Michael T. Young
Becoming a Golem
In the imagination of others
I was tortured until my
shadow abandoned me.
Bells rang through the streets,
and footsteps echoed
down the alleys.
These were signs of celebration
for those who forget time
in the shade of trees,
those who forget who I was
before their dreams of me,
their ideas of power.
So I cracked open a stone,
and drank in that light
which no one trusts.
I chewed on it until I couldn’t
speak, my skin became hard,
and nothing hurt anymore.
Amid the Wreckage
Sometimes the mind is like water,
wearing down river stones, sculpting a delta
right where thought spills into the vast,
relentless current of the world.
But the mind never stays.
Even as it remembers its former lives,
it sheds their skins, transforming into a firefly
that hyphenates the summer dark
like a chalkboard, interrupting that idea
about the speed of light in a dying star
or the rate of descent of a sinking ship.
The romance of it maps the coil of a whirlpool,
the physics of its brief span. The ship settles
among the coral, soaked and softened over decades
into a nest for colonies of sponges, tube worms,
and shrimp, histories of worlds living out their triumphs
amid the wreckage of our philosophies.
Dark Rain
I’ve wasted hours, even days
trying to keep dry, trying to save
what didn’t need saving, to prevent
the fall of what finds its soul
in the descent, as downspouts
and sewers convert the runnels
of downpour into song,
and I stand listening, drenched,
learning how to lift my voice.
Michael T. Young's third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was published by Terrapin Books. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press), received the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. His other collections include The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost (Poets Wear Prada), Transcriptions of Daylight (Rattapallax Press), and Because the Wind Has Questions (Somers Rocks Press). He received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous print and online journals including The Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Edison Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, The Potomac Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His work is also in the anthologies Phoenix Rising, Chance of a Ghost, In the Black/In the Red, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. He lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey.