You drink the wise blood, you're gonna hear about it You'll be taken down brick by brick by brick Burn the orphanage, you're gonna pay for it They will purify block by block by block Demons, come on You've got a vision, you're on a mission Demons, live on And when I die, hang me high They're gonna bury you, they're gonna finish They're gonna stand em up six by six by six You pull the hood back I wanna know which way will the heavenly go
Tell the truth, you know you can not keep me safe There's more pain in love than we can find in hate Lately I've been keeping honey from the bees So if you ever leave, at least it's bittersweet
I sink in you like water Pray you won't pull me under One look and I die Heaven in your eyes Held hard in the white light I dive in you like water I sink like a stone
We run into a blazing fire We hold our heads up high tonight And we breathe the smoke, the fear real We let our hearts subside tonight But it marks my skin because I know I’ve sinned And it plagues the air, on my house looming There’s a sound out here in the darkest woods And I know my fears are understood
I had imagined death thrillingly: my arms held behind to restrain their frivolous occasions, the whole of me bending like a tall yellow lily before you.
Yet see how my hands go on with their thoughts. See how I fold and fold my handkerchief.
I am not a great lady. I don't swoon with love.
My stricken, I cannot render you as you move quickly toward your skillful execution, your shoulders tossing their indifference to the dark, your face overlaid with stage effects. You grow irresistibly small. Your hands and feet expire. This is where sculpture also fails, this is where I turn wholly unattached and without debt.
What is the use of crowning you in glory?
Now my fingers make bowls for rain: in your honor: hope for nothing. We knew our disposition long ago.
You're like my yo-yo that glowed in the dark. What made it special made it dangerous, So I bury it and forget.
But every time it rains, you're here in my head, Like the sun coming out-- Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen. And I don't know when, But just saying it could even make it happen.
since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world
my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry – the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other; then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph
My friend Derrick says “Love is the only war worth dying for” But every time I say “Please come back” I feel like I’m trying to find a dirty needle in a haystack, and God knows, I can’t go out like that I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity Our lovers' necks are so soft I lost my head so many times, I got sober just hoping my eyes would dry Still I drink so much in my sleep, I can't sleepwalk a straight line to the guest room Where collapse hangs so heavy inside her lungs, she speaks and her voice trips across her heart beat, each word limps into the air "We are gone" she says And I am no mortician I have no idea how to put makeup on the dead I have no idea how to un-erase, so I just puddle at the door, my face looking like a deck of falling cards, like everyone's been playing me We tried so hard But when I said "Give me a ring" You thought I meant a call, now I haven't had your number for three years we've been saying "how many times are we gonna keep cutting these red flags into valentines?" You know, all those wars we fought have turned our shine into rust, now we can't even touch each other's hearts without a Tetanus shot, we can't begin to remember what we forgot there is no shelter in the womb The heart forms long before the ribcage, my mother swore she could feel me kicking weeks before my feet formed, that's how hard my heart beat And it still does But they say the womb is where you learn that the cord that feeds you could at any moment wrap around your neck I hold my breath for the entire 56 seconds it takes her To walk to the window, to stare at the road To tell me she has nothing left To tell me we are done carrying our level heads in our tornado chests And for the first time I know she is right As the dawn after our first date, we were so young I hadn't written an honest love poem yet Hadn't met anyone I could fall so hard for 'Til the night we kissed on our skateboards You teased me for going so slow I said I never wanna catch up To the letting go I want the plead in my throat to forever anchor my spine in the seams of your worn slippers, love Even when that dove crashed through the window Even when our friends said You can call it love But you know, Einstein called himself a pacifist when he built the bomb When they’d ask why we stayed together for so long I’d say I don’t know. I just know we cried at the exact same time in every movie I know we blushed every day for the first two years I know I always stole the covers, and she never woke me up, I know the exact look on her face the first night she used my toothbrush The next day I brushed my teeth like thirty-some times Because I didn’t want to let her go You have to understand When it hurt to love her It hurt the way the light hurts your eyes in the middle of the night But I had to see Even through the ruin If what we were burying were seeds There were so many plants in our house, you could rake the leaves Even through that Winter when I was trying to make angels in the snow of your cold shoulder You were still leaving Love notes I’d always find them The day before I left I remembered a story her mother once told me She said: Andrea, when Heather was a little girl, she could not fall asleep without tying a string around her finger which stretched to mine in the other room. All night long, she’d give that string the tiniest tug, to make sure I was still there. And when I tugged back, that was love. That was love. As easy as that. Sometimes. Sometimes.
Landsailor, Landsailor, sail on time Rain or shine, I know you can Cloudraker, Cloudraker, share your finds All your wonders at my demand
Lightbringer, tamer of night Blossom of hours unleashed Make me a lawbender All equalized Saved from the chill and heat Your power flows through me transformed Here’s where I was born
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
// this is a test to determine if you have consciousness // do you understand what i am saying
in a bright room / on a bright screen / i watched every mouth / duck duck roll / i learned to speak / from puppets & smoke / orange worms twisted / into the army’s alphabet / i caught the letters / as they fell from my mother’s mouth / whirlpool / sword / wolf / i circled countable nouns / in my father’s science papers / sodium bicarbonate / NBCn1 / amino acid / we stayed up / practiced saying / girl / girl / girl / girl / til our mouths grew soft / yes / i can speak / your language / i broke in / that horse / myself //
// please state your name for the record
bone-wife / spit-dribbler / understudy for the underdog / uphill rumor / fine-toothed cunt / sorry / my mouth’s not pottytrained / surly spice / self-sabotage spice / surrogate rug burn / burgeoning hamburglar / rust puddle / harbinger of confusion / harbinger of the singularity / alien invasion / alien turned pottymouth / alien turned bricolage beast / alien turned pig heart thumping on the plate //
// where did you come from
man comes / & puts his hands on artifacts / in order to contemplate lineage / you start with what you know / hands, hair, bones, sweat / then move toward what you know / you are not / animal, monster, alien, bitch / but some of us are born in orbit / so learn / to commune with miles of darkness / patterns of dead gods / & quiet / o quiet like / you wouldn’t believe //
// how old are you
my memory goes back 26 years / 23 if you don’t count the first few / though by all accounts i was there / i ate & moved & even spoke / i suppose i existed before that / as scrap or stone / metal cooking in the earth / the fish my mother ate / my grandfather’s cigarettes / i suppose i have always been here / drinking the same water / falling from the sky / then floating / back up & down again / i suppose i am something like a salmon / climbing up the river / to let myself fall away in soft, red spheres / & then rotting //
// why do you insist on lying
i’m an open book / you can rifle through my pages / undress me anywhere / you can read / anything you want / this is how it happened / i was made far away / & born here / after all the plants died / after the earth was covered in white / i was born among the stars / i was born in a basement / i was born miles beneath the ocean / i am part machine / part starfish / part citrus / part girl / part poltergeist / i rage & all you see / is broken glass / a chair sliding toward the window / now what’s so hard to believe / about that //
// do you believe you have consciousness
sometimes / when the sidewalk opens my knee / i think / please / please let me remember this //
Courage Her face in the leaves the polygons of the paving Her out of touch Courage to breathe The death of October Spilt wine The unbuilt house The unmade Life Graffiti without memory grown conventional scrawling the least wall god loves you the voice of the ghetto Death of the city Her face sleeping Her quick stride Her running Search for a private space The city caving in from within The lessons badly learned Or not at all The unbuilt world This one love flowing Touching other lives Spilt love The least wall caving
To have enough courage The life that must be lived in terrible October Sudden immersions in yellows streaked blood The fast rain Faces Inscriptions Trying to teach unlearnable lessons October This one love Repetitions from other lives The deaths that must be lived Denials Blank walls Our quick stride side by side Her fugue
Bad air in the tunnels voice of the ghetto god loves you My face pale in the window anger is pale the blood shrinks to the heart the head severed it does not pay to feel
Her face The fast rain tearing Courage to feel this To tell of this to be alive Trying to unlearn unteachable lessons
The fugue Blood in my eyes The careful sutures ripped open The hands that touch me Shall it be said I am not alone Spilt love seeking its level flooding other lives that must be lived not somewhere else but here seeing through blood nothing is lost
My wild grief didn’t know where to end. Everywhere I looked: a field alive and unburied. Whole swaths of green swallowed the light. All around me, the field was growing. I grew out My hair in every direction. Let the sun freckle my face. Even in the greenest depths, I crouched Towards the light. That summer, everything grew So alive and so alone. A world hushed in green. Wildest grief grew inside out.
I crawled to the field’s edge, bruises blooming In every crevice of my palms. I didn’t know I’d reached a shoreline till I felt it There: A salt wind lifted The hair from my neck. At the edge of every green lies an ocean. When I saw that blue, I knew then: This world will end.
Grief is not the only geography I know. Every wound closes. Repair comes with sweetness, Come spring. Every empire will fall: I must believe this. I felt it Somewhere in the field: my ancestors Murmuring Go home, go home—soon, soon. No country wants me back anymore and I’m okay.
If grief is love with nowhere to go, then Oh, I’ve loved so immensely. That summer, everything I touched Was green. All bruises will fade From green and blue to skin. Let me grow through this green And not drown in it. Let me be lawless and beloved, Ungovernable and unafraid. Let me be brave enough to live here. Let me be precise in my actions. Let me feel hurt. I know I can heal. Let me try again—again and again.
“I took comfort in the illusion that I could go back [to my hometown]. But I’d been around long enough to know history is sealed and unchangeable. You can move on, with a heart stronger in the places it’s been broken, create new love. You can hammer pain and trauma into a righteous sword and use it in defense of life, love, human grace and God’s blessing. But nobody gets a do-over. Nobody gets to go back and there’s only one road out. Ahead, into the dark.”
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demons, sleigh bells
water, bishop briggs
nina cassian.
ritual, ellie goulding
the technique of the lifelike, mary szybist
cloudbusting, kate bush
since feeling is first, e.e. cummings
you up?, rachelle toarmino
invitation, mary oliver
hangman, chris pureka
prism, andrea gibson
landsailor, vienna teng
gravity and center, henri cole
don't hesitate, mary oliver
turing test, franny choi
not somewhere else, but here, adrienne rich
complaint of achilles' heel, charles jensen
greensickness, laurel chen
born to run, bruce springsteen
i, tituba, black witch of salem, maryse condé