Jul 7
A broken house.
Lights working against themselves.
A fire on the very edge of a table.
Cracks in the basement in the pattern of five decades of rainstorms,
where for two decades I hid from them.
Where I learned to fear the weather.
Where the furnace leaves with so few words
in the longer and longer and longer winters.
In that I discovered the confusing shapes of neglect
projecting like the 4th dimension along my life.
But I grew up here…
I’ve placed my soul in different places,
between the walls.
My soul in my computer, and my soul across the floor,
spread out and carried wherever goes my dog’s hair.
And he will stay buried here,
or else in several vacuums, and trash cans, and trash trucks,
and trash mountains;
my brother.
Soul in smells of burning, and birth defects.
Pictures that I’ll be discovering under my bed,
and filing cabinets from the 60s with their yellowed paper that I’m afraid to breathe.
My soul in boxes that I still haven’t opened from websites-
usually clothes that don’t yet match my body image-
and I suppose they can ship again, with the truck, as is.
One hundred yearbooks that will show me what nothing I did about being trans,
for all I knew…
The first vestiges of a real human, in my memories,
becoming about the thresholds, shyly.
Sending myself away to the next day,
every day. Beginning school, and ending a frayed dropout
counting the nights until I assumed the universe wouldn’t let me get away with this any longer.
My soul in my 23rd September, and my last winter.
Dedicating, now, its entire core to a new, and existentially unknown supporting organism.
Would everyone allow me to mourn my losing a house?
Do not make me match your optimism, your assumptive congratulations.
I feel my soul being stumbled upon, and thrown into an unplanned demolition.
Spirited away, from my perspective,
with 160 thousand dollars to invest into the opportunity to spend 280 thousand dollars
over the next 40 years.
Playing with numbers that don’t even account for the consulting with doctors,
and the consorting with happiness.
60 days to leave a force of nature
that will soon attract flood water into the lives of the young couple
who I can’t imagine sitting around making the same mistakes I make,
plugging into the drywall, and calling the resulting warmth a kind of home
come November.
60 days to leave my soul.
Lights working against themselves.
A fire on the very edge of a table.
Cracks in the basement in the pattern of five decades of rainstorms,
where for two decades I hid from them.
Where I learned to fear the weather.
Where the furnace leaves with so few words
in the longer and longer and longer winters.
In that I discovered the confusing shapes of neglect
projecting like the 4th dimension along my life.
But I grew up here…
I’ve placed my soul in different places,
between the walls.
My soul in my computer, and my soul across the floor,
spread out and carried wherever goes my dog’s hair.
And he will stay buried here,
or else in several vacuums, and trash cans, and trash trucks,
and trash mountains;
my brother.
Soul in smells of burning, and birth defects.
Pictures that I’ll be discovering under my bed,
and filing cabinets from the 60s with their yellowed paper that I’m afraid to breathe.
My soul in boxes that I still haven’t opened from websites-
usually clothes that don’t yet match my body image-
and I suppose they can ship again, with the truck, as is.
One hundred yearbooks that will show me what nothing I did about being trans,
for all I knew…
The first vestiges of a real human, in my memories,
becoming about the thresholds, shyly.
Sending myself away to the next day,
every day. Beginning school, and ending a frayed dropout
counting the nights until I assumed the universe wouldn’t let me get away with this any longer.
My soul in my 23rd September, and my last winter.
Dedicating, now, its entire core to a new, and existentially unknown supporting organism.
Would everyone allow me to mourn my losing a house?
Do not make me match your optimism, your assumptive congratulations.
I feel my soul being stumbled upon, and thrown into an unplanned demolition.
Spirited away, from my perspective,
with 160 thousand dollars to invest into the opportunity to spend 280 thousand dollars
over the next 40 years.
Playing with numbers that don’t even account for the consulting with doctors,
and the consorting with happiness.
60 days to leave a force of nature
that will soon attract flood water into the lives of the young couple
who I can’t imagine sitting around making the same mistakes I make,
plugging into the drywall, and calling the resulting warmth a kind of home
come November.
60 days to leave my soul.
from september 2, 2022
poem from the past a day #49
i moved at the end of 2022. it's unbelievable that every poem written before the month of november of that year was made under the circumstances of my childhood home which was so run down that the lights practically stopped functioning in 2018. somehow i was still finding the creative spirit inside me; the house was like a physical manifestation of depression.
the poem is so casual, but ties itself together, i think, because of a couple hard hitting lines "And he will stay buried here, / ... / my brother."
in retrospect, i've written *much* less since leaving that house. it was like a well i was tossed into as a baby, inside which, i communicated, only with the walls.
really what happened is that the rest of what life had to offer seemed more attainable once my family and i left that stinking crater behind. actually, the final stanza of this poem is a fantasy, the house didn't go to new residents, but went to a contractor who plastered over every last dying stain with plastic and white paint and that house ceased to even breathe after a few months and now sits empty, dark, clutching its hideous secrets like a collapsed lung.
poem from the past a day #49
i moved at the end of 2022. it's unbelievable that every poem written before the month of november of that year was made under the circumstances of my childhood home which was so run down that the lights practically stopped functioning in 2018. somehow i was still finding the creative spirit inside me; the house was like a physical manifestation of depression.
the poem is so casual, but ties itself together, i think, because of a couple hard hitting lines "And he will stay buried here, / ... / my brother."
in retrospect, i've written *much* less since leaving that house. it was like a well i was tossed into as a baby, inside which, i communicated, only with the walls.
really what happened is that the rest of what life had to offer seemed more attainable once my family and i left that stinking crater behind. actually, the final stanza of this poem is a fantasy, the house didn't go to new residents, but went to a contractor who plastered over every last dying stain with plastic and white paint and that house ceased to even breathe after a few months and now sits empty, dark, clutching its hideous secrets like a collapsed lung.
