I do not want you.
Not the feel of your skin on mine.
Not the presence of your voice
subverting my thoughts through whispers.
No.
I do not want you.
I need you.
Like breath after drowning,
like the ache before a scream—
I need the lilt of your voice
to sing in my ear,
to soothe the places
I didn’t know were burning.
Like the sun chasing away the remnants of rain,
or autumn cooling the blaze of summer.
Your arrival is a balm to my soul.
I do not want you.
Not the gleam in your eye,
nor the curve of your smile,
not the weight of your gaze
when the room goes quiet.
No.
I need you—
like a pulse beneath my skin,
like truth I cannot unknow.
A found poem. Source text: The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus (below)
Not like the wretched refuse commanding our land,
conquering for fame and pomp, send a woman.
Her name—
Mother of Ancient Land Tempest-tossed.
Send a brazen,
yearning,
mighty mother
of a woman,
her imprisoned lightning breathing free,
to lift our lamp in welcome
to the exile, the poor, the tired.
Her lips shall give our silenced stories to the world.
The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
In the morning,
I promise to give myself
grace: drink water,
eat subsistence, read,
pray, wait until a bird sings
a song that doesn’t make me cry
Now, it is hard to not understand
that I am loved, & I’m sorry
I went so long believing otherwise
Sunday mornings are empty now
in chasing adulthood, in growing older
in every intonation, I wonder
what it would be like to open my mouth
and sing praise too
how the holy spirit would finally fill
my body like breath
when I would finally face my childlike faith
because it didn’t take long
for the pastor to say that god planned for the devil
to take me in my sorrow
between the pews, sermon echoing off the walls
if I was quiet, I could fill Sundays again
Only a heart like mine could understand a polarity like this:
deprivation and then excess, the ritual of it, a rhythm to sink
my life into, accustomed to wanting and hating the need.
The flood of sodium, potassium, other such careful levels in blood
all shift as I try delicately to balance routine catastrophic damage.
I try, pushing brute force to be delicate. Catastrophic it remains.
My grin becomes caustic. The public is unnerved when I’m honest.
I drink salt in my water. I’d lick the rivulets of crystals that run
from my cheeks and pool at the hollows of my collarbones
if they didn’t make me glitter so nicely in this harsh kitchen light.
The thought that this would kill anyone else echoes weightlessly.
I’m not prone to dying. Only a heart like mine could be so incessant.
I check a favorite social media app before bed
to find it unusually overwhelming.
I am struck by an endless parade
of horrifying news stories.
Everything feels
unreal and too real.
I spend the next day
trying to gain back my filter,
the one that keeps me from seeing
so much of what is happening in the world,
that blocks out all the clutter in the house,
that adds shades of gray to the bright white
and oppressing darkness.
I ground myself in unmindfulness.
I need layers between the world and me.
I like my glasses dirty
so I don’t see everything too clearly.
I need my illusions.
I am a broken magician
trapped in reality.
Sunday evening is upon us
Mind racing mixed with
A little numbing out
Sprinkled with dashes of
Dread
But…
Alas, it’s June!
New melodies
Admist familiar tunes
The page forces truth
And we will face it together
Even though this poem is crap
And ignore it I’d rather …
here we go!
