Haiku 1
week old garbage
orange butterfly perches
on the hot lid
Maybe I was wrong about myself.
All these years I have been treating myself as the damage after the fire
but I’m starting to realize I am the flame.
My love letters to myself
have become more than just suicide notes
I never got brave enough to sign off on.
I am working through the things I thought would kill me
and slowly realizing I am not the damsel in distress of this story.
I’ve been watering a garden I thought of as barren for so long
but lord it’s finally been growing.
Killing myself has always been an option
but thank God it’s no longer
the only one I can see.
She spoke over scribbles;
post-it notes from twenty years ago reminding her to get milk
spot the landscape of her creme walls buried behind plants and papers.
You’re not special, you’re just hurting,
she spoke to some unseen victim.
I wondered if
hurt was a requirement for normalcy, if
the feeling in my heart was something worthy of it,
if I was special.
Yet it didn’t weigh me down.
She carried on
into the antique phone, laying out a path to recovery.
I took note of it,
following it to acceptance as I followed
her dog around all of the shit she could have given the world.
In the autopsy room you waver,
palms slick despite your powdered gloves.
Here lies a silver form, once exuberant
but now indifferent to the indignity of examination.
You measure collarbone to navel, follow sightlines
with scalpel. Here are the ribs that caged her heart,
there is the lump she swallowed the last time
he made her cry. Scar tissue tells a story
of knives and hard living, birth and death.
You wonder about the last time she looked
up at the moon, the last secret held
on her tongue, the last time she kissed
someone she loved.
All the things that made her
whole are removed, placed reverently
onto the scale. You add up the numbers
in your mind, trying to avoid her milky stare,
but you know you’ll come up short
because there isn’t yet a measurement
for the soul.
1.
in his review of Butterfly Voyage,
a book of poems, the author professes:
“the opportunity to follow the poet
at every turn into her natural world
drifting supernaturally in fuid narrative”
such poet, obviously, is not black
for who ever floats headfirst
into black whimsy, from concrete
towards the arcane, expecting
anything less than anger or
orgasm or a bucket of chicken?
ali was, himself, a floater
a black butterfly with
a lubricated jawline and
a muscular lip dripping of rhyme
he could also, of course, beat
the shit out you if your thought
was to deny him his wings
so i guess that’s a wash
2.
they love to see us rumble but
take flight when we mumble spells
and i guess that’s a magic, right?
turning the bee’s thorn
into a mystic baton, the black voice
into a vaccinating sting.
In the last several years
I’ve simmered down. The flavors
of experience concentrated
and the volatile elements
mostly boiled away. I make
a conscious effort to turn down
the flames of media input, lest
I become just another old man
who’s always burned up about
one thing or another, his blackened
opinions stuck to his brain pan,
getting smoke in everyone’s eyes.
