March 4, 2016

Two Poems By James Diaz: "It's The Music That Gets Us Through", "The Bar At The Edge Of Town"


James Diaz lives in upstate New York. His poems and stories have appeared in Cheap Pop Lit, Chronogram, Ditch, Pismire, My Favorite Bullet, Collective Exile, Commonline Journal, Dissident Voice, Epigraph and The Voices Project.







It's The Music That Gets Us Through

It was a sound that saved me
lying on the floor
in the 90's
so many voices
and their guitars
lifting me out of teenage despair

and you don't how you made it through
except that there was music
and that it was enough of a life line
in the dead of night
beneath street lamps
as snow fell and truckers whizzed by
on the highway
and you slowly fell apart from your first heart break

the chords, the voices
taking your hands
when you didn't know what to do with them
and you danced in your head
and you never knew what hit you
and when the morning sky broke
you knew just how lucky you were to still be alive
and you knew then
as you still do now
that it's the music that gets us through.

***

The Bar At The Edge Of Town

The weight of a lyric
how it holds the earth
on a shattered, bruised axis
how it radiates warmth
with a single touch

and skies open/close
you never can tell
these days
where a feeling is coming from
and you're at the bar
and you're drowning
and there is no lifeguard on duty
except the juke box
and it says to you 'hold on'
and you don't know how
but you fake it so you don't break it-
your heart
your soul- your worn out mind

the exit sign reads:
your car is parked this way-
it's an omen, a way home.

~James Diaz

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