Be a river with me;
Be the storm;
the bend in the path;
the front porch; the heat in the south;
be a boot full of banjo strings;
a fist full of written songs;
a mouth full of chocolate dust.
When they come to take us,
stab them between the eyes.
Do not take your hand from around mine.
Make
a fist with the other, and punch spines like guilds, spit, sweat, kiss
them like a grandmother. How will open mouthed terror love filled?
And when they come to cut out hair and ask to hear penance come from inside us,
say with me loud and trembling,
but loud and clear that:
"i
have already emptied myself. I kissed regret goodbye, took the hands of
another backwards angel, and rode backwards into the rain"
Last night, instead of sleeping, I re-read Oscar Wilde's de Profundis. For those who don't know, its the letter a heartbroken Wilde wrote to the lover who denied him, betrayed him and got him thrown in prison for two years for gross indecency. Not the most upbeat book choice, but misery loves company. It's crazy how much it can hurt, even when you know it's the right move. All I know is that love is one messy thing. Ask poor Oscar. Love landed him in jail...
Anyway...After a nearly sleepless night, waking up to a tear-stained pillowcase and finally putting myself together enough to say "Amen," I have decided to focus on the task of getting reacquainted with myself... Who was I before? A fiery, brazen woman, I think. Or maybe a hopeless fawn looking for exactly what I eventually found? Was I ever an entity of my own? Or have I always been so weak, a simple echo of someone else's song?
The sun is starting to come out now and I'm starting to feel a little bit lighter. The sky has not fallen yet. I am still alive. Friday's hailstorm didn't blow away this tired body of dust and bones...and I still have poetry!
Rachel McKibbens. le sigh. Her writing is perfection and this two year old poem spoke all the way to my soul this morning. It feels a fitting welcome back to the world of the creative, the emotive, the single...
Happy National Poetry Month!
Last Love
BY Rachel McKibbens
To my daughters, I need to say:
Go with the one who loves you biblically.
The one whose love lifts its head to you despite its broken neck.
Whose body bursts sixteen arms electric to carry you, gentle, the way
old grief is gentle.
Love the love that is messy in all its too much,
The body that rides best your body, whose mouth saddles the naked salt
of your far gone hips, whose tongue translates the rock language of
all your elegant scars.
Go with the one who cries out for his tragic sisters as he chops the winter’s wood, the one whose skin
Triggers your heart into a heaven of blood waltzes.
Go with the one who resembles most your father. Not the father you can
point out on a map,
But the father who is here. Is your home. Is the key to your front door. Know that your first love will only
Be the first. And the second and third and even fourth will unprepare you for the most important:
The Blessed. The Beast. The Last love. Which is, of course, the most terrifying kind.
Because which of us wants to go with what can murder us? Can reveal to us our true heart’s end and its thirty years spent in poverty?
Can
mimic the sound of our bird-throated mothers, replicate the warmth of
our brothers' tempers? Can pull us out of ourselves until
We are no longer sisters or daughters or sword swallowers but, instead,
Women. Who give. And lead. And take and want
And want
And want
And want
Because there is no shame in wanting.
And
you will hear yourself say: Last Love, I wish to die so I may come back
to you new and never tasted by any other mouth but yours.
And I want to be the hands that pull your children out of you and tuck them deep inside myself until they are
Ready to be the children of such a royal and staggering love. Or you
will say:
Last Love,
I am old, and have spent myself on the courageless, have wasted too many clocks on less-deserving men, so I hurl myself at the throne of you
And lie humbly at your feet.
Last Love, let me never roll out of this heavy dream of you.
Let the day I was born mean my life will end where you end.
Let the man behind the church do what he did if it brings me to you.
Let the girls in the locker room corner me again if it brings me to you.
Let the wrong beds find me if it brings me to you.
Let this wild depression throw me beneath its hooves if it brings me to you.
Let me pronounce my hoarded joy if it brings me to you.
Let my father break me again and again if it brings me to you.
Last love, I let other men borrow your children. Forgive me.
Last love, I vowed my heart to another. Forgive me.
Last Love, I have let my blind and anxious hands wander into a room and come out empty. Forgive me.
Last Love, I have cursed the women you loved before me. Forgive me.
Last Love, I envy your mother’s body where you resided first. Forgive me.
Last Love, I am all that is left. Forgive me.
Last Love, I did not see you coming. Forgive me.
Last Love, every day without you was a life I crawled out of. Amen.
Last Love, you are my Last Love. Amen.
Last Love, I am all that is left. Amen.
My love is halfway across the world this Valentine's Day, so I can especially relate to this super sweet poem. It speaks of long distance love in a world where people are only allotted 167 words, each day. Tweet Tweet :)
It's in one of my fav poetry compilations - The Last American Valentine from Write Bloody Books. Perfect VDay present for yourself!!
The Quite World BY Jeffrey McDaniel
In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover and proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words so I slowly whisper I love you, thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.
When psalms surprise me with their music And antiphons turn to rum The Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul.
And from the center of my cellar, Love, louder than thunder Opens a heaven of naked air.
New eyes awaken. I send Love's name into the world with wings And songs grow up around me like a jungle. Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes Your Spirit played in Eden. Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise Shine on the face of the abyss And I am drunk with the great wilderness Of the sixth day in Genesis.
But sound is never half so fair As when that music turns to air And the universe dies of excellence.
Sun, moon and stars Fall from their heavenly towers. Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.
Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf, All fear another wind, another thunder: Then one more voice Snuffs all their flares in one gust.
And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars And no more buds and no more Eden And no more animals and no more sea:
While God sings by himself in acres of night And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.
