i am proud of you

National Poetry Month Sales

Platypus Press — Up to 25% off of selected titles for National Poetry Month. (ref)

I write poems to teach myself what I know. They’re instructions for how to come back to my body when I’ve had to escape it. They’re stories of what is possible, what health looks like, what can be corrected about how and when I choose to be vulnerable. I want to make little contained surprises. To surprise myself with what I’ve found out.

Today there is a cold the colour of a bruise, and every smile has a shadow bigger than itself— I am never only happy anymore, I haven’t felt anything without some grey and bitter after-taste for months. My heart flies north with the birds for the winter, only it never seems to find its way quite back. Some part is left in that other place, with the bluer skies— That place is a dream, I’ve never seen it, only heard stories from the swallows who see my wanting and recognise it. My body is hollow, my mind a greenhouse abandoned years ago because nothing ever grows there—I have no honesty, every word I write is a lie. I’m so sorry.

It’s important to see every dead end as a detour because this world will say no to you a thousand times before it says yes. You will beg for something and it will say no no no you have to be patient and wait you are not ready it is not the right time for you. Or you will crawl on your hands and knees just to be a little closer to what you want & it will take one look at you and turn its back. All you can do is breathe deeper and run through open fields and put everyone on the line for the wildness of your want. Eventually you will stop feeling like a faulty bathroom light that flickers a few times before it turns on. You will hear the sweet syllable of “yes” like an arrow taking root in the body. And nothing will hurt. And everything will feel like ripples in your bones extending outwards in a kind of forever.

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us. It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.