The ambivalent affect of a cold cup of tea
On a snowy day, late March
When everything rings of life and death and urgency
Like our elliptical elections
With their Messiah complexes
Mundane
Like Thursday desks and tables
Green tea tainted with undertones of unwashed coffee
Lingering in the pores of mugs
The politics of shame
And all the things I wish I told you
(I wish I had told someone)
But cyclical realities are ultimate realities
And I've chosen mine already
Woven with interchanging self-destruction
And re-composition
Re-construction
Resurrection.
Pain.
Dull, dualistic
And dripping from my forehead
Did I mention Thursday?
Did I mention scars?
Shall we move to new and different places
And leave ourselves behind?
Burdens like sticky, heaving blackberries
Molten, melting, gooey, globbed together and leaking
Through the cracks in my straw basket
Heavy.
Dropping berries walking paths to places
Falling like blood-bombs
One by one on the white-brick
Walking silence into sunsets
And never looking back at the
Rotting plasma carnage
That marks the roads I travelled
What's left are leaves and stalks and thorns
A basket dyed dark red and sticky
Me, poised and paralyzed
Gasping, gagging, groping in my liberation
Homesick
For places that never existed
That never will
Crying stories that never happened
Fearing creatures never born
Blisters and bruises,
Beckoned to oceans
In the soft-tide I saw my future
In the undertow, my past
Riding the waves with crystal foam
And diaspora trash
All my chunky sins intermingled with salt and seaweed.
Questions burn me
Bind and blind me
Battered and bleeding
Left helpless on the floor
And they yell
Learn faster!
Learn better, learn well!
If pain leads to the deepest learning
Then I will know so very much
Muffled and maimed I'll sink in it
Drowning,
Docile in the knowing of things.
Facts and figures
Factors, functions, fractions
And formulas
Here are the things I know
Splintered, smiling, basking in their blinding light
They’re my diamonds, my precious disasters.
They are my welcomed death.
Eyes open and perceive
Taking stock of the surroundings
A blood-burned path of blackberries and scar tissue
My knobby-spine leaning against a tree trunk
Sea breeze, and my aura
Free-floating but defeated
Affected ambivalently by these words
By worlds
Spirits and bodies and
Torn flesh and minds
Still always cold questions
Still always early Thursdays
Walking
Working
Willing to draw more breath
Willing to keep walking
To keep working
To keep breathing
And bleeding.