I have given up on
getting up because
giving up hurts less,
yes?
New lines, old news
as ugly as anything else I saw coming
because I knew like I knew
but seeing it in the mirror is,
well,
that's new news.
I reject it as part of F2,
a mental plane I must have wandered to infinity
back before they scared me into pinning myself to cork,
abandoned on a broken pane of the looking glass
babbling and reeling among mirages of
empty fields and cotton gins.
I used to collect shards of broken bottles,
mined them up from the red dirt at the steps of
the old abandoned church. I called them
my diamonds, and I had a whole jar full,
and I was ******* somebody, then,
with my jar of diamonds
and my white hair
and even then I think I knew
like I knew
there is no new.
I have memories of a dead woman seated upright
in a rocking chair in that church,
bathed in bare sunlight from holes in the shingles,
the day my grandmother and I dared sneak past
peeling paint and rusted hinges,
the day we found the typewriter.
The dead woman was covered in dust,
navy-blue rags hanging from bones,
crisp white hair draped across
used-to-be shoulders.
I knew she had been there all along;
I know she is there still. She told them all,
'They will come,' like she knew that she knew,
and we knew that she knew, so we did.