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holy shit. Somehow, apparently through a friend's backup procedures, some of my writing from when I was fucking EIGHTEEN showed up on our file server. I've been sitting here reading with my jaw dropped for an hour. You all are the only people these days I think I could stand to show this stuff to. In unexpurgated form, I will paste these in at intervals. Some I don't think I can bear to have out there, largely because in reading them I seriously want to go back and kick my own bitchy little ass. Oh, and this was before I (wisely) stopped writing poetry. Forgive the absurdities, please.
Intersections
In the days I can barely see;
sun-blind I wander having awoken
mid-afternoon, feel the pale construction
barriers around me, struggle
towards conversation.
I muster a smile in the hopes
it will be taken, find my body held
by hands I know I love.
Part-time only, sometimes I variable
in a cell, like a honeycomb, not prison,
although halfthat too,
girls that communicate somehow with air
fluctuations, and the love here is different,
terrified I quiver, ponder insanity.
my home is in the breach, and when the sun
goes down my eyes can open, I see through the mist
once more again finally,
now the gears turn and I am frightened
by the way my mind works.
Not of despair do I write, but the sadness
Sorrow as an expatriot, never allowed
to touch her real homeland.
I fluster against the locks and remain in the bay,
try to learn to swim, othertimes
sink under.
The first leg is always the hardest and then
one grows accustomed to the rhythm of motion
finds comfort in a wavelength;
it is not human.
I feel a child, lost in a big world, yet in control
for the child understands the microcosm
with the macrocosm, and in control
of immediacies, manages the greater
dilemmas.
In a room, my hands are still stiff
with cold.
my mother, drunk, in a car,
forgets to turn the headlights,
crashes into the shoulders,
foliage.
It is only a dream, but I take the wheel;
the car disappears.
In the distance between sleep and waking
there is bread, right angles,
a lesson, and I fish for words
locate information about time
and a class.
The girl that is like I was squirrels in,
tries to rouse my sleeping companion
for her physics lab and I chuckle
subconsciously
when she says she's too drained:
I have dreamt once again of the man
who forced me, sixteen
to open my mouth,
recall pottery and women in love with me.
The word rape filters in like coffee,
shakes my muscles, Alexis like a subchapter of me.
I think of dark rooms of smoke
empty wine bottles, the furtive movements of sex
in a corner, velvet lifted for an anonymous head.
Phone calls in the night hold an affectionate voice
but expectant, and I try
so hard the wash through oceans of time space and difference
I can't touch him from so far away.
Together, I make him buy candles, taste beer and me
in his mouth.
The dream made me want him
in my fear, to call him, if only to know
That he still wants Sam dead.
Ropes so thick they hold the parts of the world
to each other bind everything,
I reach out for a Camel,
touch hemp.
I examine my eyes from behind the computer
(there is a mirror against the wall)
they seem faded and smoky, drawn in
with a heavier pen than before.
Catch glimpses of Jesus, weeping
and bleeding, staring off
into the spaces around me.
Sometimes I recede, waves ebb from the shore,
back to the wasteland my home.
There I can only scour the bleached skies
for some signal that my hands still belong
to my arms, watch the infinite horizon
scallop stories in a language that isn't
of words.
Here the sun is more grey than yellow,
ashen light merges shadows,
this world belongs to geometry
unlike nature, the science of textbooks,
axioms and theorems I do not know,
it is made like the placing of words in a line,
in a paragraph, et cetera.
I cannot help but feel my wings,
ceremoniously burned, feather by feather,
while the cold air finds a home in Massachussetts.
I sit for minutes like hours remembering
the colors of birth and my parents
shining like knives in the bright light of day,
kissing their daughter goodnight.
And goodnight to me was all nightmares,
the pain of the time before sleep flooding
my blood pounding me into a person.
My heart still an infant's, my mind clamored over the edge.
Out the window I saw the stars in the sky over
the hideous leaves of the fall
parting in places for the buildings of Hartford
and I felt what it was like to be alive:
pain, the old wounds of others
boring holes into me, one so tiny,
so recognizably powerless.
Now old habits persist; when I fade into me,
blurring background with bodies I make eyes
like blades, like any who come near me will die.
I know where circumstance ended and beginning began,
where the lives of others become the life of the world
but I forget how to open the doors,
how to tug on the ropes and bind what I will--
all I see is the INRI I wrote on my chest
as a child, with crayon,
when Christ was the big man
in the church.
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