A Mind, Lively and at Ease

While eating pasta and drinking water, the toll one’s body pays for college, I’m reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s House of Life again. Damien Rice’s live discography plays on my laptop. Soft, warm lamp light illuminates the page I’ve written notes on, trivial matters soon to be narrowed and polished into an essay: 

• journey
• birth
• hair (Rossetti is obsessed!)
• soul/spirit
• whirl
• wind/wing/breath 
• shadow
• nuptials
• field

Leading into more symbols and such for a paper that resembles all others and such. Boring. 

Even if I had a chance to do it over again, pick some other couple of majors or a different career path… I’d still choose this submergence into words, these tombs of past poets, authors, and journeymen. 

The more I struggle with sentences, the less I struggle with myself. I wish it made more sense, and that I could find more happiness in something grounded. Although, whenever I’m not burning from creativity, I’m a zombie walking in thin air. 

I don’t see a path; I just see a cause.

Simply push problems onto your own shoulders

so as to deal with it, personally, retching from the toxins.

Know this is the last heave, that you already squandered

yourself irreparably for another’s sake, gazing at an impassive

face clicking, blending further pixel by pixel—flattening features

to a single plane of crowd. Foreigners. 

I grab your wrist, quick, a second ahead of quicksand bodies 

and dirt eyes merely speckles engulfing every inch of every 

tiny detail—your: laugh, eyes, smile, figure, frame, voice.

Without repent, “Sorry.” 

Selfish, pulling you back, forcefully, 

“Don’t leave. Don’t let go.”

Missing you, enough to shed pride’s skin, reveals a pliant,

vulnerable underbelly of undeserved shame. Weak, I catch

our friendship to hug loosely, fingers bent to prevent 

shapeless connection from slipping through leaking gaps…

slits oozing mercilessly, irreversibly opening forth…

further down the pit of used to, were, was, and, the finishing blow,

knew.

Whenever I feel like no one is listening (a younger sibling problem that never seems to go away completely), I remember you guys and how some of you have stuck with me for a long time. 

Thank you. It means the world to me. 

     -Amanda

P.S.

This is for you!

I am tired of poetry:

exhausted with poems,

weighted with lines,

carrying along stanzas

that ache until

perfected,

poignant,

but lost on paper—

and I miss holding it briefly

caressing the words into standing up straight

smoothing out their collars

waiting to present themselves

to a critique of open air,  

and then it feels as if I’ve lost blood

and tears and sweat and skin

to the anonymous,

before new words and old words

collide together in lines

again, calling out to me

asking for my attention with glittery eyes

and I submit to them

minutes and hours and days 

before they speed along my fingers 

hushed for moments 

until read again in your mind—

loud with passage and synapse,

glittering in your mind’s eye

until they vanish

once again.

Levant

«Shiftingly, does this amount to much? 

It’s a question of my comfort, satisfaction,

and complacency, though how else did we Africans

disperse across Pangaea? Why wouldn’t we

let the trees harbor us in the canopy of their

arbor, forsaking the earth for its bounty rather than

its being?

Did the first humans seek shelter from rain, or

collect it, follow it, measure out its abundance,

and ration the liquid to a community of peasants 

both humble and aggressive? 

Were the rooms of Jericho filled, heated with social passions, 

listless with wanton greed, 

with an atemporal want never to be met, 

or merely busy whitewashing their walls

to mimic the sun’s path?»

inquires the student.

«Yes.» replies

the master.

«Next?»

Don’t look at me that way, 

please. I can’t take it. 

I can’t take that desire. 

I can’t take the dizzy 

warm drain of confusion and 

apprehension that follows

a cry out for my appearance.

I’m not this body.

I’m not this mind.

I’m just another conscious energy

pushing forward

to prove everything previously

assumed

inaccurate.

Quit showing surprise. 

Quit pretending you care.

That shelf you place a figure of me 

on can’t be reached without

a ladder, so I’m rendered

useless

watching life proceed

beyond my clutch, grasp.

You never even noticed 

I left

until I smiled 

from the ground.

Finished watching One Day, and my allotted emotional storage is at capacity. 

Therefore, I’m giving myself a break from posting for the next week. 

Sitting on the floor, I’m waiting for everyone to arrive. I should be taking a shower, but my brow’s furrowed. I’m angry. I’m so angry at everything. I’d like to shake everything and everyone around me into movement so that the world starts spinning again and this forever in between state of moist and hot winter becomes its namesake and starts freezing me into a person that’s willing to wait and see what the future holds for a girl that doesn’t want anything more than making everyone happy. The universe laughs at this and so do I, in an Alice in Wonderland shaking laugh from the Mad Hatter. 

So, even those I love doubt my abilities. 

«Stop making me say I told you so, and take me seriously in the first place,» I say jokingly.

That’s it. I’m leaving my thoughts apart from this stream of universal consciousness, let them all sink into the mainstream realities and refrain from imagination and inspiration. 

You’ll see the trail I left, nothing more. 

The fixed state inside, a chair of fortitude

and lifting grace, awaits the day

for our arrival: to sit upon the truth

of mind and matter, dragged over,

draped across, shaking off the heavy 

dust of work. I stained my hands shades of blue,

gave up, walked away, and typed lines

onto a shifting blue page. The lines:

life, heart, head, fate,

ran as a delta for a drying river

of ink and the skin I rubbed 

with soap to shed marred cells.

Newly shaped palms. Splatters

filling the cups of my hands 

lightly, barely touching, but painting

them to course and blot. 

Tell me when. Tell me when I’ll

stop cringing when I think of you.

Tell me when I’ll stop regretting 

what went wrong. Tell me when

I let you down. Tell me when I 

couldn’t keep up. Tell me when 

I became less than a friend. 

Tell me when I lost your respect; 

I’ll tell you the exact moment

that you lost mine.

I get it, I get it. It’s fine that no one else is as excited as I am about Contemporary African American Poetry. I mean, what are the real-life applications besides educated street cred (in my dreams, hah)? 

But… can’t you be excited that I’m excited? Why wouldn’t this be an amazing thing? Why wouldn’t you want to diversify and learn how a different culture, ethnicity, and demographic feel, think, experience, and explicate? 

I get it. 

I lied. 

I don’t get it. 

Am I missing something? (Besides everything…)

was that a mess or what? Scatterbrained! Hardly any consistency. Oh well :) Onto composing new lines that hold some concrete weight instead of all this… childish vague ambiguity.

Onward!

To never want something

almost always welcomes

itself into your doorway.

Harbinger, I’ll call you

in the delicate entirety of

mind. Absent, in person or

largely in thought.

“Your body,” he said,

and the muscles in my shoulders 

went from a loosely strung guitar 

to a rusty washboard 

anticipating dirty laundry,

“—it’s perfect.”

_

So I gave his words a stanza

hardly anything but heavy

with the many reactions that 

torment my sensibilities—complicated

with less than a compliment and

rising with the grime left uncovered,

caked together with 

perennial discomforts.

The girls laugh.

_

Though, with all reluctance, I’d

heard this cadence previously

from a little boy tattooed with the

green pride of master Yoda.

Holding emotional court—as

always, the verdict fell

with my escaping 

confidence.

Young and soft, impressions only

pressed my silly-putty frame.

Awaken, darling.

You’re hurting yourself.

“Hurt?

How’s that possible?”

You’re torturing your mind.

“By remembering?”

By dwelling.

“There’s just so much nostalgia…”

It’s inevitable.

_

Go to sleep, sweetie.

You’re making it worse.

“Worse?

How’s that possible?”

You’re blaming yourself.

“With guilt?”

With innocence.

“There were many opportunities…”

It’s vindicable.

_  

Recollect, sugar.

You have forgotten.

“Forget?

How’s that possible?”

You are avoiding it.

“With regret?”

With rejoice.

“It was a very long time ago…”

It was your life.

Dropped off, walking toward a street corner,

only thinking about my tired feet

or ruminating over my sex life with torrential 

self-deprecation—I forget,

When, my gaze astray connected with this

figure—I’ll never forget, provoke me

if you please on this one occasion—

who was dancing, full blast, hardly any

inhibition, with the sole envision

of merriment ascribed a jester.

While the women bow their heads in rest

or perhaps restlessness,

each shuffle commits a prayer—their 

bodies bibles.

Silly little white girl

strains against fitful swoons

every lingering bump.

The coins clatter preceding that 

long column of decision seldom

experienced, her pale form considered

a red hood amongst wolves.