Things You Should Feel Poem by Kerri White

Have you ever felt
anything,
but more specifically,
the rise of chills
creeping across your body,
as if it took forever for them to arrive
..then gone so soon,
and suddenly, an unmistakable feeling of wanting more...

How about the feeling of a decrepid book
falling to pieces in the nourishment of your palms,
and you compare what you no longer recognize
to the sections of life you've grown to hide?

You try to salvage, recreate something
that should've never been created in the first place,
then it starts to become you, control you;
the strings you never knew you had..
and a feeling of regret overtakes your path,
like wild weeds over stepping stones,
and you know your direction is wrong.

Or how about the perception
when your eyes lock inside
someone else's eyes
and you selfishly hope
(for what seems a solid lifetime)
that his(her) book is in
no better condition than your own?

I'm sure you've felt your surroundings
when you have the need to just think for a while,
and you go outside for the air to hold you,
but you realize you're so desolate,
you really don't want it to let you go...

So if you've never felt
a real smile,
a real reaction to anything-
a real shake to the core-
maybe you've never really tried
to understand yourself at all...
You can't feel what you need
if you don't know what you feel.