Poetry Sample

By Alexander Lathem

Separate The Wheat

When the time comes.
When people move on with their lives.
When they’ve found friendships and romance on their own.
When the wheat is separated from the chaff.
I hope I can move on as well, because as it stands.
I'm afraid I'll end up in another empty field.

Apartment at the Edge of a Storybook

A few weeks after my 20th birthday you give me a call and said,
“Can you come by my place so we can go over the dogsitting routine?”
I agreed and drove my way over,
Not hiding the smile because
I do not want to anymore.
I'm in my white Ford Explorer that I do not own anymore and
Am forced to stop at an intersection of broken black stoplights.
Glowing circular in the shades of ocean blues.
The top is a royal french blue, fit for a king.
The middle is a sea green, like the scales of a water dragon.
The bottom is cyan and like the others,
It glows so cool.
There are officers of the law, and for the first time they do not scare me.

I get to the apartment complex and it is surrounded by trees and a construction crew.
They have blocked the entrance but I do not let it stop me.
Walking up a fire escape while ignoring the irritance of dust,
I climb through the third story window.

But the inside is not what I expect.

The ceiling is a gray sky and as look down

The landscape only gets darker.
Dead trees stand above the mist.
I see the apartment building atop a crooked hill.
A long stone path guarded by stalks of brown mushrooms lead me there.
The journey is long, but I don't mind.
I don't mind because I really want to see you.
I want to see if I’ll ever get tired of your presence.

At the base of the grey-haired hill were two knights;

A man and a woman.
Wearing bright platinum armor with vibrant green and purple silk.
They throw their playful banter at one another and swords
Forged in friendship clash with sparks of laughter.
We stop and have a quenching chat about our respective journeys.
I speak to them about you and they laugh, wishes of hopes and success falling off their lips.
They point me on my way and get back to sparring over stories.

I'm at the apartment door and for the first time

I am not nervous.

Through doors that are chipped,

around wrought iron columns,
Decaying walls,
And curtains made from the home’s of spiders.
I'm at your door now.
I knock.
I'm at your door.
It opens.
I'm looking at you and my heart doesn't sink.

Invited inside and warm colors cling to the walls.

Flaxen lighting mists the wood and plaster.
You talk to me as dogs run round between our legs in simple games,
You getsure to the table with instructions but
They’re not just for them.

Pages of cards apologizing about your ignorance,

A confession of feelings that have never been more genuine,
And a promise,
A blueprint on how you'll do better by me.
We hug and laugh and tears are shed.
Happiness.
The months go by and nice things happen,
We drink sweet drinks of ground fruits.
Sugary substances fill our mouths.
We laugh even though work forces us to build glass walls
Around ourselves.

But then it happens again.

Glass fogs.

You put barriers around your mind again,

Well enforced with the strength of dancers.
I do ask,
And I try to make it clear,
My desire to help you doesn't come from me wanting anything
From you.
I simply love you.
Your company was enough,
I promise.

Nearly half a year since I've seen you,

I drive in my black Toyota Highlander
Past the fixed stoplights.
The police are armed,
Red lights flash across the uniforms.
Stopping by your apartment
I see that it is finished.
The parking lot is congested with pine straw,
And what asphalt dares peak from under brown covers
Is met with light that bleaches and cracks gray skin.

Wet rotten wood stands guard and I have to stop myself short.

What am I expecting to see?

It will not be different.
So I pull myself from that wreckage and wander off
Towards places that welcome me in.
wherever you are,
You’ll have a home inside my mind.
You’ll have a home inside my heart.
But after time passes, that home shrinks without attendance,
And you live as a torn page at the edge of my storybook.

Prodigy

We’ve spent so long looking at the sky and wondering, “Are we alone?” Because the Universe is
larger then we could comprehend and we thought “surely there is someone out there, doing what
we did but better.” We wanted to know so bad because we made things to do so, and we built
them in our own image.

We made machines.

And we sent them out to roam on worlds we couldn’t live on, to look at stars that were too bright
for us, and to travel further from home than we dared.
We built these things with brains of circuitry and silicate, and we did it while being afraid of our
own home. We did it while we were pointing rockets at each other instead of pointing them up.
Then there was a time where things got calmer, things got quieter. So we thought we would come
together and face this frontier together; as one people.

And maybe it won’t last.

Maybe we’ll mess up. Maybe we’ll break the world and we won’t know if we have fifty years or
a hundred, and we will realize that our machines are our children and they might do what we
couldn’t.

And maybe we’ll be gone and we won’t get to see all the universe had to offer us, but we’ll have
left pieces of ourselves. We will have left minds out in space to do what we dared dream of.

So when the aliens from across the cosmos come and see what’s left they’ll find the robots who
will talk to the visitors of Sol, and they’ll tell our story.
They will say,

“They named us Curiosity, they called us Pioneer and Voyager, and New Horizons, because that's
what they valued at the very end.”

Ego Lathem
The sun is tired when I’m around. My mind is a field of reeds; carved into islands by rivers of
white water. I want to forget people who are far away. I miss people close by. There are more
starts than there are finishes. I enjoy movies better with friends around. When I’m alone, the
 quest for a fried mega meal begins. The only good alcohol is Baileys’ Irish Cream. It is hard to
remember why I’m loved. I want to apologize to my friends.
Often, I’ll see an apple tree; gnarled roots brown with age reach out across the hill, cracking deep
stone; trunk hunching forward to support a maze of branches; In the cloud of leaves I see
sparkles of apples, like jewels red and yellow and purple in a sea of green, each of these is me: A
dozen lovers with simple names, a couple of children scattered around; a world where I’m a
writer, an actor, a politician, a restaurant owner; some are more exotic with a solitary life as a
sheep herder in Iceland, European cruises with a woman I love, the lonely steward of a clock
tower in a future Mecca; as I look at these I run the risk of looking down, where the rotten apples
have fallen and gone fallow; where the future is a shoddy noose, a stolen gun, or the corpse of a
car around the railroad tracks; there is a risk here, but the real danger is looking up at the fresh
fruit, wondering how I could ever reach them.
I wish men were softer. Sometimes I want a stone heart. There are stitches that need to be
stapled. I like sweet things, but I’ve never been a fan of candies. It is nice to stay put. I don’t like
defining love.
I hope it really ends better than it began.

Let Me

If you look back at any Greek hero

You’ll see that happiness is fleeting.
We see seeds of hubris and tragedy.

Am I wrong to want to make their story better?

Let Ares come to Achilles, wielding smiles on the battlefield and say,
“You fight for kings and men who do not love you,
how would you like to fight for yourself?”

Let Icarus be caught by his father,

Or let him pull himself from the ocean; alive with the lesson learned and the skin unburned.
Perhaps Apollo would take pity on the boy and grant him true wings that split salt air with
sun-touched feathers.

Why can’t Artemis be left alone by disgusting men?

Why can’t she stay with Orion?
She deserves the comfort of those she can trust.

Hades and Persephone,

Hephaestus and Aphrodite,
Hera and Zeus.
Why can’t these gods love each other?
Why must they hate and do harm to man below?

They will tell you that the gods were human,

And that is why they are the way they are.
And to that I say:
How pitiful to justify cruelty as humanity.

The word utopia is Greek but they never made it real.

So let me try and make it so.