is it odd
to desire the displeasure of our youth?
I wish I could see you again,
14, expression-full,
in love with creation;
What commandments of Genius!
I have wondered if your days are nice,
if they rest in the calm lake of contentment.
I imagine you are as stable
, still ,
as the heroine of a disfiguring childhood.
I have visitors too often –
idolized a life i never wanted
but had to have; how many loves
went the same way as:
i’ve got to change something.
And now, I am here, trying to change something,
and some things are changing:
mosul and tikrit and fallujah
falling down like the dread
dominoes of East Asia
and Latin America.
I’m giddy with sadness.
How I miss being saved,
being rescued and revived,
how I miss the muse;
Spring in summer fall and winter.
and forgiveness is an ever moving target.
as festering if forgotten as if not forgiven
these crimes against trust –
I have not been able to forgive
every day … as I intended,
the broken bonds of childhood.
i fear I must visit my mother.
i wonder if only personal contact
might one day dissolve
what Time and Distance have not.
I have run for so long.
sometimes I feel just tired.
sometimes I wonder if I’m not sad
but just tired of running.
I can’t even remember
how I got here today.
Each day I wake up
speaking broken german
wondering where I am
and what it is I’m supposed to do.
I spent a year attempting to prove
, through the raw logic of me ,
that I had not, in fact, died
– some point where memory stopped
and an oxygen deprivation fueled hallucination started.
It might have been when I was 6
and I’d gotten a bike for christmas
where upon riding it
I must have crashed
because I woke up to my cousin
with a tom selec mustache
putting my bicycle into the back of his truck.
It might also have been around the same time,
my mother’s car slid on ice
careened into the barrier between the east and west
interstate 10.
the police took us to the police station
where my sister’s boyfriend picked us up.
I lost all my christmas presents
when the car was towed to the junk yard.
i am not the paradigm changing
charismatic religious figure
i imagined my self
to become.