iPoet

Where Rain kisses Souls/ Where Peace tames Chaos/ Where Sun courts Moon/ And all the Stars swoon. My name is Marcel Van. I have written poetry since I was a child and now do so more prolifically as a creative writing major at Southern New Hampshire University. I attended Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire, studied in Rome and in China and taught college-level ESL to Chinese nationals. I lived in six states and three countries, volunteered both nationally and internationally, edited foreign periodicals, worked with foreign pilgrims and sold foreign media. I have written for the Brooklyn Brush and am working on a compilation of poems for self-publication. I write poetry with soul, darkness and light, love and death. I aim to imbue much of my poetry with a theme that can be felt by many a person—a theme that affects us all in one measure or another. As human beings, we all weather storms and fight battles. These storms and battles I try to re-create in some fashion with human language and breath. I focus a lot on human love, the joy and pain it brings, alongside the other virtues or vices that aid or ensnare it in the process of expression and being. Poetry is meant to be a lot of things. For me, poetry is a bridge, a window, an umbrella, an unknown path in the woods that overarch life’s impasse. I mean to offer a cup of tea, cry a sweet song, call a rainstorm, draw with melancholy, rant with blood, swim with oars and dream with ink. I wish emotions and thoughts, curses and blessings to reign as one in each poem I write.

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Fire, My Momentary Companion

I was feeling a little lonely as I sat in my living room on a Saturday evening in January. Time for a fire, I thought. I swept the ash away, laid out some twigs and sycamore bark that I had gathered, and laid upon them a couple light logs that I had bought at the gas station down the street. I find great pleasure in striking a match on a new, crisp matchbox. Something about the stiffness, the…

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Life's Better on Nantucket

Photo by David Kanigan While it’s probably true, that life’s better on Nantucket, it can’t be a permanent escape from what I’m running from. Or from what you’re running from. Most of us are running from something… Guilt. Shame. Distrust. Pain. Resentment. Bitterness. Jealousy. Hate. Death. Life. It’s all the same. Burdens of Soul are all the same because they all bear a weight that can crush…

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Truth is Offensive

Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels.com “If you are not offended, you cannot grow.” -B. B. 2018, private conversation How true I find this statement. To be offended is in a sense to go dark. You have seen people’s faces when you say something accidentally that unnerves them. Their face changes, they get flustered, their eyebrows knit together, they frown or grimace, they clench their teeth and…

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January 7, 2023

Photo by Kevin C. Charpentier on Pexels.com You’re falling, scraping your thighs, knees buckling, ankles cracking. Nothing can hold your dead weight so you sink like a ton of dry coral, fingers bloodied by sharp edges. Like a sponge you soak up the algae, the floating microorganisms, and inhale the toxic bubbles of carbon dioxide. Corpse. It’s a watery grave. Hidden caves that collapse with…

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Want. Need. God.

How little we strive to do our chores well, if we do them at all. Let them plant, prune and pick the grapes. I will eat the harvest. What poverty there is in each of us. What haughtiness we shoulder, in spite of ourselves and the whole world with us. What a pity, that we should persist in our duplicity. We want to play, yes, but without the sweat. We want to laugh, yes, but without the noise. We…

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I Say, Go!

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The Last Drop

When you’re pouring out the tea from a French Press and a stream of green, brown or even red slowly makes its way over the transparent glass towards the lips of its cave turned upside down and falls into a basin of china made just for it, it is cradled lovingly and with care until it cools and is sipped by the human, making a shorter journey into the mount of a darker cave to be consumed for its…

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Ocean, Will You Be Mine?

Ocean, Will You Be Mine?

Propose to me. On purpose I mean. With light shimmering in your hands, a sparkle in your eye, a knee kissing the earth and those pearly whites glimmering. I love your heart, your hair, your ocean blue and your hands that touch me with sweeps and cautious caresses. The arms that gently rock me like the boats in the harbor. You are firm like the docks there, but flexible like the sails. You bend…

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I fell into a teapot

There are whiskers, sheep curls, pussywillows, and butterfly wings stashed in an old Chinese teapot which is covered in sleepy spiderwebs and pixy dust. I’ve not opened it for some time, but today was a good day. An old song wafted in the air of years gone by, or was it someone I once knew? The teapot was smoother than I remembered, the glaze a softer matte muddy brown than before. Too soft.…

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Where Were You?

How I needed you that day. The day the air smoked of timber, the skies that looked like gray wool, the noisy creek gagging over pebbles and the moon covered with snow. Where were you, I wonder, when I was raked across the thorns, mixing fuel with fodder, and made to watch the boys boil the dye. The wood was split that day, the chopping block oozed red with cedar and cherry. The fire went ablaze…

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Living Winters

When the Winter is warm and you are laziness prone, there is so much noise in not knowing the you inside. The violin whines and whistles like wind, but its forlorn melody moves your heart to sway like a pendulum in the cavern of your mind, echoing with tremulous thoughts. I didn’t know you then, but knowing you now has put a tremor in my strings, even the fibers of my clothes verberate to a sound…

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Nevertheless, She Persisted

Lighting the candle at both ends. Lighting a lamp in the night. Watching the rise and fall of sleepy lungs, ZZZs clinging to walls and ceiling beams. Wincing in the cold. Panting in the heat. Sighing at that lustful magazine. Grasping at perfection, finding flaws behind cobwebs, under sagging floorboards, in-between dusty books with torn canvas jackets. A shift in the spine bends her…

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Words. A Paper Entree.

Words. A Paper Entree.

Write it. Fold it. Slip it in. Lick it. Address it. Stamp it. Writing letters is nothing less than an archaic, modern, concrete, meaningful work of art, of war, of love, of sorrow, of fear, of time, of psychology, of communication. The heart and mind usually get together as they control the hand and the ink that flows to conjure up some sort of meaning between emotions and words. The letter is…

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The Eye of the Potato

The Eye of the Potato

Have you considered this all important fact? Potatoes are like people. Perhaps you have heard that potatoes have “eyes”, and when you prepare them you cut out the “eyes”. The “eyes” are basically the new sprouts that the potato is trying to produce. When left in the dark, the potatoes will surely sprout and not just one, but many. How often do we sprout new ideas when we are left alone or in the…

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Who & What & Why?

Who & What & Why?

I begin… Writer, Poet, Student. Come into focus to see life and the world and its people through a different lens. All lenses can be scratched. Can be broken. Can be shattered. Can be forgotten. Let that not be so. Protect that lens which helps you grow, helps you feel, helps you know, helps you see! The world blooms before your eyes. It sighs beauty, hope and spirit. Don’t miss a moment.…

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Buff your Beak

Trim your nails, blush your cheeks, lift your chin, buff your beak. Cleanliness. Beauty, Intelligence. Grit. These are important, but do you have it? The World points, summons, declares, decides, what it means to be – to love – to die. The Earth beckons, embraces, listens, records. All are necessary, but can you afford it? Oh sleepless nights where the darkness tolls to starlight. The…

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When you're flying...

When you’re flying…

it isn’t easy to see where you’re going. Lots of things pass in a blur. Focusing takes more effort as the wind dries your eyes and you cry emotionless at the scenes passing by. You’re not sure what time it is, where you left off, or perhaps even where you’re going. Where are you going? I don’t even know where I am going. Time. Work. Sleep. People. They all blend together in an expanse of…

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