Category: poetry

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3zfgyi_prince-1999-1982_music

1. “Don’t worry. I only want you to have some fun.”

It depends on the mother. But some begin to lose themselves in the fleshy, post-birth folds around their waists, in the feeling of excess blood, decreasing and slowly recalibrating its flow, in adjusting to the less taxing burden of one body again, instead of the heft of two.

It depends on the mother. But for some, childbirth is beset with instability, the worry attendant to a partner’s precarious presence. Now you see him, texting in the delivery room, now you don’t, at the 3 in the morning beside the changing table or hunched over the diaper pail.

He is at once flesh and apparition, at once as essential as the braided DNA inside the baby and as intangible as desert air. One too many complaints and he could slip away for good. One too many worries voiced and…

“Unless you know, you don’t know.”
RIP Robin Williams

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someday you will find this. in some box of old syllabi and grammar drills or with some notes for something i planned to write and revise and publish. you will find it and you’ll sit down right where you are. you will stop. stop everything and take some time.

and you will bunch your eyebrows together, or raise them. and your mouth will open. that bottom lip drop way. or else you’ll feel your lips tighten together to hold in the spit. because your mouth will get dry. and you will read this. and you will say something like ‘i never knew.’ either out loud or to yourself. or you will think ‘i figured that.’ and you will start to piece incidents and comments together to try to shape this into something like sense.

you’ll feel a little guilty and…

…and maybe should stay there.

**RAMBLE/RANT ALERT**

I have gone through those break-ups that deflate you, suffered losses in which you know you will never stop missing the person as long as you exist on the planet and they do not.  I have physically hurt to the point of tears, curses, and moans–all of which are a relatively uncommon phenomenon in my life.

I know the numbness that hovers about and then follows the pain; pain in which you feel your skin–I wrote this once when I could find no reasonable fix–is turned inside out.  Pain without a beginning or end.

Pain is a solitary act.  A lonely beast of a burden.  For no one can feel it but you.  Others can know it; can see it on you; have had their own and therefore can empathize with yours.  But it is your coat to wear, and if you’re lucky…

Dear You,

I told myself that it was because of my father that I fell in love with you.

I loved him in the unconditional way children typically love—without acknowledgement or understanding of flaws.  My father’s flaws became part of my definition of all men.

Once I stopped loving you all by default, I started loving you out of obligation.

According to history you were wounded and incapable of functioning at full capacity due to those wounds.  I wanted to love you to wholeness.  So I would not participate in any behavior that might further infect those wounds.  No “brothers ain’t shit” poems would come from my pen; I turned up my nose at that venom.

I could not bring myself to say anything to or about you that I thought might reduce or call into question your masculinity.  I figured that was being done to you already from all…