Five Poems by Aariona Harris

 

Growing Up

I wish I could age backwards.

Find a way to pack up

This baggage, that weighs on me.

History might not repeat

If I could be allowed to protect myself

From the darkness that screams

I’d love to age backwards,

Begin anew, and remind myself of

All the wonderful things I might do.

 

Vacation

I miss being away

Gone from the shackles

Of my usual life and

The people forcing me to stay.

I miss the naivety of being young

And believing I could be happy

Wherever I was in this world

Having endless faith and never

Wishing to let it all drift away.

I miss the possibility of taking a permanent

Everlasting and forever relaxing

Irreversible, extending stay.

I am older now and less naïve.

I cannot go on a vacation.

Permanent or brief

Because there is already so much

Expected of me.

Worn Book Pages

I’ve lived so many lives in just this one

I know my time on this earth isn't done

Somehow I’ve aged beyond these 23 years

Yet still, I have not conquered any of my fears

Today

I sway in the wind like a great oak tree

Together we screech through the night

And hope that my old and tired body is not yet done

Putting up a fight.

Because life is pain, and death nothingness

But I refuse to go quietly into the night.

 

Guilty Conscious

I fear that I am irredeemable

These thoughts plague me

If I cannot atone for my perceived sins

Does that not make me a lost cause

A drifter who cannot be saved?

I am guilty of much and it is a nightmare

A dream like state where I awake terrified

That one day the dream will end

And I will be faced with all of my wrongs

Faced with a new reality

That irredeemable was the perfect word to describe me.

 

 

 Empath

Do you ever know something which you cannot know?

See the truth of a thing, though no one has informed you.

Do you ever have to take a moment to not feel every feeling?

To not feel-the unconscious need to be understood

I know these feelings intimately

Yet they are not my own

This burden does not leave me

Does not vacate the premises of my soul

Though it senses the havoc which has been reaped.

I understand the lives of others

I see their brokenness

Have made a family with their darkness

I do not wish to know things, I'll forget what I know about me.

So I listen to the darkness and wait in fear.

Wondering if it might extend to me-one last request.

Quiet these souls

And reveal nothing else.

 

Aariona Harris - Is 24 years old, turning 25 at the end of this year. She was born in Chicago, but currently lives in Missouri. She is a full-time student completing her bachelors degree in English literature, with plans to take that degree to law school.

She has been in love with literature since learning to read. She didn’t have the simplest life growing up, so any escape was a welcome distraction. She was the kid that would read in class after completing that day’s assignment. The kid who spent her lunch hour in the classrooms of her lit teachers. She realized in her sophomore year of high school, that she could help another person escape using her words. From then on, she mostly wrote short stories she never shared. It somehow never felt good enough. After her mother passed, she wrote Loss X Mental Illness. Her objective was to write down all that she couldn’t say, and what she might only FEEL. Yet she couldn’t keep it to herself. Somehow, it felt like a disservice to someone who might find comfort in her words, as they walk through their own grief.