Poem: Listen to it or read it or watch me perform it or…do all three! YOLO.All Rise A moment of silence for all the selves I’ve lost to time or inner wars. The one who was going to be a professor, a rabbi, a magazine editor. The one who threw up in broad daylight: mortified, pregnant, a plastic bag of orange puke tied and left on the curb. The one who walked away from college thinking we’d all still sleep next door, cackling in a shared bathroom until the end of our days. The California one in sunglasses and jumpsuits; the one who donned a blonde wig on Halloween, hoping she’d fool everyone, though she only fooled herself. The one who wrote daily poems in Brooklyn to remember how she lived when she was with the people she couldn’t imagine living without, but somehow did. The one who believed one person could hold everything, who believed a person could go through life without enacting any harm, who thought of only one person for so many days their name was like a snake eye that never blinked. The one who didn't believe death would come for the beautiful ones. The one committed briefly to outfit notes, morning yoga, a daily spiffing of the desk. The one who sold milking systems to dairy farmers. And all the waitress ones, too: the Cape Cod stoner, the lunch shift lady, the one who wouldn't call herself a waitress, who served cocktails overlooking the Hudson, dreaming of the train she'd take to the city where the boy she’d nearly kissed threw his arm around her like an owned thing. The woman who wore white go-go boots in all weather. The one who wanted to write somebody else’s poems, instead of her own, who drove cross country for poetry, who squinted, scanned, and scoured for someone’s choices she could follow to a T. The girl who wore shirts with words on them, and the girl who tied a silk scarf across her chest, called that a shirt. The one who lived, briefly, for the weekly recap of a bad television show, who got everything done thanks to a single saving song, who thought she could learn to look clean on short notice, thought she could show up at a wedding on time with the right kind of shoes, could arrive at her own atrocities and have something to say. (And to the selves who remain with me, who never age or drain of power—the selfish self, the sleepy self, the one forever heavy with hunger; the dishwashing daydreamer, the one who expects more than what comes, the one who longs to be known, known deeper, seen fully, seen in darkness, lauded annually by candlelight by her storied fans & beloveds— I raise no glass to you. To the self who covets all the love and then more, who expects what she doles out to return in kind—she’s still with us, no need to light her yarzheit, she’s megaphone, lit as the summer solstice, sits like a New York pretzel on the couch, knows exactly where her wounds are and presses on them herself—she’s got one whiskey on the rocks and another on the way, no need to boost this beast, she’s living noise.)
I had first heard this on the Hartland video, so it was great to read along this time. It's even better the second time round.
You rock. You rock. You rock.
I love these posts.