Ode To The Family’s 2003 Chrysler Town & Country Minivan

Sometimes inspiration rises from the everyday happenings that feel so forlorn and bland.

Everyone has a unique experience and while they might overlook common formalities: another dinner, another drive, another drag of school. They can all be captured.

The art of the poet is to see the beauty in the commonplace; to encompass and package a little breath of truth to bring a little light, a little hope, a little sense of understanding to another human being.

Well, lately I’ve been focusing on metaphors and similes, and imagination in general within my poetry, as well as using familiar and everyday objects/activities as my subjects. Through these experiments, I’ve fallen in love with a more subtle rhyming method, where the rhymes do not fall at the end of every sentence and sentences carry over lines. Apparently the term for that is enjambment or run-over lines as opposed to end-stopped.

Here is a poem I wrote this week about my family’s minivan, which, unfortunately, appears to be living out its final days.

I hope you enjoy! (:

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Ode To The Family’s 2003 Chrysler Town & Country Minivan

You are as old as me and yet somehow
still older. Every time we step into
your arms, your legs buckle, groan, and bow.
When you try to move from your night bed, you
try once, then twice before you lurch off the
gravel perch and stumble, for a moment
on the verge of crashing a pot with your knee
unable to command numb limbs so aged and spent.
Words are merely slurred and mumbled. We stop
to feed you morning coffee, the liquid
pools in your mouth, you taste it burn and smell
bitter potentness. It stains fingers amid
digestion. Even up and wakened well,
every pothole and stick rattles your teeth.
Your joints creak with every bend and you wheeze
that it’s always too hot or too far beneath,
for comfort, or life for that matter. We
give your back massages and clean your chipped
glasses. We even sit you in shades of trees
during outings. But time is time however kept,
We dread the coming day you’ll breathe your last,
And we pray that long you will stay steadfast.