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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4427 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Relinquished Mia I know you can’t always understand how people just give up any more than I can explain how the sky presses down on me until I can’t breathe, can’t for the life of me rise out of that vault no door and no one to save me, save for this loneliness which doesn’t argue, which won’t scream, which doesn’t hit and can’t hurt me in all the places that already hurt. Sometimes I don’t know what I want--to live or not to live when I can’t tell the difference anymore. Awake all hours of the night staring up at the same low-slung ceiling caving in; meanwhile galaxies swirling in a batter of milky dough too far away for me to comprehend where the infinite begins and or ends then, everything I’m supposed to feel feels so insignificant. Sometimes daylight holds a knife to my throat, tells me to move move anyway and I do then I walk up and down the Avenue my steps trotting ahead searching for a friend, the left boot the missing glove, my face among faces swimming upstream downtown where thrift shops spread their wild seeds at night sprouting weeds of discard and discontent forsaking sentiment The hotel across Main Street no more than a half-way house where thieves, kings and whores of the usual order come and go muttering monodies no one understands or makes time to hear the Christs among them reciting Dante’s Inferno up and down Sinners Hall in and out of alleys to and fro across the tracks what do any of us know of saints and sinners? I have watched the mangy doggerel following its own smell fortunes found, fortunes lost heirs to millions who cry and leap chasing the windswept dollar down the gutter, the deutschmark wheeled off in barrows along narrow escapes of boroughs falling down in disrepair. I, who have seen empires rise and crumble the shattered windows twisted up in wrought iron the bolts, the fire, the blood and graying grief turned to rust Rabid and savage begging for lead mercy I have gone mad up and down that single highway San Francisco to San Diego all the cities’ fences lawns tombstones laid out in precise rows El Rio, have I been here before? I have been lost and turned around made my way back again what should have been half an hour cost me midnight past expired on a train bound for nowhere Out of city limits, out of cigarettes, a fugitive in the window, ‘was then I saw the poem of myself staring back at me and I did not care I did not care whose clothes I wore, I did not care who I might’ve been I did not care who I might become. I had found freedom was not “yes” was not “no” was not a raised fist, no longer angry, I turned myself in. |
