One day, I'll tell my daughter
I wanted to be a poet so I became a doctor broke the bindings of my textbooks even as my bones groaned under the memory of inscisors and hitting, they buckled through every exam buckled me down to the reality of healing, that is the itching crawl of tissue and personality knitting themselves back into something whole I'll tell my daughter, Baby, you don't need to cut yourself open just to describe red You don't owe the audience a sacrifice break the bread of your flesh make loaves out of your wrists misting the air in their eagerness to be swallowed Sometimes, making it looks like me unscarred, apparently eyes leaking with light and chemistry atoms fusing to give me energy to make it another night more You don't need to suffer to take suffering away though doctors do suffer plenty It takes maniacal love for reanimation for shadow puppetry, surgical knives sparring with shadows to make them finger-bunnies to become messiah to break the bread and eat it too to live every death on your operating table and love every life that left it Poets linger in condemned stories still smoking slightly around the bones of each window They peer into the haunted cavity hunting for a spark, even in dead cities Doctors give stories a say in their demise and an ear to hear it home they were poets once, after all they wrote about you, long ago As a doctor, you live more than one life as a poet, you make lives live forever and any girl who lost life but loves stories still should look into a career I wanted to be a doctor, I'll tell my daughter so I became a poet died first and lived later but later crept up on me sooner than sleep so I started studying and wrote a miracle I mean, I wrote a paper and became a miracle I was healing and in doing so becoming the enabler of this nasty habit of staying alive of wanting people of choosing today now now now now every now that will come after now I'll tell her medicine made me and poetry gave me a daughter to tell this to
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You should know that you're not safe here.
Go on. Scram. A poem is no place for a nice kid like you Yeah? You identify as "young adult"? okay, well, I'm gay and identify as human being but Death doesn't care which body she takes in the end which is to say that white people die too and the Spaniard curve in my neck isn't a Horcrux and I won't live forever and neither will the F.O.B.s that actually made it to New York City and lost their accents too probably still bobbing and sinking like the rest of their baggage tossed to sea to make their tongues lighter Maybe they lost their keys too the ones that they used to break into their houses after a long day of disappearing It's true, I'm too pessimistic to be young Maybe I really am a ghost after all and I know you said "young" before "pessimistic" but I'm a poet, you know and the only thing I know to do with words is twist and besides, you're never too young to die but you can be too old to which is why I still can't love her in public and why she'd probably assume my yellow ass'd be too cheap to take her to the movies anyway and that's probably true but also, $13.25 is a lot of fucking money to see Scarlett Johansson act out my erasure in 3D when I can just live that shit every day for free and you're right, it's not always about race and poetry is supposed to be pretty and life is fair unless you overthink it but I told you, when you get to my age, you start thinking like a ghost so you start making lists; for example: A List of Lists 1. A list of things you need to do before going to sleep 2. A list of things you need to do before waking up 3. A list of excuses for every time someone offers you a beer 4. A list of people who are too nice for you but you kissed anyway 5. A list of poems you still need to write 6. A list of comebacks you thought of 12 hours too late 7. A list of crime scenes you want to haunt before Death comes back for you what? You look like you expected something else. But you came for a poem and sometimes a poem is a list just like how a cake is sometimes a recipe and a girl is sometimes a ghost or a poet or not a Horcrux or lost keys or too pessimistic to be young or too young to be pessimistic and not at all concerned about the difference sometimes she's broke or Scarlett Johansson sometimes everything is about race and poetry is supposed to look like this and life is unfair unless you overthink it Sometimes Death forgets to come back for you and you've forgotten what that means so you write a list but backwards It feels
a little like nails freshly painted screaming and splintering across a chalkboard every chalkboard the pretty Carolina blue chipping flaking lifted straight off by friction chased by terrors that wouldn't stay in the night day terrors hooded in their invisibility cloaks the kind they said don't exist here but they do they want to see me strip for them all the way down to my bones i say no but they keep coming they're already here Peering down into the girl's mouth is a sliver of fluorescent clarity
clambering over the bump of my bent head, running its fingers over her gums mottled with gray teeth eaten by cavities Broken English, paradoxically efficient, whips me by way of my left ear as I pass along steel tools to the dentist, stick a sterilized aspirator into the girl's mouth so that she speaks with a lisp interrupted by the saliva sucker that slurps in exclamation not quite a hiss but also not quite human I like to think that my lungs speak the same dialect ¿Cómo te llamas? María, the girl mumbles around the talkative tube still rambling urgently against her tongue A curious quiet stills my brain the only arrangement my face can think of is a smile down at her ¿Cuantos años tienes? Tengo siete años. My colon understands siete años it means a lot of split broken things for María it is not knowing that there are split broken things living in her mouth and smiling anyway it means not knowing to know or maybe knowing just enough and I don't know where to begin to stitch together the cracks in her smile first because there are so many broken things that don't seem to need fixing so many girls that don't need saving from themselves and I am not one of them Too easily, fluorescent clarity scrubs away my delusions of grandeur as I stand there broken Spanish crowding me in with paradoxical efficiency I know a little less and in doing so know more I forget why I am here a sickle probe dangling from my fingers and a smile gerrymandering my face into a peace I can't remember the last time I felt; I've been in pieces for so long I think she wants me to tell her that I can fix her but I don't know how to say that and I don't think I could anyway not when her perfection is laying in the womb of that shabby lean-back chair like an egg I think cracks can't be that bad if it means hatching if it means living if it means María can go on believing that she is alright that her mouth is splintered in all the right God-given angles and don't she dare ever think otherwise I just came to talk to her, see because my lungs were lonely and longed to travel so I ended up here, a runaway from home, brokenly speaking and reaching for some familiarity and coming up with mouthfuls of realizing that I was looking for beauty in putting things back together but maybe I have no right to do that maybe I found that pieces can be seven year-old girls who look up to smiling people without thinking they're about to get eaten and I am not one of them so maybe I should tell her that my name isn't really doctora but cansada preocupada triste and all the other things I don't know how to say yet but I don't I want to tell her that she reminds me of me a long time ago but not so long that it couldn't be me again, I suppose I want to tell her that not flossing wasn't the worst thing that happened but laughing was the best thing and doing it with friends was better the bestest thing that ever happened but I wouldn't know how to to say that in Spanish I'm not sure if there's a word for that but she probably made one up in the dialect her lungs speak words soaring out through her ruined teeth, little gray things like ancient cities scratching the clouds and tourists gasping, Look. Isn't that something? Knotting cherry stems
with tongues means "good kisser." I swallow them each time.
Growing up is a such a cruel paradox
wiser, yet still want all the wrong things Serious, imperious, too good for childish dreams, yet secretly still want to play games Never thought it'd come to my mind to flip off all my sober reasoning Never took a drink in my life it all changed the moment I saw your face Erase all the pain of remembering all that you broke so Meet me behind the tree where lips first met and hair was free Lovely as a bumblebee The perfect place for hide-n-go-seek and dreams that outshone the stars dreams that brought us to where we are And now I can't go home I've lost my will to stay away from the tree where my heart is still Honey if you want me Go back to the place where we used to be happy Adulthood is a fucked place the rent here is a blood price to pay Much easier to dissociate you from all the sense I have gained since Erase all the pain of remembering all that you stole so Meet me behind the tree where lips first met and hair was free Lovely as a bumblebee The perfect place for hide-n-go-seek and dreams that outshone the stars dreams that brought us to where we are, oh You know I want you, I want you You could be my sweetheart, honey and make new pretty memories You know I see you, I see you You could be my sweetheart, honey I'll go and forgive everything, so Meet me behind the tree where lips first met and hair was free Lovely as a bumblebee The perfect place for hide-n-go-seek and dreams that outshone the stars dreams that brought us to where we are And now I can't go home I've lost my will to stay away from the tree where my heart is still Honey if you want me Go back to the place where we used to play hide-n-go-seek (It's not you I love It's the idea of It's not you I love It's the idea)
It was a bright day,
an autumn Friday When I admitted what we both knew was true And in a moment the treetops were all gone and I was fast transported back to a time not too long ago Foreign kindness and a sweet smile right below warm eyes Time and time, the moments passed like errant fireflies and I knew that today, I'd never be alone again I was a radio person, all the songs spoke to me singing Join the ranks of broken-hearted step up to the line unarmed Miles and miles they stretch and march this beat Join the ranks of the souls departed from happier places they all started Battlegrounds look different when you're on your knees Heard the drums beating when I laid down on your chest Foresaw broken knuckles, dirty knees I must confess Today was breaking like a promise, I expected and wasn't you or me, it was us three; us two and a killer called time Foreign kindness and a sweet smile right below warm eyes Time and time, the moments passed like errant fireflies Like a. cliché, I never wanted to make of my life I was a radio person, all the songs spoke to me screaming Join the ranks of the broken-hearted step up to the line unarmed Miles and miles they stretch and march this beat Join the ranks of the souls departed from happier places they all started Are war cries really there if no one's around to hear? Join the ranks of the broken-hearted step up to the line unarmed Battlegrounds look different when you're on your knees The halls are silent here
There is chatter, smatter of painted smiles and mohawks and hi tops here but no noise, no hitting all violence. The silence has a vicious edge to it like get up, shut up, keep shuffling a slow blunting of stymied minds because Success is already defined in the dictionary religion is interpreted literally and everyone needs their holy book; here, the walls laugh like gods. We are all so lucky here but why does the air still bruise us? Well, the violence is in the innocent eyes, smooth guile, so well-practiced and reflected that it fools the liar I've been spit on and shit on and cast in white plaster Everyone drives with gaslights that throw shadows into the street under every bus Darkness drags its segmented legs behind it heaving its shell into my throat choking all the beating things inside and I let it. Or rather, they fed it with mouthfuls of me. The violence is quiet so these halls just soak it up no crumbs of the person remain not one drop No one notices. You seem to have lived a charmed life
The kind of life that starts with "Once upon a time..." Where mothers and fathers were college sweethearts and live happily ever after I stand awkwardly at the tips of the starched, fair pages a secondary character that might get killed off before Chapter 5 and unless I present some interesting piece of plot fodder, I can forget about a sequel. I've heard that if you introduce a gun in a scene at some point, it must go off I am huddled under the cliffhanger on page 15 cupping the bulletholes I've been passing off as acne scars I'd rather be ugly than broken at least the ugly duckling can shed her skin if she waits long enough at least the laughter stops laughing at some point if she dies long enough at least she finds that her feathers were destined to be white that the color in her skin rubs off if she scrubs enough I barely make it to the end of each fight scene. I am a trigger and the things that happened to me grope my body with the intent to kill or at least scare you off with a warning shot that hurts you through your plot armor The shell casings will tell everyone that I'm dangerous and I'm worried that you will be clichéd into believing it too and whether or not you leave me, allegory will lead me through grinning Crystal Hollow, over spitting Fire Bluff, across boggy Siren Moor where nothing really grows anymore and I take this journey alone hoping that redemption hatches from its literary shell on the other side I hope redemption has wings or strong cyanide or the face of God I still dream in hyperbole Usually I'm swimming through the cosmos, no, the entire damn Universe, staring down at the bluish speck that is our star system nestled between the lines of a journal page The bullets become daisies and you don't see me coming but you choose me anyway even if I shoot even if I twist the plot it's okay, because you're into wrinkles Can appreciate pages that age gracefully passed along under many previous thumbs I forget how to hold a pen sometimes But instinct tells me that I have done it before so I keep on reaching out from down here Potential hums against the turning point-- or is it the opening scene?-- and I can see a puddle of accidents up ahead Want nothing more than to paint it. To make it my metaphor. But as I approach, I don't see anyone I recognize in the reflection Just sky. Sticks and stones may break
my bones, but poetry slams lay waste to my soul |
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