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Best Poems Written by Mina Turi Kustas

Below are the all-time best Mina Turi Kustas poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Mina Turi Kustas Poem

Rebel

Sometimes,
I catch glimpses of the future.
It’s never very bright.

Well, that’s alright
Because on cold winter nights 
Any warmth is welcome to greedy fingertips.

It comes from the fire-tender.
She calls me to the feeble light,
Calls me darling,
Lets me warm my cold, cold hands 
above the weak licks of warmth
And so, I am content.

But sometimes, she’s cruel
And now her embers
Leave sad burns on my arms
And in her domineering rage,
She crushes the tiny orb of warmth and home
And it hurts.
I am content.

I wear her clothes.
Her wine flows in me; I reek of her.
I own only what she gives. 
A bottle of bleach, a skinning knife
Will not cleanse me of her grime.
I am content.

The moon, a lonely curator,
Shone his flashlight over empty windows
Shied away from dark doorways
For guards fear what they guard
But thieves and bastards don’t
Because we own nothing and therefore lose nothing. 

I crouched in an alley, naked 
and bruised and hollow and content.
The bliss of independence, as it were.
But it was not to be-
It is not to be-
Because she finds me every time

Lowers her hood
And reminds me, 
I am not alone
I don’t have to be alone
I will never be alone.
No, I look too much like her, goddammit.

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Flying

The lucky ones

There was a fly upon the windowsill
Of the rumbling yellow bus.
The child glanced down with a shrug
And ruled that it should live.

I watched it try and try and try
And try to get off the yellow bus
But after what you had seen and done
The glass separation loomed cold and hard.

He was missing three legs: two
on his left side, and another on his right
And we must try to imagine 
But I can never feel
You cannot understand
What it hurts like to lose three legs
Because you never even had three legs
In the first place.
What is it like to lose your wings?
Only angels and fruit flies know.

So if you, my fruit fly
Someday find that you cannot leave the ground anymore
Then I’ll reach in my pocket for some tissue paper
And smother you, firmly, in my regretful fist full
Of flies and angels and mice and men.

Details | Mina Turi Kustas Poem

Good Night

Suppose that I laze upon a swimming pool:
I am hooked around a donut ring, living the good life:
People drink juice with me,  never wilting under the glare.
Suppose-next- that I pace my room,
Not really sure what people talk about outside.
Suppose one to be true, the other a lie, 
I think something important would be drowned deep inside—
But the feeling that I am being kept alive by so many different people:
It keeps me afloat even as I go to sleep at night.
I lose the power of speech every time I go to bed:
Past sunny skies and loom dark worlds ahead.
I want to die vaguely, with the closing of an eye:
With no friends around me. But even that is a lie.

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Poem Iv


There was a keyboard
And then there was an open book
On top of that, a taunting cursor
And also a feather-tipped pen.
And then I saw piano keys,
And gadgets and knobs with teeth
And foreign words and tongues
With the tang of bitter history
And I didn’t know what to say
I didn’t know if I was qualified
So I crouched down on the asphalt,
Clawed at it ‘til my fingers bled
And scratched my sad little thoughts 
into the earth and out of my head.

Details | Mina Turi Kustas Poem

Diving


They must look beautiful, diving for oysters.
And when they come up floating, butts up, 
We also say that they are and they were, beautiful.
What makes you dive down? is it the golden rays
Dancing on the waves, or maybe it is a fear
Of the city that you were born and raised in.
What it feels like to be willing to die
Nobody would know if nobody dived.
But if nobody volunteers do I have to go?
If I had a choice I would never go diving for oysters 
because much more than truth I want a sense of happiness
But the unknown is there, a round milky smoothness 
Sometimes clasped in shaking fingers, gasping
But most often unretrieved, continuing to taunt, glowing
Beneath a sea that is more than death, a sky that is sea.

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Poem Iii


I liked scribbling
Hearts symbolising,
Two intertwined in one,
In love,
As a mindless scribble,
Absentmindedly;
But now presentmindedly,
I craft this heart, thinking
Not of the new season
In favour of the physics lesson,
But of you, in favour of
A predictably broken heart.
And I wish I could go back to scribbling,
On a cracker nibbling,
The hearts symbolizing
But not meaning anything 
To me, intimately.

Details | Mina Turi Kustas Poem

Poem Ii


The way a loner examines this here world
Is in relation to but not involved or absorbed
Within the cobweb’s gentle flimsy hold
Which may seem nothing, but to players are of gold.
I thought I was no easy butterfly, 
Avoiding cunningly the songs and other various crap
Of the fancy of the damsels and the distress of it all,
For the strongest webs set down in paper words
I thought to render real ones insecure, unfit.

But you have taught me, violently 
Through the strings extending from your fingers to mine tips
That tales will spin themselves, no matter how thin
And the more obscure to the eye, the more happiness is slim.
So here I am in dearest quietest suffering 
With love coursing through my veins and heart a-fluttering,
Willingly or not, I cannot tell, trapped in your embrace,
Thinking that things are finally starting to make sense,
Feeling real warmth for once, but with no sense of gratitude,
Understanding love and wishing that I didn’t,
Belated, befuddled, brokenhearted, wondering where it all began.

Details | Mina Turi Kustas Poem

Poem I


My lover brings the smell of rainy roses
Petals beaten, heads down, living done
Rising from them a humid stench of wrongness 
But fragrant while they last, swaying with the sun.

Because your hands from my mind are never too far,
Things can seem to me to be more than what they are.
I wish the same pull which pulls this ink to its bed
Could pull you into my life and out of my head.

Though I remain here stuck in present eternal bliss
A calendar would scoff at the few squares it kissed.
I won’t pretend to know what you miss
But if you held my lens of tiny hopes
Up to your eyes to try and see the same
You’d find that my vision’s honey-tinged 
With despair and defeat and love, unexpectedly sane.

And if I do see you sitting on my sofa where you’ve never sat,
Don’t look at me with pity, just help me turn it into fact.

Details | Mina Turi Kustas Poem

Poem V


I love this place
And this is my place.
But this is their place first
And it is not my place.
But this is my place too
And my place is here.
But there is no place for me here
Because this is their place. 
Why did I have to come here?
Why did this place
Which is already their place
Have to be a place
That I can call my place?