Colleen Machut is a teacher and a writer from Sheboygan, WI. She lives there with her husband, Trent, and their son, Desmond. Colleen and Trent write and perform songs in the lakeshore area of Wisconsin. Colleen has poems published or forthcoming in Whimsical Publications, Impspired, Open Skies Quarterly Edition 1, Open Skies Quarterly Edition 3, Jalmurra, Creation and the Cosmos Anthology, Anxious Times Magazine, Today’s Caregiver, and CORE: Dance Poems Volume III.

Memory Sand

In early mornings, softly lit,
you sift from the catacombs
of my consciousness.

My preoccupied eyes empathize
with past iterations of you and I;

High on flutter-flirtation
and caught in our own gravitation,
we never found satiation
in choreographed faces.

We echoed walls with proper greetings,
amiably deceiving -
stressing the seams of alternative meanings...

If only the whimsical
had conquered the physical...
If only the genuine
had outweighed the trivial…

Now I blush-wince at the thought
of the self I forgot
in a veil of manic daze
converted to rage
by a guilty flame
you never felt-
alone in my inferno self.

I filter through it yet,
in early mornings, softly lit,
as you sift from the catacombs
of my consciousness.

Dailyness

My bucketful of failures
Grows heavier each hour,
Collecting wasted moments
To weigh against eternity.

Stumbling on misplaced mistakes
I never fathomed lost,
I innovate excuses
For the moment I get caught
With jousted petals bleeding truth
through a briar patch of thought.

A self-created avalanche
Of invisible assumptions
Usurps infant dawn,
Tainted by presumptions.

Faced with disenfranchised eyes,
Unrefreshed by time,
Reflections witness brushstrokes
On my plastic face of lies,
Tracing wishful lines
To fabricate the shine
Of lovable eccentric smiles,
Unimagined wise.

Surrounded by my petals,
Poised upon my pedestal,
I wonder if I'm worthy
Of genuflecting spectacle.

The future rolls its eyes and yawns,
Awaiting measured moments gone,
The sharing of authentic thought
Distracted by my muse gone wrong.

My passion turns to labor-
Inspiration turns to favor,
And I crave a different flavor
To dilute that of my failure.

Buoyancy overtaken
by accumulation’s grind,
My salvation is the guillotine awaiting in my mind.