blood and poetry

I memorized a poem this weekend. It was at the moment when bloody knuckles no longer seemed beautiful or valiant, but, instead, a far weaker symbol. The line between glory and pain is thread-thin, but chasm-deep. A line like a scar.

You do not have to be good. If you tell me to count the stars, I will chase the number, not the promise. In the vastness, I will lose sight of the mercy.

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. Memorizing a poem has a vastly different character when it isn't for a grade. You read the words aloud a hundred times, over and over, tracing it into your skin and your soul. Sometimes, you need to hear the kindness in your own voice.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. You whisper it, sleepless in bed. It's a prayer. You get quieter as you go on. It's a lullaby. Meanwhile, the world goes on.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely You scream it alone in your car, make yourself promises instead of threats. the world offers itself to your imagination

Calls to you like the wild geese –– harsh and exciting You scribble it along the bottom of your class notes, heavy black ink lace.

over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Your scars will fade with time. The poem will dim. There will come a time when your glass soul will need a different prayer.

But today, with the marks of a struggle still fresh on my skin, I need to steal someone else's words. I need to steal them and keep them for my own; use them to tell myself the things I haven't learned to say.

2.22.13

metaphor, pt. 2

Sprouts.  Or a number of other things. How metaphorical are we trying to be, here?

metaphor

You gave me flowers –– a whole bouquet, pink and white –– and I kept them in a vase on my desk. They lasted a week before they died. I kept them there for another three days after that, until they started to smell. I threw them away.

"You're so beautiful," you said out of the grey dusk. For the first time, I said, "Don't lie to get what you want." It was the switch that turned out the lights. Your eyes shuttered from the inside, and mine were candle flames in the dark.

I wrote you a note and folded it into a crumpled heart. I sealed it with the kiss I wouldn't give you. And then I tore it to tatters and shreds, ripped it into a fistful of pieces. I let them go dance in the evening wind, set free, just like me.

I planted my own flowers a week ago. I pushed the seeds down gently into the dirt, safe in their little pot. I put them on my window sill. And they've started growing, pushing up little green sprouts towards the warmth and light. They'll bloom with time and patience.
I don't mind waiting. I've found a better metaphor.

soft

By Lauren Bost

sleep

Vladimir: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?... Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?...
Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.
At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.

~ From Looking for Godot, by Samuel Beckett

{I keep trying to explain to people what this book is about, and I can't make them understand why it is as great as it is. But I guess that happens sometimes.}