disclosure

I keep the thought of you always tucked behind my ear,
Casual but constant, Like a stray wisp of hair. Compulsively, I tease it back out to play with it, An absent-minded tick, To twirl you around my fingers, Self-soothing Your warm smile… The downy back of your head cupped in my hand as we slow-danced Reminded me painfully of the time I held a baby bird in the driveway Of my childhood home. His fluff a perfect fit in my smaller palms, My dumbfound awe The tiny pin pricks of his talons Offset by the cloud of his untouchable fragility
A dizzying suspicion of duality... My joy turned to panic In the face of his trusting innocence His eggshell bones and thimbleful heartbeat Encased in nothing more than a brief cough of down All so small, so precious, so breakable…
And I! At ten, a red and reckless titan Teetering on a ladder to reach the branch where I found him. In my haste to return him to his nest Before I destroyed him with an accidental breath, I pulled the coiled-spring branch down too hard And let it go too fast and The backlash flung him into the open sky A graceful arc… For a moment, almost as if you were in flight. I imagine it might have been exhilarating.
It kills me that you with your good and true soul Would thank me for such a thing. He landed on the lawn across the street with a limp and inaudible thud And I, shaking violently with remorse, Scooped him back up with fingers I cursed,
Returned him to his home with fingers I cursed.

His gray eyelids blinked up at me still,
Translucently in love:
A grief-stricken conviction. How many more lessons would it take In my casual cruelty and haste Before I would be worthy of your trust?

I wind, unwind the question
In spirals down my still-cursed finger
And tuck it back into place. I do not know if I am strong enough 
To suffer into virtue.

It is deep summer and I am sweaty and hunched over the side of the swimming pool. I am 10 years old but my scrunched nose is already losing its snubbiness to obstinate aquilinity. My brow furrows against the noon and the blinding chlorine sheen and my blazing self-consciousness. Naked, wet, prepubescent bodies crowd around me. Every jostling mound of unfreckled flesh stretching the back straps of swimsuits seems more at ease with its own existence than I could ever imagine. I have lost all hope for myself in the flood of such languidity, such happy comfort in defiance of what feels, to me, an insurmountable and unswimthroughable communal pool of insufferable discomfort. I am insufferable, crushed into a tiny invertebrate I hate by social alienation and a seemingly inveterate feeling of inferiority. I learned to breathe through my nose after doubled and redoubled efforts from coaches, overcoming the genetically labyrinthine difficulty my nose has found, since infancy, in coaxing air through its passages. So I am not afraid to dive. I speak in full sentences but only half-poems in my head. I start every internal sentence with “I,” just like this, because I am the only thing I know and am not wary of. I sog my sentences with sacks of adjectives and adverbs because I still do not understand action. Nonetheless, I plunge and drench. Acid blue, frantic movement. I open my eyes and mouth under water and feel briefly but pleasantly fishlike. Life is not so bad. What a lovely sensation, an ice-crack of release, to leap from sweaty concrete swaying from the heat-haze, to jackknife into an oceanic bloom, to feel the balloon-pop bursting away from your body all around you. You feel important in that moment, don’t you? The water says, “look what you have done” and explodes to embrace you by each atom. A lovely sensation. Life is not so bad. I will hunt that moment down, that interlude between heat-haze and cool, liquid clarity, for ten years to come.  I will love the color green because it falls peacefully between those two poles: cheery, alarming yellow and languorous blue. Trees and plants, the greenest among us, understand blue and yellow better than anyone else. They drink only sunshine and water and wear the color of my eyes on every finger. Butter and blueberries make, objectively, the best pancakes. Be as the pancakes are, says my ten-year-old self to my ten-year-old self, copefully. Unfortunately, I have developed a sense of humor funny only to myself, since I am the only person I hang out with. This would probably make the things I say even funnier to people, if I said them with bravado and staccato self-confidence, but of course I do not. My self is my whole world, I am ambivalent. I have occasional moments of what feel like greatness and unique understanding, and I feel destined for glory. But this gives me a frustration, hatred for, and obsession with other people, because they seem at ease and happy, and because they do not recognize my glory, and because I hate who I am around them, and because I hate hating. I become both avoidant and desperate, but spend most of my time alone out of sheer unavailability of human contact. I am homeschooled. I also glide underwater to the next side. I somersault as the concrete approaches and kick off a little unevenly for the next lap. The pointlessness of this never feels oppressive to me, for some reason. I daydream while I swim, just as I daydream while doing anything but reading. I live this time only for what my head and other heads create. I move fluidly between dreaming worlds and feel calm, so calm, so so calm when I am alone with words. A still, stretching pool for only me. I defend my words like a wolf mother and I return to their breast like a helpless child. Like a helpless child? I am a helpless child. But even this pleasant dreaminess, my private subterfuge of present evil, will be beaten out of me by the evil itself until I am too concrete, sweating and swaying and sinking through sterilized water. At the moment, in some sense, I believe in myself – that my opinions and perspective matter, and bring a unique value to an outer world that could be improved by them. I will lose this to a pathological fear of egotism, but will become egotistical anyways. I am not always so grim. I am really not always anything. Other than, perhaps, a proficient swimmer. I surface and return to the back of the line of waiting divers.

fragments, pt 6

Celebrity, longevity --
Take it lightly,
Brake for levity.
Austerity is relaxative,
Truth and posterity both just relatives.
Brevity laughs the last imperative:
Love everything that leaves.

fragments, pt 5

In love with the human singularity,
In love with the tandem and the disparity,
In love with this new clarity:

The sincerity of the disguises we shed, by layers
Leaving torn veils that lead like trails
To this moment.
And then the next --

Recklessly in motion and at rest,
We connect in
Burst cocoons and dead skin.
Every shed exoskeleton feeds the bred ecosystem
Of our collective wisdom.

fragments, pt 2

light moves over your sleeping body:
a shifting patterned robe
fluttering lacework
curling arms
wind chimes

comforter, lavender, coal
endless texture mixer
color theory wheel
hollow-pocked cheeks
parted lips
crooked teeth

crack me like a walnut
my apple-hearted crock pot
kin, catharsis, improv
partner, cartwheel, seasalt:
burning incense,
trailing thunder,
steady breather,
fists like cusping peonies --
open me.

fragments, pt 1

Have you ever used a humble word?
Do you dare to eat a peach?
You cannot hear the mermaids singing
if you drown them in your speech.

I have seen their washed up bodies on the beach.

I have heard their mourners calling, each to each.

It didn't sound like this.

Life goes on, and all my wishes have whittled down to one:
To be remembered as someone who tried.

I have outrun everything but desperate sincerity

And this shape-shifting fear-hound,
Nightmare dog on the heels of every thought.

Mutt, I have spent every night of my life
With my fist down your throat,
Clawing for the name to call you by
To cast you from me like a herd of pigs.

You are aloof, sarcastic,
You pretend not to notice
When you're coming or going.

I'm embarrassed by how casually
You drive me over cliffs.

You are so close these days that sometimes
You wear my body
And I watch,
Dumb,
Numb,
And skeletal in a fur coat,
What you do and say
And wonder
If my voice has always sounded that way.

Even now, alone,
I hear your paws picking paths
Down the hall outside my bedroom
And the hot fog of your breath.

Your eyes are fearful yellow and always glowing closer,
Like the headlights of a train constantly closing in
On a cartoon woman chained to the tracks.

What ritual will exorcise you?

All I want anymore is my skin back
And a knife to your throat.

forgive me

There are times I disappoint you,

O friend or fear behind each face --

And times I disappoint me, too.

But the former does not displace

My doubting of the latter's due

In the dispensing of our grace.

.


We travel up, between, and through

Exchanged relationships of space.

No transgression is old or new.

We disentangle. We embrace.

roll call

Cast your life and grief in plaster relief.
When your lovers leave, keep and gild their teeth.

Pane past scenes in iron-framed stained glass screens
In cathedrals where the light braids its streams.

Concentric circles, the shafts bend and seep
And the shafts bow and weep and wash your feet.

Light fields spin to gold and back into wheat.
We watch in rows with scythes, and do not reap.