Rather than transcribing lived experience directly, I choose to make strange the almost-familiar. Why? Because we also need the ineffable.
Why is it wrong to write from the head?
If my skull is sanctum—my skill to withdraw
when the world is too much without, is my flaw
that I’ve shied or my chosen part?
I have been swinging between poles of gratitude and forlorn-ness. What a strange word, old-fashioned, and yet forlorn with its rhyme with torn and lostness is the word that comes to mind. Little Bo Peep was forlorn. America is her.
I stay between get and grief. Radiance
is a dream I had of light. Even now
the days are shaving themselves down, thinner
and thinner, a prepubescent autumn…
I am hoping I can deliver this monster without killing the mother.
before today was yesterday and yesterday was good. tomorrow could be excellent. today there is cabbage soup and a box of holiday to toss around the house like eyelash thread instead of tinsel.
A dunking worthy of a new baptismal sect.
“Every time you name yourself, you name someone else.”
― Bertolt Brecht
