Tess:Confessional

Pacing in the hospital that day,

I will remember this:

In my mind, he is always

I pour myself like glass, like gold

There are sister who have sisters and sisters who have brothers and sisters who have siblings and sisters who have been left behind but never stopped being sisters and there are sisters who have given up the mantle and there are sisters-in-law and there are sisters in faith and every single one of these sisters experiences it differently.

I have loved making music with you for the past 15 years. Your guidance and your fellowship have been wonderful examples for me to follow, then I will continue to strive to be both the musician and person that you have helped shape me to be. I have always admired the joy you found in the world and your fortitude and persistence in facing the world, and the way that you balanced these two. The card you made and gave me and my husband for our wedding still sits on my mantlepiece, and the quote you wrote on it I carry with me: wherever you are, whatever you do, be in love. You are someone whose love is so open and given so freely, and it has been an honor to love and be loved by you.

My grandmother is dying

I press my hands to your chest, to your flesh,

lacuna

I thought to myself, I want

truth falling heavy from my lips, a stone worn smooth from hiding beneath my tongue, hard and simple and old as time. it's ugly, the truth, hard to swallow, hard to say, hard like stones i have carried for many miles, a weight i bore and bore and bore and bore-- honesty isn't easy. it's hard.

belief is an art, like any art it must be honed--

i spiral outwards from a fixed point, farther away and then nearer again, endlessly, and that fixed point is wherever the people who love me best live. it is where my dog is excited for me to come through the door, where my father claps my back and cooks my favorite meals, where my mother answers questions about me every week because there are so many people who care about me and ask after me even now. my fixed point is where ever there are hearts with my name and face inside them, and i move away and always come back, always return to this place where i am loved, a tether i have no wish to untie, because it whispers to me, endlessly, you are loved, you are loved, you are loved, you are l- and on the mornings when i wake up and my skin is the wrong size and my brain is the wrong shape, there is my tether, like am umbilical cord running back to where my mother sleeps, her heart whispering to mine, always, you are loved, you are loved, you are loved, you are l- my grandmother laughing into the phone, my aunts sending me birthday cards and recipes, my brother calling me at midnight because he knows i will always pick up and help him with anything, will always say it back,  you are loved, you are loved, you are loved, you are l- as far as i may roam i know i will always follow it  to where i belong, which is there, where a cacophony of voices does not hesitate to say, in a chorus, in a murmur, in a shout: you are loved. you are loved. you are so very, very loved.

be whatever you want to be, my love, everything your heart desires, 

sunset, the sky goes green-- paints the world with careless fingers, a splash and a smear, artless-- i wish on stars and watch the world glitter, sharp and hard. it does not care about me. i am only one more thing watching the sky. the sun disappears and it all goes dark. until tomorrow, whisper the stars. dark again, until tomorrow.

i take the letters and spin them into words i take the words and they are the warp  on which i weft my dreams and this is the way in which i weave poetry verse and song, i cut them tatters and sew them pockets and in this way i dress myself to be more than i was before so that my reality might be made more beautiful by my fiction. the emperor has no clothes because he dreamed them more than he crafted them and i will repeat no man's mistakes. i will wear black like the night sky studded with stars and i will wear white like the waves that never stop kissing the shore and i will never be cold again. i have my dreams and my poems and my pin-pricked fingers and a loom and a plan and i am weaving myself a dress and a map and a magic carpet because why not. why not. i take the letters, scatter them across the  skirt of my dress, picked out in shining gold word-thread:    w h y    n o t

i want to un-learn english because i think i have been indoctrinated into believing words can only mean one thing or perhaps two, but in a static way, a rigid and unyielding way, that create walls where i want only air, only open. i want to rebuild my vocabulary from the ground up, because my instinct is to use the phrase  "from the ground up" and maybe if i could be washed clean i could use new words, like i want a fresh foundation, a base that lets me build in different directions, sideways, perpendicular, not just up but out, wider than the spaces between my fingers and the horizon. i want my words unblemished, want "witch" to be something other than a woman in black, a pointed hat, a broomstick. i want witch to mean me and be unafraid to be the witch because i want to redefine witch to be whatever i am now. i want to write poetry with words i have never said aloud, want them to do something other than trip off my tongue. i want words to fly, to fling, to leap, to soar.  i want to un-learn english because i want to be like a child understanding for the first time that when i say i am an island that i am not the first person to say they are an island, i want to says new phrases and rediscover how to stitch together syllables into poems. i want to start over. i want to be unsullied by my own assumptions, to be  unconstrained by the lessons i absorbed unknowingly. let me speak unpolluted. i want to reinvent.