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The grass is always greener
on the other side.
Unfortunately,
green has never been my color,
and crossing that river
feels less worth it with every day.
I am searching for hills
of purple and gold
under a crystalline sky
of glowing jeweled hues.
I am searching for lands
of eternal diamond suns,
where smiles lack teeth
and eyes never lie.
I am searching for a place
where our turbid waters settle
and smoothly wind their way
to flow among the breathless stars.
There is something unimaginably cold
about waking up, swathed only in hard-edged
blue shadows, in the middle of a very long night.
It feels like the destruction of worlds,
the genocide of thought and reason,
and all that remains is to tremble and hope
for the swift arrival of bright-lit morning
(which, inevitably, comes late and grey.)
It is a shiveringly desolate sensation
that seeps into the lungs and stays
for eons and eternities, until you become
so weighed down with dark atmospheres
that it becomes impossible to get up
when morning finally decides to come.
I have stayed in bed for so long now,
I begin to believe I will never rise.
I remember, long years ago, when my mother
would drag me tired-eyed from a warm bed
and ungently stuff me into Sunday’s sundry frills.
We walked the four dull blocks to the church,
her modest heels tip-tapping across the concrete.
We knelt on the hard floor, arching our hands
in mimicry of the vaulted beam-crossed ceiling.
I would sneak glances, squirming'neath iconic eyes,
to see the stiff edges of Mother’s face softened
by the shifting colors from the stained glass,
soothed by the pale pink of Mary's brow
and the white of wing-wrapped hosts.
I was always a little afraid, at those times,
that the smiling crystalline Jesus above us
would smite me down in a rain of holy fire
because I loved her more, kneeling in church,
than at any other place in the entire world--
She no longer looked like herself.
I am burrowing past the bits of spine
and lungflesh to bore a hole
into the core of my limping heart,
where I will huddle around muted limbs
and say,
Hello, heart. Haven’t seen you
since you were tiny and hadn’t learned yet
to beat on your own.
…I guess not much has changed, has it?
1.
Like every four-year-old
Catholic-Lutheran-Methodist-Baptist-Protestant,
I drank my grapejuice
before the blessing;
Communion.
2.
I can remember
really being baptized.
There are silvered dreams
of the man placing me in,
holding me under,
passing me through,forgetting his words.
3.
My mother searched
for the right church
instead of religion.
It was a race with crosses
as batons, and I
dropped mine entirely.
4.
One pastor was
a bigot, one priest
uninspired,
the reverend an
embezzler. One church
an ugly paint job, two worn
down and old.
5.
Father was a pagan
who found god his own
unspiritual way. I took all
my best qualities from him;
all my worst, too.
And still dusk digs in
its fingernails.
I am so many beads
on taut strings, but no one
knows how to use
an abacus anymore.
No matter where you turn,
there is always a ceiling
when you're in a box.
Some people find that
comforting.
Things I keep in me:
1.
Look at me from all angles,
I am a person composed entirely
of a turned-away back.
What shape is a heart? It is
the roundness of shoulders,
the scapula's heavy curve.
2.
I do not want. Full stop. Things
happen to me, are done
to me. Passively, I am defined. Passively,
I am worn. Passively, I am soothed.
I don't remember what desire means. I do not have
the desire to remember.
3.
Long hours replace long hours. Nothing
gets done. Long hours find me thinking
of long hours, ad infinitum. I have come to know
such a circling world. I have come to know
the damning pressure.
4.
So it is that repetition suits me.
5.
I spend a great deal of time sleeping.
Just that. Motionless, breathing
only lightly. I clench my teeth
till my jaw stiffens.
6.
And I wake up, again and again. I am
always asleep. I am always
waking up in order
to sleep.
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