The nightmare is that there are two worlds

“Everybody has experienced the defeat of their lives. Nobody has a life that worked out the way they wanted it to work out. We all begin as the hero of our own dramas, in centre stage, and inevitably life moves us out of centre stage, defeats the hero, overturns the plot and the strategy and we’re left on the sidelines, wondering why we no longer have a part, or want a part, in the whole damn thing. So everybody’s experienced this. When it’s presented to us sweetly, the feeling goes from heart to heart and we feel less isolated and we feel part of the great human chain, which is really involved with the recognition of defeat.”

Nail me to you. I will ride you like a nightmare.

“Art is the burning bush that both shelters and makes visible our profounder longings. Through it we see ourselves in metaphor. Art is metaphor, from the Greek, meta (above) and pherein (to carry) it is that which is carried above the literalness of life. Art is metaphor. Metaphor is transformation.”

My mother-in-law told me one Christmas, after another episode of psychosis, that I reminded her of Peter Pan. “You’ve just lost your shadow,” she said, “and you’ll find a way to stitch it back to your foot.” I marveled at the congruency between that familiar story and the belief that the soul leaves through one’s feet. I wondered if I’d literally lost my soul as I photographed the silhouetted marks that my body left on the world. The body was there, but something else was missing.

Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?

I write about you all the time, I said aloud. Every time I say “I,” it refers to you.

You’re [a] monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you.

Part of me doesn’t want the reader to come up for air; that is what being black is like, what being a mother is like, what being a woman is like: there is no break. The poems began to reflect that in structure. When I read them out loud, I want, on some level, to bombard the reader with the speaker’s experience. There are some things that must be unrelenting in order to be understood.