S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
I see your picture in the yearbook, but it's blurry; somebody spilled a soda on the page, soaking through the paper and leaving a muddy mess that almost completely masks the braces and bleeds away the ink of your quote.
Did I do that?
Your signature is still on the front page - blue, in permanent market, as if you knew that I wouldn't read it well in a blue background, except for the single case where you misspelled love.
Despite these twenty or so years, enough to find a family and live in a house with two stories and a white picket fence, I can see everyone else: Pablo skateboarding on a railing, Jeremiah handing me tobacco, Clarice trying to push my head in the water when I told her I didn't want to swim.
Yet my mind screams and throws up walls when I reach even for your name, trying to snuff out the spark of mystery it can never quite kill, no matter how many bricks it makes me eat.
I'm afraid that's for the best.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
the oil slips down the stairs - drip, drip, plop, drip - and puddles on the hardwood floor in little black droplets, mixing with the white drywall spilled out like Jackson Pollock painting on that long hallway to the front door where the kids said bye to daddy in the morning and tackled him in the evening.
but you wouldn't know that, would you? you always slept in the closet under the stairs, pretending you were a wizard and thinking the world was one tear-stained corner to the other, where you could live out any fantasy if it meant dragons could carry you into their caves and bury you in their gold, because they thought you deserved more than a whip or a belt.
and when the kids went off to college and daddy focused his bloodshot third eye on you, it was only a matter of time before you stepped into the cockpit, strapped on goggles over your eyes, and pressed the red button on that joystick.
or, to say it better, you climbed onto your dragon, grabbed onto it with your little scarred arms, and told it to breathe fire.
if you still had eyes to see through, or a body that didn't blow away in the wind, I think you'd be proud to know you are the greatest wizard of all time - you killed the villain and escaped life, the biggest closet of them all.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
On the equinox you fled to the ancient oak tree outside the math classroom, climbed through the white branches, and nestled in the pale green leaves. They parted to let you through like you were a persistent gust of wind and so you thought you'd found your birthright.
You made the tree your throne and crowned your head in sticks; you swore to join the robins and the kites and the hawks - you would learn to fly like spring.
Mother Nature sent her armies of pollen from the boughs of your palace and those of the squirrel lords nearby to sting your eyes, stick in your hair, and drive you back to your calculus.
Yet you persisted, and in the summer made the wooden bones of your wings; in the fall, you snatched falling leaves and glued them onto the knife-carved wood so that you would carry your throne, in all its red and yellow glory, upon your back.
And, come the solstice, you took off from your tree, it and you now as white as the snow that fell on you both.
Perhaps, as you hurtled to the gravel, you realized it was winter.
At least the leaves freed from your glue hurtled into the sky farther than your broken bones.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
mama always told me the new moon was the scariest phase because the lights of stars couldn't catch the backs of hungry wolves or stop the man in the alleyway with a gun in his pocket from shooting the first unlucky man in the back (then again, she always told me much didn't stop him anyways, because no man's so desperate as a killing man.)
i guess she's right; i can feel the ice on my numb fingers and i'm not even at the window, where the snowflakes bury the pane while they fight for my attention, crawling along the glass like ants as they scribble out elaborate spirals and ask me why in the hell I'm still waiting, wrapped up in a green blanket and shivering on the floor.
the moon can't save me now.
but beyond them there's a lady singing. and i don't know what about, i can't hear her that well, but her voice is honey to my lips; it patches up the cracks and soaks up the blood. she bandages my blue legs, peels the ice from my fingertips, coaxes the callouses away, sucks the frost out of my lungs, shakes the water buried in my hair, and soothes my shivering bones to a sleep that i know i'll wake up from in the morning (i didn't think that i would an hour ago)
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
autumn death's pale shadow carving the trees and earth charming with a mask of red leaves fall
Poem 6
April 5th, 2018
hollow (pantoum)
Spoiler! :
the dog flops down on its side; the couch watches the dawn as I pull myself out of bed to hide inside the kitchen, stifling a yawn.
the couch watches the dawn, filled too full with stuffing to feel me inside the kitchen, stifling a yawn; it wonders what it's supposed to be.
filled too full with stuffing to feel me the sated dog ignores my reaching hand; it wonders what it's supposed to be, now that there's nothing to command.
the sated dog ignores my reaching hand; as I pull myself out of bed to hide now that there's nothing to command; the dog flops down on its side.
Poem 7
April 5th, 2018
the adventures of doggo (pantoum 2)
Spoiler! :
the dog then scampered over the fence, pawing its way through the neighbor's grass, because that night someone left the door open as they'd had too much to drink.
pawing its way through the neighbor's grass, the tiny dog scanned the pool for men stumbling (as they'd had too much to drink and alcohol keeps good company with water).
the tiny dog scanned the pool for men stumbling where only an orange cat reclines now; and alcohol keeps good company with water, so they lounged the night on a chair.
where only an orange cat reclines now. because that night someone left the door open, so they lounged the night on a chair; the dog then scampered over the fence.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Oh, it took me a moment to figure out how the pantoum is put together, but I like it! It's a nice challenge, and the building of the world/story is pretty fun.
"I've got dreams like you--no really!--just much less, touchy-feeley. They mainly happen somewhere warm and sunny on an island that I own, tanned and rested and alone surrounded by enormous piles of money." -Flynn Rider, Tangled
the man with the tiger head places a hand on my shoulder and tells me that, if there's any inch of myself that i haven't explored, i should get my fedora and my bullwhip, because he's tired of the way i swallow my peyote in the dusk and leave him to clean up the vomit in the dawn.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
I've never been good at chess. My opponent knows in their mind ten-thousand ways to wipe my pieces from the board, exterminate my side, whether it's white or black; I only have a one-track mind that jumps off the rails to think about how pointless existence is, plan out the following day's chores, or seethe as bishops corner my king.
If I'm on a staircase, they're on the balcony above, rifles raised and ready to reenact the massacre of the Mameluks while I stumble for cover, vision narrowed to a single step and nothing beyond.
And, in spite of it all, I'd like to run all the way to the top and cry out my glory (I just don't want to move my feet).
Chess is a game of memorization; it's for the patient, not the intelligent, and I was never patient.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Where she stepped, the flowers bent away, the men and women crumpled, the sun grew spots; when she rode on her horse, wielding her lance, there was no escaping the fire that radiated through her arms to the tip of her lance, through her legs to the hooves of her horse - she was a nuclear bomb disguised as a woman, poisoning the streams and spreading boils on even the faces of those lucky enough to escape her endless wrath.
The leaders assembled but briefly to stop her. After she cleaved the first tank, and they saw the pallid face of death adorn her head with a crown of bones and pile skulls onto her throne, they fled into their bunkers, grabbed their rosaries, and prayed God would be merciful enough to hide them.
She either had His endless fire, or perhaps she could see fear like a shark sees a trail of blood; one by one, she committed regicide, stopping only to maim the commoners who had massed around the shelters for a spare drop of water and a piece of bread not turned to salt and ash by her weapons.
I was hiding in the corner of a closet when she found me (I think she would've ignored me if my convulsing limbs and frantic heart hadn't bled the truth into her eyes) - she grabbed me by the chin, pulled me close, and said, "There is nothing I've done to the world that I haven't already done to myself; how else can I see it fit to destroy the former?"
And I could see the lashes on her arms, the slashes on her face, and the hoofprint that stamped out her eyebrows while coloring her eyes in blood (though none of these marks were as gaping as the scar she gave to my neck).
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Pause when the green skies start to break, sparking from cloud to cloud like the messages you frantically send to a friend as you cower between the seat and the steering wheel of your pickup truck, and you'll find, just before the rain breaks the air and splatters the ground, here the shadows of the dead linger.
Peek out of your window to see the bodies crawling up the lightning rods, shirts charred, sunglasses broken, bony jaws exposed. And if they look back (it's hard to tell, but you can usually see a gleam from behind their eye sockets), they're judging. Are you worth joining their ranks, they fortunate enough to climb up to the world of the living and wait to come alive in the split second they reenact their violent deaths?
But they're fickle, because they were the daredevils, and they can tell when you'd rather stay in your coffin when the sky starts to boil again; all you need to do is crouch beneath the steering wheel, count to ten, and listen for the cracking of the storm's whip, casting each spirit, one by one, to where they came (Heaven or Hell, nobody quite knows).
Look up after the final bolt to see the rainbow spilling into your eyes, you who decided a long life drawn out slowly was better than the opposite.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
It took too long to figure out that the playground was a farce; rust lurked in the limbs of the seesaw, holes breached the center of the slide. I cut myself when I peeled back the fake rubber and found spikes peeking at me. All around this silent deathtrap bushes had grown to cover the concrete walls, lash them in vines, and block all but the smallest exits in thorns.
The light above my head flickered - it had pulled me here, it had carried me through the abandoned streets of Chernobyl, and, when it had been convinced that I would follow it anywhere (and I, blinded, couldn't see where else to turn, no matter how many windowpanes I broke and how many cuts crisscrossed my body), had ensnared me like a venus fly trap.
I grabbed the light between my hands and smashed it, but to no effect. The shadows slowly enveloped me, pulling me into a ground that glowed green, emanating from a concrete prison stuffed with jars of lifeless animals, save for the one empty one whose lid slowly opened for me.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
we made our boxes out of straw and the wooden boards lying around in a warehouse long ago abandoned (there'd been an accident; a man had fallen into a batch of boards with their rusting nails pointed up, though i didn't find this out until later), peopled them with snowglobes and candy bars, and called them our palaces.
it was just something for two scared kids to hide in while their parents paced the room and shouted curses, pointed at the lipstick on each other's cheek, and demanded how he or she could abandon their two precious angels for the sake of a devil (never mind how the winner walked out the door following a pointed tail).
when the fire came, we wrapped ourselves in blankets, stuffed ourselves into our boxes, the snowglobes broken and the candy bars eaten, and waited for a pair of arms to carry us from the ashes. i thought we'd stay forever, because we had no choice; our parents' bodies were bones clutching each other's neck like predatory-prey dinosaur fossils, while their spirits lurked in Acapulco or some place like that.
but different people found us and pulled us close to their chests.
i'm starting to crawl out of my box again, now that i have myself a diploma and i'm a safety inspector in warehouses making sure nobody will ever be as unlucky as we were when we needed to hide somewhere and accidentally made our lairs out of a curse - i can only hope you've left yours too.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
he didn't wanna be a race car driver; he didn't wanna drive around in circles all day; he didn't wanna slam his hands on his helmet and let the tears pool on his chin, to drip drip drip onto his lap.
he didn't wanna get so close to the edge, but he didn't wanna get in the way of the others; he didn't wanna slam into that barrier and pitch the car over the spectator's heads, headlights blaring until they smashed into the ground and the hood with the horse decal whinnying until it burst into flames and spilled oil onto gift shops and food stalls.
he didn't wanna die, mama; nobody does, but we gotta get in the car to make it to the finish line.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo non tornò vivo alcun, s'i' odo il vero, senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
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