Poetry by Aaron Conklin

​Threadbare Hearts in the Eternal Summer Night
 
Do you remember those deathless summer nights,
drinking gallons of red wine on the balcony porch of our apartment?
Parading our worth like an orchestral work of self-indulgence
and keeping our tattered inadequacies shielded behind the volume of drunken grandiloquence.
 
Can you still hear the jubilant charade of our significance?
Our time, our moment, our voluptuous laughter in the dark
serenading the passing strangers from high upon our grandiose veranda?
The echoes of our shameless bravado, ripe with the luscious taunting of debauchery.
Hollow eyed dreamers desperately clinging to the sweet inebriation of our youth,
and never giving it a single second to sober.
 
Do you remember drowning through mad days of incoherent despondency?
Our will confined to the ornamented escapism we had built into a life.
Oh, how we felt the weight of living so much stronger than we ever had before!
With our reckless sentiments bashed to rags against one another’s hips
our loins swollen and sore, with the names of former lovers on our lips.
Then lying awake in suspended midnight, brimming with unfulfilled passion,
and confused by the aftermath of our choices,
the loosened stitches of our threadbare hearts unraveling.
 
Do you remember so many inarticulate disappointments with the world
and how they all made us want to die?





​Song of the Autotelic Charlatans
 
Writers must keep reading one another's work.
Artists must keep talking about one another's visions.

In doing so we convince ourselves,
that the torment and eternal weirdness is significant,
that the shame and the guilt and the lust
and the humiliation of being ourselves,
is a part of something broader
and grander
than our understanding.
Superior to normalcy,
richer than mediocrity,
more true to life
than societal projections of decency.

Musicians must sing and celebrate each other's songs
because it nourishes the false religion of ourselves.

The constant chatter that speaks in empty circles,
the complicated ways of saying very little,
masked as some individualistic affair
philosophizing the inexplicable,
translated through elitist jargon
from behind cabernet stained teeth,
eluding to nothing.

A transcendent smokescreen,
a forced idea that's more comforting than reality,
that is easier for us to accept,
than the aching truth of our inadequacy. 

It is a mass generated spell of hysteria,
that reverses our importance to the world,
that grants us value for the more broken we are.

Do the poets truly talk to god?
Or do we just covet our own reflection
in the idea of omniscient deities?

Awkward, misfit, self-absorbed romantics
with lies on our tongues and desperate dreams
bleeding from our heads.

Nevertheless, I know not how to silence this voice,
nor do I really want to stop it from speaking.
and I don't really want you to turn off your voice either.

​

Bio: Aaron Conklin lives Warrensburg, MO on a small farm with his wife and two sons. Having graduated from the University of Central Missouri in 2014 with a BS in Education, Aaron is a high school English teacher and a middle school wrestling coach. His hobbies include studying chess, practicing martial arts, and writing poetry.  When asked about where he finds his inspiration for writing, Aaron stated: "I choose to live simply, close to the earth, and in service to others."

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