Potential successes, potential blockades
This time next year
you will not be here,
because homes grow wild
and plenty, my dear.
So relax.
Calm down, take a breath.
Take the riverboat down
to the farthest pier in your nicest dress,
and marvel at the upstream’s roaring press.
Cleansing means churning but clean means calm.
You’ve been through this all and more before,
my dear, so
relax.
Calm down.
Take a breath.
Something they don’t tell you is that there’s a magic garden
in every courtyard in Philadelphia.
Gardens made of glass, and tears, and gunfight.
And through it all, as the sun sets,
roses creep out of window-barred pots and slither to the streets –
every atom in the city chasing that faint ocean air.
The city of symmetry, city of two rivers – entre fontaines,
je t’aime from here to there and back again,
the Atlantic rolls between us.
In the meantime, I’m eating up spoonfuls of Sundays
I’m all too willing to give.
And in this time I’ve hidden myself in every corner of the city,
every bustle in the suburbs, here I am,
sarcastically.
Found in yarn stores in South Philly,
fingers running through the strands
despite the weight of cheesesteak in my hand.
Resting the holy hollow of my body in a Temple cot in summer;
ring around my toe and vision hazed
in vodka-sparkled saturation.
On my knees in a bathroom or two in West Philadelphia
setting tiles in the floor of a soon-to-be home
so a single mother can breath a little easier for a little while.
And out here on the Main Line,
wrapped in white sheets, a pen in my mouth,
listening to that goddamned bell toll,
Waiting for the gift of Sunday exploration
in the holy city of gardens and love.
Sitting listless in a twin bed writing;
the smell of carnal acts a day away still alive on the sheets
and the sound of our breathing in my head,
I got to thinking.
I am not the person I was when we exchanged hellos.
I’ve cut my hair and cured my skin since then.
I’ve been healing,
a healing where I’m learning not to pick at
peeling, mending skin.
You’ve changed as well in ways unknown to me;
existing an island away, living only though the ripples of the
three floating dots at the bottom of my screen
I’m coming,
I’m coming,
I’ll be right with you.
Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for hearing.
Thank you for helping me grow.
My heart is bigger because of you
and I am not the kind of person to let that go untold.
Thank you for choosing me, thank you for holding me.
Thank you, however briefly, for the person I am to you.
Mirror, mirror, shiver me timers,
three shots of rum and it’s not any clearer
to the people I’ll run in to later tonight,
to the pictures I’ll be taking under darkened lights,
that I was not built for beauty.
I was built for walking.
I come from a people who haven’t forgotten the roots left behind
when they were pulled like weeds, culled like beasts,
and corralled onto the path to their future.
I was built in their honor,
built in the image of the tears they trailed in their wake,
the tears that blossomed into the white rose: Neakita.
I was built to let them stand again, out of red earth from Oklahoma,
the people who crawled from a hole in the ground and into the flaming sun,
and flourished under it.
They do not deserve these scars.
Twenty-two hundred miles of death-dotted trails,
carrying only blankets reeking of disease, $50 to spend, and a loaded gun,
it’s no wonder there’s a grave every step of the way.
There still is today.
So, Lax Bro, I wasn’t built to be pretty.
And Lacrosse? More like Stick Ball, war’s little brother,
not played but fought across the plains.
Do not test me.
And don’t you dare desecrate the sport my people created
with your poor excuse for a personality.
I’ll cut any blanket you give to me in two.
I was built in their honor,
not to be pretty:
The gap between my teeth closed with seven years of dental work,
almond sliver eyes, cheekbones high and strong,
overlapping digits on my fingers and toes:
A, Chahta sia.
Yes, I am Choctaw.
I am of Chickasaw too, and
I was built to uncover this part of my culture.
So let me remember.
Lean on me while we walk together.
Katimma ho hotupa?
Tell me: where does it hurt?
The children are happy behind the fence, you know.
This is all you’ve ever been told.
You see them run past, sometimes;
your face pressed to the wooden slats,
eyelid peeled back inside the crack —
sight reaching out to meet their running forms.
They will always know peace, you know.
While war has always torn your ground apart,
their side will never run dry of fleshy fruit
or the ripened ribs of those creatures they farm.
Knowing this, you look around your side.
There are no children playing here;
they sit listless in the dust, ground down by the countless
sticks and stones thrown over the fence in playful ignorance of whom they’ll hit.
If they hit you they’ll ruin you, you know.
This is all you’ve ever been told.
And still you watch:
the splinters in your cheeks of years and years of breathless watching
though the crack have made you bitter — the wooden shards have hardened you,
yet still you watch, wide-eyed in disbelief and longing.
Happiness has gone extinct on this side,
and happiness is spelled with leaves of gold on theirs.
Everything they stole from you was branded
with the gilded promise of a wish:
for bluer skies and cleaner air and food to eat.
And yet — and yet!
You hear the children cry.
The grass is always green for them and all you have is dust,
and still they whimper at their feast.
The children are happy on the other side, and so
they will never see your sallow eyes shrivel in this heat.
Their happiness is built on never seeing how they’ve come to rest their heads
on these stolen leaves of luscious gold.
That —
that
is how they di(n)e in peace.
Clawing your way through a wooded town
on a rare day of autumn heat won’t get you anywhere,
I think you’ve forgotten.
You’ve been drug away from the forest floor,
eyes a knotted, snotty mess and hair in your teeth before;
why can’t you give it a rest with your wild-girl heart?
Dried leaves crumple in your clammy fists,
a flurry of red-orange flakes with edges like broken glass
unstick themselves from your palms and float down,
never to be reassembled
or remembered;
crushed in vain by a girl with a wild heart and hands of a man:
even holy water could not cleanse the things you touched back then.
You bring rock to trunk to scratch the features of your face
into the soft clay bark of the old oak tree.
Naturally, the disfigured tree disfigured you;
and for the rest of the days that its roots burrow down into the forest floor,
your folded jowls and pinching eyes will grace the clearing’s door.
As such your face wanders into country lore
and you are remembered as a monster;
Old Hag of the Hill who ate wild-girls’ hearts.
Too late, the crack of guilt lashes down on your hunched back,
the rock slips from your grip and you follow it down;
finally collapsed in this lawless wooded town.
You know the hours will pass and the searchlights will find you.
Questions will be asked and avoided, repeated and half-completed;
half-sense words building sense and sentences in the moonlight.
You’ve all been through this before.
The forest knows how to wear its destruction well,
that is to say, it hides it all;
little do the occult ad-ults know what wreckage goes unmanned here;
the wrecked remnants of your wild heart.
Years pass in the forest, and your tantrums subside.
No-one asks why, but you remember,
wild-girl at heart,
that night you tore your wild heart into pieces
and planted its meaty pulp in the roughed-up forest floor.
I measure time through methods more intimate than
seconds, years, or days.
You learn to, don’t you, when time zones lead to tears?
When the anxiety of separation manifests for years?
Time has only shown me that our meager, human
methods of dividing up a day in ticks and tocks
leaves so much time unaccounted for.
Time is more than regularity;
it should be shown as valleys and peaks
with the echo of eternity:
“As Long As It Takes,”
echoing eternally between them.
Time will take
As Long As It Takes
and rigid divisions are a shitty constraint
on a concept that is one- and ever-flowing.
So let me preach:
Measure time in tubes of toothpaste
and moments in metres and miles ahead.
Measure hours in hot water cooling,
and days in books not yet read.
Measure years in love and decades in passion
and life in what’s been produced from the thoughts in your head.
Take it from the girl who lives six hours behind her boyfriend,
five hours behind her best friend,
two hours ahead of her home address: home to the house she’s never lived in,
and three hours ahead of the first house she was ever brought home to,
under a rainbow one day in late October;
time is a patchwork of moments.
And those moments will take As Long As They Take.
I did my growing-up in kingdoms and swing sets splattered far and wide
across this worn Earth-world.
Vine-covered buildings dropped their leaves at my arrival,
and armed with only a glue gun and a green marker
I tried to right the wrong of my being
in the place I was living.
No-one told me it was natural.
Natural to shed one’s coat or skin
either because of personal growth
or a season’s whim.
No-one told me it was natural,
seven years behind us now,
to be imperfect every once in a while.
That sometimes nature has ideas bigger than
our day-to-day interactions and reactions.
That sometimes leaves will fall and skins will stretch or shed
for the best of us and the best of them.
Yet when they do, see not a naked scar
but a rugged skeleton letting
life in.
You lose yourself between the empty ticking of the clock,
The low-brow knock of tick-tack-tock;
The wayward, strident second hand
Beats to the sound of unmanned wreckage
Inside the holy-water of your heart.
You lose yourself between the leaves of sheaves of books,
The smell of well-felled plant-cells planted in antiquity
Permeates the dusty shelves,
And only time will tell whether
They will find a home again.
You lose yourself in stacks of stones and tomes and poetry,
A clustered, flustered, flotsam-jetsam meld
Of stories bound together by the past;
Held in ship-shape place for
Longer than history itself.
You lose yourself under night’s weighty deep-dark cape,
Walking the fleeting distance from one bright-bite
Pinprick of light in the sky to another;
Wondering under what thundering sky
You yourself will join them.
You lose sight of yourself, you begin to notice, in the meaningless
Of hypocrisy, and the view of infinity from your bedroom window.
So while pre-processed thoughts and lacklustre words
Pour from the jaws of immobile, ignoble people,
You lose yourself again in the empty ticking of the clock,
And learn to love its simple sound.
My fingers have ground to a halt,
Their prints run dry and blisters bloat the muscle behind my skin.
Words no longer flow with such fluidity now they’ve been rubbed so thin.
My sight is crinkled at the seams —
Exhaustion is usually a breeding ground for poetry,
But from this early-morning darkness I’ve spun out only fragments of stories;
If knickknacks were words and scrapped books came together,
That would be a picture of my poetry.
I can hardly breathe for fear and cold,
These empty words have stolen the hearth on which I warm my soul,
And I am left alone with little to hold, and time again ticks out its close.
New clichés are born in my head,
Whispering uninspired, uninspired,
To the body rotting in this bed.
Candleships 