the urgency of risk.

Dear Rebel,

You urge me to write. Urge is defined by a seizure of  light in one’s body. It elevates one’s fingers to touch something or create something. Urge is a language of intimacy and conversion. Urges include digestion of vitamins and elements from soil. An urge can be placed beneath the curl of another’s hand. An urge can be an invitation of words. 

Rebel, I am eight days into this new age and something has dramatically shifted. No, it is nowhere near self-actualization, but closer to acceptance. I sleep outside of my nude now. I sleep alone most nights. I sleep with chest flattened by cotton press of yellow-yolk contraption. I sleep beneath the invisible constellations on my ceiling. I sleep wearing ten thousand genders like colorful kites tangled up in my torso. I sleep motionless; I sleep like a Pina Bausch dancer choreographed into whispered shoulder rolls.

There is an urgency for love. To find the map that completes my location. To pave the roads of my soul with the concrete from another. To close every drawer and cover each exposed shelf to make room for another. An urgency to move on. Last month, you made love to a river and I found (continue to search for) the complacency of my blood. We address our parts as revised elocutions. Urge others to do the same to make room for variants. There is no one way to this beyond breath.

an urgency of.

What time is it.
Soon we are given back our lost hour and this makes me think that someone will arrive at my door and ring the bottom bell. They will have gold and red weaved fabric purchased for three dollars at summer stoop sale in Brooklyn. Inside, will be my 20’s.

Not currency……………………….years. 

Sometimes I feel an urgency to locate someone to root with. To impregnate me with poems that I birth out in painful contractions. Each time my water breaks, I will instruct my mate to leave the liquid alone.

I’ll need to pick out the sounds and search out the rhythm. 

We will have tiny jars of spices we’ve dried out from markets. Footprints of travelers in each room of our home. The sky will wear us as though it were a giant envelope and we are letters.

I will sift through my 20’s, then stuff them into my pocket like loose change. No need to peruse much longer than a few minutes. To remember. To recall. Split second reminders of life. That one. That time. That dislocation of breath. That excruciation of movement. The pills. Dark. Water in handfuls or handshakes. Rain. Locked out of car. Break-in. Burnt sienna. Across country. Moonsongs. Malbec. Macaroni and cheese. The musk of that one. Bookshops and the fire that tried to remove 27. And then. And then.

*

On Sundays, I peel away the folds of newspaper and bring out the section of Styles. In it, Modern Love. Here is where I find my salt and inclination toward the romantic. Here is where I also view the ones who are looking to stitch themselves to another. A lover once asked me why I look at the photos of strangers announcing their marriage. I don’t recall my answer, but what I was thinking:

This loneliness is unsympathetic and I am searching for photographs to remind me of what [could] bloom beside me. And I search for something to recognize. And [maybe] I search for me.

*

There is so much music in here. And someone inside this note whistles a tune that wraps itself around my expanding waste. I translate this high-pitched air as an urgency to remain. Or persistence to see what waits.

*

Our someone is still out there. Or maybe….they’ve just arrived. What matters is that with each sleep we gain insight into the dreams of our lymph nodes. I’ve got one beside right breast and it reminds me to wait. And it reminds me to [always] touch the parts of me that fear. And one day, that mate will arrive again. Like a swelling. Like a reminder that even in urgency, there is a need for patience. 

         `

countdown toward finalities

file fingertips into sterling silver points

serrated like bread knife, hungry to cut away at words in need of further diagnosis.

work toward revision
enter the poem with questions

photo by Francesca Woodman

don’t make the reader feel dizzy

searched urgency
declare

supper with sadness
press into carbon and oxygen and choke.

[NOTE: Imagine a word with limbs, long enough to be pulled or bent. Imagine a word with pre-determined illness or allergy. The metalanguage conceived in the spread out stanzas or found in the tightly-packed prose poems or couplets can be viewed as odors. A smell takes shape when rubbed against or mixed with the container in which it starts from: food, human, bottle.

think of poems as suicide letters
desperate medications

To exit: how it feels to be entrenched in these poems, write the pain of it, the journey, trauma, translated hurt-songs, scar chants.

{how to} walk off a stage or poem and be normal.

strap magnifying lenses against pupils/ detect hidden fibers defining each line

Get it before she dies and no clarity can be given.

Look away. Diagnose. Crush pills onto tongue repeat daily. Quiet the crazy creative emotive.

How sad to be inside a body that can never be clean enough

Practice the angular motion of disintegration

uniqueness derives from in-
ability to
see all

Notice a tree.
Write about it.

Its bark is infected like homeless mother’s limbs with skin weathered from winter and bed bugs.

Go outside.
Write about it.

I stare at an open field and search for the bodies held captive by tall wheat or poison ivy.

Visit amusement park for children called zoo.
Write about it.

I see an elephant and describe its skin as heated crust. I count each fracture disrupting the smooth. I call it monster call it mammal of wild grey call it me in the evening when enough bodies have rubbed against me to feel bloated and heavy, a swell of weight.

What happens to the spread of body, torn apart to make a statement?

Bones, carefully grown tissue formed by osteoblasts, or specialized cells, contain salt and strength, though not enough to fight away the sadness or sense of not enough. The similarities in these excerpts arise in desperation. We must destroy self or space around us in order to make a statement.

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. . ………What cannot feel can still feel.