of souls, a silent cause, 
In every line, a story waits to bloom, 
In every gesture, shadows dance and loom.

He slips into the skin of kings and thieves, 
In laughter's echo or the sorrow that cleaves, 
With every role, he sheds his own disguise, 
A chameleon of truth beneath the lies.

Yet when the curtain falls and lights grow dim, 
He walks alone, the laughter turning grim, 
For in the mirror's gaze, he sees the cost-- 
The self he plays at times feels almost lost.

Behind the mask of joy or bitter strife, 
Lies a tender heart that yearns for life, 
To feel the warmth of love, to touch the ground, 
To find a voice that's real, a sound profound.

He dances on the edge of joy and pain, 
A jester's crown, a lover's sweet refrain, 
In every tear that glistens on his cheek, 
A testament to dreams he dares to seek.

So here's to the actor, bold and brave, 
Who walks through shadows, yet still dares to save, 
A piece of truth in every tale he weaves, 
For in his art, the world finds what it needs.

In the quiet dawn, beneath the breaking light,
Lies a fire that burns beyond mere sight.
Not just the talent that time may hone,
But a will that carves its path alone.

Skill may build the bridge, the steady hand,
But will ignites the daring to stand.
It whispers courage in the face of fear,
A voice unwavering, always near.

For skills can falter, fade, or bend,
But will persists, a steadfast friend.
It drives the heart through storm and still,
A force that bends the strongest will.

So when the world demands more than what we know,
It's will that helps us rise and grow.
Beyond the skill, beyond the thrill,
It's the unyielding, burning will.

In a world where silence speaks the loudest,
Where moments flit and fade like fleeting shadows,
We interrupt this program, dear hearts, to pause--
A gentle call to notice, to ponder, to cause.

The hum of routine, a relentless parade,
Daydreams and deadlines, in twilight they wade,
But halt! Let the air be filled with still delight--
For beauty blooms softly in the depth of night.

We interrupt this program to savor the day,
To grasp at the whispers where soft wishes play,
Look closely, dear wanderers, at the petals' embrace--
In the mundane's allure, we find magical space.

Snapshots of laughter unfurl in the light--
The way shadows dance when day kisses night,
Here lies our story, a tapestry spun,
Each thread woven tenderly--hearts beating as one.

A pause for the weary, the lost and the brave,
To breathe in the silence, to cradle the wave--
For life is the canvas, a palette of grace,
We interrupt this program to find our true place.

So rise, gentle spirits, to write your own script,
In the theater of moments, let not your heart slip,
Together we gather, our voices entwine--
In this brief interruption, let your light brightly shine.