- Wesley Appel
Selected Poetry by Wesley Appel

Photo Source: Pixabay
Dew Drop
Dew Drop
Rolling down a rose petal.
Down the stem it goes,
Passing thorn after thorn—
Skipping over leaves like groping hands.
Touchdown!
Drip drop, Dew Drop touches down.
Amongst the fertile plains of earth
Dew Drop settles in the growing mire.
Other drops congress
Convoking and dropping
From the rosy, golden, majestic heavenly reaches
That the morning
bequeathed upon them.
Worms crawl and work
Helping the Dew Drop to carry out its noble task,
Because greatness rests on the back of minutia
And life is smaller than that.
Have you looked?
Watch the drops dance and sing
Lapping in the moonlight’s love
As mama leaves and papa feeds their verdant homes
When morning comes.
Crawling lower beneath the earth
With rollie-polies and
blind things slither
Grabbing and pulling unawares of the light above
And the fire below.
But the Dew Drop continues to dig.
A miner it could be—an excavator!
While all the other drops have met their timely ends,
Fortunately to return
to their fated havens,
This one continues its burrow.
Past a hundred years it sees,
Then a thousand,
Then a million,
Forever descending into the subterranean heaven
Leaving comfort,
Trickling into uncertain sediment.
Trailing past things once alive in dirt which once sprouted life,
Moving to return life
where life once was,
And the Dew Drop falls further into oblivion.
Missing the moonlight, missing the sunlight
It finds a new home because there is only one way to go—
Always down,
Careening forever.
You should’ve looked
when you had the chance.
Dew drops are fleeting—
Fledgling little bubbles of concentration
Focused on the only goal
they ever knew.
Dew Drop finds no grass below.
Dew Drop finds only mystery and sightless wonder
And it continues to plunge
Towards the core.
Dew Drop adjusts.
As it pursues, it spreads itself
Leaving pieces behind
for the earth to use,
Giving back to what was given to it.
The earth uses Dew Drop to make life,
Sending love and warmth up to the roots of the rose,
The one and its brothers and sisters
That housed Dew Drop and supplied it for its journey.
Dew Drop loses drip by drop
Becoming smaller,
Becoming so much larger,
And it concentrates,
Like a drill,
Falling,
Opening.
Open up, world!
Open the cave,
May Dew Drop fall into that rushing river underneath the earth—
A river that giants once drank from.
Let him become the biggest Dew Drop,
The world has never seen one so big.
It is far too late to see how great Dew Drop truly is.
Because minutia is the building block of greatness
And we must continue to dig to find how small we are.
Filth
Alone
In my filth locked away
Hoping to see the red sun
Shining down on my face
Dark and hard is the room
I am accustomed to. Filth
Builds and I am trapped
A light shines from the dark
A doorway I see sun shining
A step through it is light
A new air a new sound
Alone
Others look with fear. Filth
Is still covering my scaled skin
That I have not seen
In the reflective pane I see
I am the monster. Filth
Remains and I am lost
A scream in the distance
A tear in the air breeds the dark
A step through it is me
A me which stands yonder
Alone
Others run in the rain. Filth
Starts to run down the scaled skin
I see me
In the red sun I see
I am no monster. Filth
leaves and I am found
Together
Wesley Appel is a Masters candidate studying clinical psychology at Teachers College of Columbia University. His fascination with the mysteries of the unconscious and the manifestations of behavior in waking life infer his writing, whether it pertains to human connection or unresolved trauma. His hope is that people will find solace in knowing that they are not alone in the emotional and psychic challenges they face and that his writing will create a platform to open discourse pertaining to mental health.