Triggers with depression and trauma are everywhere. Accepting them into your daily life is tricky. Sunlight marks my memory thoroughly. Just another journey to be one.

#poetry #poem #writing #reading #poems #poetrylovers #poemoftheday #poetrycommunity #ampoetry #trauma #depression #mentalillness

https://patrickwmarshauthor.wordpress.com/2025/12/03/i-cant-change-the-sunlight-2/

I Can’t Change the Sunlight

First, it was the beams between dust,
highlighting particles dancing
in my parent’s basement
with chocolate carpet and an eyebrow window.
Where we, old friends and lovers,
would swap dreams and desires
until you tearfully realized I couldn’t do anything
but wrestle with my depression.

Then, rays of it glittering in jeweled reflections
during our honeymoon
on an emerald lagoon, with tropic tips, and
bows of sand being plucked by Key Largo waves.
That sediment could never be a keep or castle,
it was too broken, fragmented,
and fragile to form any support.
Just like us.

Next was the morning slanting through
the bay window over the couch of our old house.
A theater seat for our fights, screaming, throwing, thrashing,
and every detail of my unending depression.
You, my son, are on my lap, asleep, an infant.
I’m crying, and the tears sting your forehead.
I wipe them away, my trauma baptism,
I have an endless supply.

This stardust anchor falling through time
and space, cracking the earth’s atmosphere,
honing our existence, growing our cells,
is a cosmic stake piercing my heart.
It will not end me. I’m always undead.
Worse, it reminds me honestly
that this daylight trigger
will always be there

as long as I am.

#ampoetry #author #blogging #books #creativeWriting #emotionalWriting #literature #originalWriting #patrickWMarsh #poem #poemOfTheDay #poems #poetry #poetsOnWordpress #spokenWord #writing

The Cast Iron Star

My father’s hoarding heart
is bending bricks in his garage
creasing the foundation, turning
his house downward,
closer to the pit
he clawed out from.

At first, just artifacts
bits of his past lives
recovered from dead family.
Immortalized in tins, boxes,
bins, stacks, and piles in his office,
study, backroom, and garages.

My mother would whisper
that he’d always be this way
perpetually holding, gathering, keeping
things for the future, or to anchor the past
a ship adrift in trauma and loss,
without a compass or map.

I stare at that cast-iron bathtub,
the 600 pound invertebrate
bulging out of this house’s spine.
Another shadow added to his grief silhouette
a mixed-media of material requiems
to his past and present.

I know that when he dies
it’ll still be here.
I don’t have the strength to move it.
How could I pluck his favorite constellation
of its most beloved star?
For him,

it’ll always lead home.

#ampoetry #amwriting #books #family #hoarding #patrickWMarsh #poem #poemOfTheDay #poems #poet #poetry #reading #writing

I wrote this poem about my father's struggles with hoarding throughout his life. It comes and goes, and the more I learn about my own trauma, the more I see his hoarding reflected in his. Enjoy.

#poem #poetry #writing #reading #hoarding #family #poet #ampoetry #poemoftheday

https://patrickwmarshauthor.wordpress.com/2025/11/26/the-cast-iron-star-2/

“Why do you like monsters?”

My father asked
at the glass table over dinner
with onions, peppers, teriyaki,
and steaming, jeweled pork.
All fueled by olive oil, lemon pepper,
the warm, wet ashes of the grill
glued to the kitchen air.
The stove light aproned and orange.

I want to tell him.
Abandonment.
His wound bleeding through time and memory
weighing us down
since he was seven years old
in the alleyway, in a cupful of exhaust,
watching his father’s last goodbye
thorn the evening light.

I could tell him.
Level my eyes to him, a statue,
a gargoyle fixed on the gothic gutter.
His trauma became mine.
He didn’t know the darkness.
He survived it. Muted it. A noise cemented
by shadows that sprouted trees
in his unhealed soul.

Now, they’re rancid stumps
inside the half-closed
coffin of my heart.
Their pain filtered and scrubbed
by a wormy soap
into fiction and poems of
phantom trains, crowned demons,
cursed skies, and marbled undead.

You, father, wish it was HR documents,
equations, or carpentry, but instead
I’m a monster-maker, a wounded poet.
But, what I truly wish,
father,
is that you’d expressed
your graveyard song
of emotions and trauma

so I didn’t have to.

#ampoetry #blogging #books #fiction #horror #monsters #patrickWMarsh #poems #poet #poetry #reading #theGreenlandDiaries #writing

Numbers traveling across paper
Some do little but gain their favor
While others toil yet gain little
A system ridgid, cold, and brittle
Help cry voices of the poor
While the rich yell more more more
Energy flows it seeks a ballance
It ebbs it flows it offers challenge
Serenity lies in the absence of the
need to make books ballance

#poetry #poem #money #poetrycommunity #ampoetry #poet

Utopian dreams of those who dare
While those of means without care
Seek to take that which was given
Why would one be so driven
When desire outweighs what is right
Ideals and dreams take silent flight
And in their place is left only fear
While the meek cry please, oh please not here

#poem #poetry #ampoetry #poet
#poetrycommunity #writing #writingcommunity

In the shadow of truth lies that which binds the ties of wreched greed and careless lies. Told by those who would use inocent lives of the truthful who only seek love and life.

#poem #poetry #ampoetry