4 More Poems by Ryan De Leon — Sons and Daughters

Little Rabbit

Little rabbit
Do you see me in the park            Standing
On water droplets
With smoke peeling from my lips              from my hand
Do you understand the snow     falling from the
Tops of trees
Can you see to whom I pass the smoke
Giggling, mouth agape   she is looking at you
Rabbit, my friend             can
You understand why I walk onto the frozen
Lake
Step by step testing how far I can go
Before a shift     before a crack sends me shuffling
To solid ground
Each step the length of a hop

a hop that lengthens as she chases you through
the field after the smoke is finished         your
friends scatter and leave little rabbit prints
that I follow        with my eyes
my legs are growing too heavy to follow you
or her or your rabbit friends

my head grows too cloudy to find my way home
little rabbit, if you still see me     leave a path of
prints in the snow            a path that leads me home
and she won’t chase you
any longer

A Philosophy of Loneliness
“Caring about someone gives the world its meaning. It is through such caring that you constitute yourself as a person”
~Lars Svendsen

Groups of people are sitting in wooden circles
In alleyways packed with sun
In the pub the tables are filled
with chatter, filled with laughter, filled with beer

Darkness around a screen
Comedic melancholy dances through Manhattan
Across from which LACMA holds paintings, blurred
Between conversations where voices
bounce off rounded white walls
and reveal the chiaroscuro of Los Angeles.

The new age of intellect is welcomed with a shiver

A new island turns to concrete, cracked and gray.
a monument of sorrow
A statue made of alcohol and air
Of silence and hair
Of shadow and sleep

A pile of grey meat rots in the sun
The stench blankets the heaves of
Routine
Now, a place of
opportunity found false
the comfortable home deserted.
An ocean that separated lives, now divides
Continents of defeat

Roman Horror

The smell of my great grandmother
Permeates a room in a country she’s
Never been to.
Have I lived well in this room
That screens the legacy of roman horror
Mingling with the dead series of renegade
Exclusivity in the brasserie of French New York.
My hero              my lineage
Anniversaries of death today
As any day          days that expose the
Love that was never there. The love
That was never found                    but
Replaced

To build a new person to live anywhere
In the dark          in the light
Through death and peace
Takes time screaming
Time weeping
Time
Scratching           time
Laughing             it takes
Time

In the dark in the light

For Creeley

Pawing at your forehead
Covering your eye
While
My eye is
on the floor.

Rocking like
A mad man
You mutter jagged
Clusters to
Your wife.

Profundity
Finds its way
               Into your
Voice.
Your thought is
Found in due
                              Course.

But I must leave
               You now
Like you               your
Patch
to drink a
               Lot of beer.

Ryan De Leon was born and raised in Southern California. At age 21 he moved to the North East of England and became a neo-modernist. He is now back in California. He is the founder of Sons and Daughters. To read more if his poetry on S&D, click here.