I promised myself that someday I would tell you about the Black Shell Girl. How she looked at me with eyes of such loathing that in the equatorial heat they struck my heart cold and still haunt my dreams. How she slid soundlessly through putrid water and all I could think of was her thin body, her girl parts, being exposed to so much bacteria and the infections that must follow. How dark dark black her skin was, though it was only meant to be coffee colored. How she didn't appear to go to school with the other children but instead spent all day in the water gathering snails for her family to eat. This is the lowest form of poverty in an impoverished country.
She was black.
The water was black.
The snails were black.
Snails the size of your fist, but it still took several buckets to feed a family for a day. They are mostly shell, after all.
She diffused silence and hatred. Hatred for the snails, hatred for the putrid water, hatred for the merciless sun, but especially hatred for everyone else. Because none of us were in that water, none of us were that cursed, and none of us were that young.
She slid through the stagnant trench with her alligator eyes locked on me. Me, pale as a helpless fish, under a UV-blocking umbrella, belly full of anything but snails. None of us deserve the life we are given.
In my dreams she one day crawls onto the bank and discovers that she no longer has the body of a too-thin 12-year-old girl, but instead the armored skin and prehistoric jaws of her brethren. She slips back into the water and slides away from the rotting shack forever, full of power and vengeance.
Eventually she finds me and eats me.
And at last we can both sleep peacefully.
Saturday, July 11, 2020
Thursday, September 27, 2018
i am drawing on your arm with marker and you are not amused
by Austin Kerswill on Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 11:30am
There was a profound sadness
in her eyes.
It rarely reached her lips
but it was there.
It was my plan to draw it out.
I am writing this because I want to.
You are reading this because you were told to.
She spoke of things she
wanted to do with my arms.
She spoke of Removing the Tendons
and making them into a stringed instrument.
I would have let her.
No, not you.
The girl in the poem.
The one I'm writing about.
Of course she's not real.
She got a haircut.
She said it made her look
like a boy.
I told her she didn't.
She did.
Now you have taken the marker and are poking me with it. I am laughing. You aren't.
**I don't know Austin. He wrote this back in 2009, and in 2010 he died at the age of 18. I know people who knew him, and I wanted to know him back in 2009 after reading this poem on facebook. I hope I get to meet him someday, and I want to tell him that I was thinking about him long after he died, and I didn't even know him. That's how important each one of us is. And that's how important a poem can be.
in her eyes.
It rarely reached her lips
but it was there.
It was my plan to draw it out.
I am writing this because I want to.
You are reading this because you were told to.
She spoke of things she
wanted to do with my arms.
She spoke of Removing the Tendons
and making them into a stringed instrument.
I would have let her.
No, not you.
The girl in the poem.
The one I'm writing about.
Of course she's not real.
She got a haircut.
She said it made her look
like a boy.
I told her she didn't.
She did.
Now you have taken the marker and are poking me with it. I am laughing. You aren't.
**I don't know Austin. He wrote this back in 2009, and in 2010 he died at the age of 18. I know people who knew him, and I wanted to know him back in 2009 after reading this poem on facebook. I hope I get to meet him someday, and I want to tell him that I was thinking about him long after he died, and I didn't even know him. That's how important each one of us is. And that's how important a poem can be.
Monday, May 28, 2018
Anyone who says differently is selling something.
Two times in my life I have been broken all the way down.
Two times I have reached my limits and lost all understanding of how to go on. And two times I’ve had to wait, in the belly of a whale, before being rescued.
That in between space — post-breaking and pre-repairing — isn’t so bad. It’s quiet, it’s numb, and it only smells a little like death. The war of giving up has already taken place, this is just the wreckage. There’s so much activity while your house is burning down but once it’s all ashes what do you do? Sink to the very depths of passivity and take comfort in the invincibility of no longer caring.
It’s not a bad space, but the admission to get in is steep. And you can’t stay forever, 3 days 3 nights, you know the rules.
Get up, wipe the vomit off, get to work.
The story doesn’t end when you break and it doesn’t end when you’re rescued. Everything just keeps going because this is life and pain is patient.
There is no rock bottom. Just the soft belly of a whale.
Two times I have reached my limits and lost all understanding of how to go on. And two times I’ve had to wait, in the belly of a whale, before being rescued.
That in between space — post-breaking and pre-repairing — isn’t so bad. It’s quiet, it’s numb, and it only smells a little like death. The war of giving up has already taken place, this is just the wreckage. There’s so much activity while your house is burning down but once it’s all ashes what do you do? Sink to the very depths of passivity and take comfort in the invincibility of no longer caring.
It’s not a bad space, but the admission to get in is steep. And you can’t stay forever, 3 days 3 nights, you know the rules.
Get up, wipe the vomit off, get to work.
The story doesn’t end when you break and it doesn’t end when you’re rescued. Everything just keeps going because this is life and pain is patient.
There is no rock bottom. Just the soft belly of a whale.
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
The Centre Cannot Hold
A forgotten doorway.
Forgotten on purpose, dismissed with intention. Lock rusted and key thrown away.
But these things we do have a way of undoing themselves.
I peeked through a crack in the door and expected to hardly recognize you. I expected to be a simple voyeur peeping at nameless characters. A decade passing would have destroyed your features and rendered you a stranger to me. Perhaps you would have a wife, children, new hobbies, friends I had never heard of.
I thought it would be like watching a play and leaving before the houselights came on, the actors never knowing what they unfolded before me as I hid in the darkness. Where would you be living and what kind of work would you do? I expected to get away with it, you see. I expected my presence to leave no mark, for any hint of recognition behind your eyes to be completely eaten away by the tides of over 10 years gone by. When I crept close and pressed my face against that crack I expected many things.
I did not expect to see my own face staring back at me.
And I did not expect to stagger back from the sight of how young and beautiful we once were. And I did not expect you to have changed so little. And I did not expect the flashbacks of us in New York, drinking and fighting in the streets. And I was not prepared for your love to be as hard and fierce and desperate as it had been then, and I forgot you are a poet and that pathos does little to destroy our love, instead feeding it and using it to fuel the fire that keeps us up scratching our way through stacks of paper at 1:00 in the morning.
And I was overcome with a dark longing to rip the door open and expose myself to all your rage and all your love and all your sickness because you used to say I was the only one that could save you and I always scoffed, but seeing you now, and seeing myself, I'm beginning to wonder if it's true.
There is no wife. No children. No idyllic house up north. You do not build tiny ships in bottles or work in the telecommunications industry.
Instead you move from town to town, slinging drinks and making friends you have no intention of keeping. You're fit and age has not touched you, except in the eyes, which are dark from too many parties and too many late nights, and too many highways burned beneath you. You are hiding your weariness and looking for the next escape.
We are so much alike. How could I help but despise you?
But you were too great for me back then. You were a sad and wild thing and I couldn't withstand the fierceness of your love or the calamity of your affection. I didn't have the rage that I have now, and I couldn't cope with your darkest moments. I gave you up and ran away, first from boyfriend to boyfriend and then from town to town. I was afraid of the things I thought you would bring forth in me, not knowing that the grating of time would reveal so much more.
I am as sick as you are, and saving you is the only thing that will save me.
So come to me you obsidian lion, and lie in my arms like a lamb. Sheath your claws and hide your teeth in wooly subterfuge. Bleed in my hands and roar in my ears and this time, this time I will stay. You will finally have what you want and I will be just as disappointing as you need me to be. And I will watch as the sheepskin falls and the teeth come out and when you lunge I will be ready, I will be ready, I will be ready.
And I will eat you alive.
Forgotten on purpose, dismissed with intention. Lock rusted and key thrown away.
But these things we do have a way of undoing themselves.
I peeked through a crack in the door and expected to hardly recognize you. I expected to be a simple voyeur peeping at nameless characters. A decade passing would have destroyed your features and rendered you a stranger to me. Perhaps you would have a wife, children, new hobbies, friends I had never heard of.
I thought it would be like watching a play and leaving before the houselights came on, the actors never knowing what they unfolded before me as I hid in the darkness. Where would you be living and what kind of work would you do? I expected to get away with it, you see. I expected my presence to leave no mark, for any hint of recognition behind your eyes to be completely eaten away by the tides of over 10 years gone by. When I crept close and pressed my face against that crack I expected many things.
I did not expect to see my own face staring back at me.
And I did not expect to stagger back from the sight of how young and beautiful we once were. And I did not expect you to have changed so little. And I did not expect the flashbacks of us in New York, drinking and fighting in the streets. And I was not prepared for your love to be as hard and fierce and desperate as it had been then, and I forgot you are a poet and that pathos does little to destroy our love, instead feeding it and using it to fuel the fire that keeps us up scratching our way through stacks of paper at 1:00 in the morning.
And I was overcome with a dark longing to rip the door open and expose myself to all your rage and all your love and all your sickness because you used to say I was the only one that could save you and I always scoffed, but seeing you now, and seeing myself, I'm beginning to wonder if it's true.
There is no wife. No children. No idyllic house up north. You do not build tiny ships in bottles or work in the telecommunications industry.
Instead you move from town to town, slinging drinks and making friends you have no intention of keeping. You're fit and age has not touched you, except in the eyes, which are dark from too many parties and too many late nights, and too many highways burned beneath you. You are hiding your weariness and looking for the next escape.
We are so much alike. How could I help but despise you?
But you were too great for me back then. You were a sad and wild thing and I couldn't withstand the fierceness of your love or the calamity of your affection. I didn't have the rage that I have now, and I couldn't cope with your darkest moments. I gave you up and ran away, first from boyfriend to boyfriend and then from town to town. I was afraid of the things I thought you would bring forth in me, not knowing that the grating of time would reveal so much more.
I am as sick as you are, and saving you is the only thing that will save me.
So come to me you obsidian lion, and lie in my arms like a lamb. Sheath your claws and hide your teeth in wooly subterfuge. Bleed in my hands and roar in my ears and this time, this time I will stay. You will finally have what you want and I will be just as disappointing as you need me to be. And I will watch as the sheepskin falls and the teeth come out and when you lunge I will be ready, I will be ready, I will be ready.
And I will eat you alive.
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