Poetry by Jason z Guest

A limited collection of my poetry is available here for public viewing. Free subscribers can access previews for two months, while paid subscribers gain full access to my expanding poetry collection. To learn more, click on any poem below.

Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Kitchen Door

This is a quotidian poem on a past experience of discovering our family’s ranch house kitchen door breached by migrants along the Texas-Mexico border.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Loops

A simple observation of weather and nature in the Texas Hill Country captured in a poem with heavy usage of rhetorical devices such as alliteration, consonance, assonance, and simile.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Iguanas

A free verse poem with an internal rhyme scheme looking back on the startling surprise and raucous nature of mating iguanas on a metal roof in Costa Rica.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

The Old Guard

A nostalgic, free verse poem that looks at my childhood memories of majestic pines that towered over our local golf course. The poem, heavy with imagery, uses personification as a rhetorical device, in which an idea or thing is given human attributes and/or feelings or is spoken of as if it were human.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Coatepeque

Considered an eighth wonder of the world, the volcanic crater lake Coatepeque (Lago de Coatepeque) of El Salvador measures eleven by fourteen kilometers. The environment exhibits great natural wealth and the lake’s vivid blue waters cyclically change to turquoise green. Mayan ancestors of four lineages migrated to various water-protected environments in 8207 BCE following a triple-star event; its Quiche lineage settled onto Teopán, an island within this lake.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Hill Country Cashier

The daily life, hunger for connection, and struggle of small-town life are captured in this quotidian poem of a simple encounter in a Texas Hill Country store.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Observation Tower

Gamboa is a small town in Panamá, on the Chagres River which feeds into the Panama Canal. The town is surrounded by rainforest and wetlands, home to countless flora and fauna of the Soberanía National Park. This poem is centered around its observation deck, offering majestic views of an exotic territory, and a perspective of just how small we are in the grand landscape of our busy lives.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Chasing the Light of a Wonderful World Below

In this poem, I am working the interlocking rubaiyat, an ancient Persian form of poetry. As contemporary as Robert Frost, this quatrain form is made of four quatrains following an aaba rhyme pattern. Each successive quatrain picks up the (third) unrhymed line as the rhyme scheme for that stanza. I’m using this to capture the unmistakable beauty I once witnessed atop a mountain that overlooked the Uncompaghre Peak and National Forest, just northwest of Telluride. Words cannot adequately describe this heavenly view, but herein lies my attempt to capture its effect on me.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Luminaria

Traditional haiku never carries a title, but I have assigned one here to set a location for the poem on my site and to represent the “sun” as our luminaria, just as traditional luminaries illuminate the life and streets of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

The Shoe Shine Man

Reflecting on the power of human touch, this quotidian poem is a tribute to the lost art of shoe shining, small talk, and thus, a nod to the trades.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Gabriel

This quotidian poem is a tribute to my dear Mexican friend, Gabriel, probably the hardest-working laborer and most reliable individual I have ever met in my life.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Catch and Release

This sporting afield work is written as a series of “essence” poems created by American poet Emily Romano, featuring a short, structured form of two lines, six syllables each with an end rhyme and internal rhyme.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

We Interrupt This Message

The nature of counting down helps us measure the remaining time of some outcome as we approach an anticipated good. In this structurally concrete poem, I am counting up by the use of the number of words to a dreadfully-common weather occurrence in Texas - tornadoes.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Morning Reprise

Heaven is all around us, and certainly within the beauty of a majestic morning reprise, captured in a simple free-verse poem.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Rain Over Puntarenas

A series of ramages gives an account of observation while caught in a rainstorm within the bar island community of Puntarenas, Costa Rica. The poem is really about vulnerability, especially in this area. The pirate Chipperton journaled to have arrived at a "Punta de Arena", or “Sandy Point” in 1720, referring to its long, needle-like surface threaded miles out into the Pacific.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

Sonnet of the Songbird

This poem employs the poetic form of the classical Shakespearean sonnet, capturing the morning magic of songbirds over the high plains of Taos in late summer.

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Poetry Jason Z Guest Poetry Jason Z Guest

I Don’t Know

In the company of best friends and with hearts for all things Latin America, several of us stumbled into this unforgettable “experience” in the streets of Antigua … so much more than a bar.

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