Posts for June 12, 2019 (page 6)

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.

I choke on remnants of you

left lingering in the air

suspended above me

surrounding me

permeating the ground beneath my feet

thwarting my escape

from memories that suffocate

me

in the absence of you

This is a “trace poem” based on part of Sylvia Plath’s “Edge”.

The lady is completed.   
Her lifeless form bears the beam of triumph,   
the fantasy of an Argentinian obligation
courses in the rolls of her skirt.    

Her exposed toes appear to whisper:
     We’re spent; the trudging is over.

stitched into the hem 
of dusk’s indigo shawl 
is the hope of brocade 
conjured by Midas’s 
wishful fingertips 

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.

i don my
paladin armor.
i carry
a cleric’s shield.
i lay on hands
and cure your wounds.
i send you
“love and light”.
i’ll pray to your god-
and mine-
then marvel
at the
unfairness
of it all.

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.

When cream curls in coffee, I see
the surface of Jupiter, its storms reflected
in the cup I hold.
While planets and atoms parallel each other, somehow following a path,
we are the sole chaos-
breaking apart the bonds of our breath,
afraid to look up
at the stars and see
that there is no one, nothing
who will save us.