Oh to be a gremlin child again. Covered in grass stains and grazes, hair unbrushed with daisies in the knots, no concept of my own physicality, half way up a tree and eating an apple around my missing tooth. To be unabashedly ugly, to be unashamedly hungry, to be healthy and hearty and lean and covered in bruises and full of love and sun warmed strawberries. To feel time stretch forever, only flying when I fall into books. To love summer once more, and her insects and sweat.
you can’t waste your life btw it’s just not something that’s possible to do. your mere existence is already a precious and valuable use of your time. the time you spent becoming who you are now was inherently worthwhile
The pen tip jabbed in my back, I
feel the mark of progress.
I will not dance alone in the
municipal graveyard at midnight, blasting sad songs on my phone, for nothing.
I promise you, I was here. I felt
things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from airāand I
went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.
The way Lil Peep says Iāll be
back in the morninā āwhen you know how it ends.
The way I kept dancing when the song
was over, because it freed me.
The way the streetlight blinks once,
before waking up for its night shift, like we do.
The way we look up and whisper sorry
to each other, the boy and I, when thereās teeth.
When thereās always teeth, on
purpose.
When I threw myself into gravity and
made it work. Ha.
I made it out by the skin of my
griefs.
I used to be a fag now Iām lit. Ha.
Once, at a party set on a rooftop in
Brooklyn for an āartsy vibe,ā a young woman said, sipping her drink, Youāre
so lucky. Youāre gay plus you get to write about war and stuff. Iām just
white. [Pause.] I got nothing.
[Laughter, glasses clinking.]
Unlike feelings, blood gets realer
when you feel it.
Because everyone knows yellow pain,
pressed into American letters, turns to gold.
Our sorrow Midas-touched. Napalm
with a rainbow afterglow.
Iām trying to be real but it costs
too much.
They say the Earth spins and thatās
why we fall but everyone knows itās the music.
Itās been proven difficult to dance
to machine gun fire.
Still, my people made a rhythm this
way. A way.
Ā My people, so still, in the
photographs, as corpses.
My failure was that I got used to
it. I looked at us, mangled under the TIME photographerās shadow, and stopped
thinking, Get up, get up.
I saw the graveyard steam in the
pinkish dawn and knew the dead were still breathing. Ha.
If they come for me, [begin strike-through] take me home
[end strike-through] take me out.
What if it wasnāt the crash that
made me, but the debris?
What if it was meant this way: the
mother, the lexicon, the line of cocaine on the mohawked boyās collarbone in an
East Village sublet in 2007?
Whatās wrong with me, Doc? There
must be a pill for this.
Too lateāthese words already
shrapnel in your brain.
Impossible in high school, I am now
the ultimate linebacker. I plow through the page, making a path for you,
dear reader, going nowhere.
Because the fairy tales were right.
Youāll need magic to make it out ofā here.
Long ago, in another life, on an
Amtrak through Iowa, I saw, for a few blurred seconds, a man standing in the
middle of a field of winter grass, hands at his side, back to me, all of him stopped
there save for his hair scraped by low wind.
When the countryside resumed its
wash of gray wheat, tractors, gutted barns, black sycamores in herdless
pastures, I started to cry. I put my copy of Didionās The White Album
down and folded a new dark around my head.
The woman beside me stroked my back
saying, in a Midwestern accent that wobbled with tenderness, Go on
son. You get that out now. No shame in breakinā open. You get that out and
Iāll fetch us some tea. Which made
me lose it even more.
She came back with Lipton in paper
cups, her eyes nowhere blue and there. She was silent all the way to
Missoula, where she got off and said, patting my knee, God is good. God is good.
I can say it was beautiful now, my
harm, because it belonged to no one else.
To be a dam for damage. My
shittiness will not enter the world, I thought, and quickly became my own hero.
Do you know how many hours Iāve
wasted watching straight boys play video games?
Enough.
Ā Time is a mother.
Ā Lest we forget, a morgue is also a
community center.
Ā In my language, the one I recall now
only by closing my eyes, the word for love is YĆŖu.
And the word for weakness is Yįŗæu.
How you say what you mean changes
what you say.
Ā Some call this prayer. I call it
watch your mouth.
Ā When they zipped my mother in a body
bag I whispered: Rose, get out of there. Your plants are dying.
Enough is enough.
Body, doorway that you are, be more
than what Iāll pass through.
Stillness. Thatās what it was.
The man in the field in the red
sweater, he was so still he became, somehow, more true, like a knife wound in a
landscape painting.
Like him, I caved.
I caved and decided it will be joy
from now on. Then everything opened. The lights blazed around me into a white
weather
and I was lifted, wet and bloody,
out of my mother, screaming
