Every situation

Tells you

How different you are

How special you are

Treat your problems like

Your opportunities

Without pain there is no gain

Find the reason before you

Are fear of something,

I bet you will laugh at the reason

I am not a difficult child.
You are not a difficult mother.
But,
sometimes we have things to say
and
sometimes we say nothing at all.
This,
I suppose is where we are difficult.
Because being human is difficult.

I cannot imagine why so many years ago
you chose to have us. Not because I think
you do not love us, I know you do, but
because of the sorrow my sleep brings to you
on the Sunday mornings I sleep in. Love,
I imagine, is returning from church and
still bringing bread to those who wish not to
consume it in any meaningful sense at all,
or, if consumed, to satisfy hungers so basic
you marvel at what that converted energy
is used for. I have failed still to explain that
I pray in different and marvellous ways that
I don't think are invalid but will still hurt you
nonetheless. This is part of growing up.  

There are many dances that you and my
grandmother have surely danced that I
do not have the rhythm for, but there
are many dances that you and her and I
have that are the same, just as in the Old
Testament there are so many prayers and
blessings and cursings and legacies passed on
from one child to another to another child.
During these passing-ons there are surely
missteps
where some son is bound to step on some mother's
left foot as the rhythms change on time's dancefloor.
There are many examples of this that exist
that don't need to be said. It is all the same.
It is all different. I have pointed these things out
before. Before I finish, let me point out
that when I point out these things
after laughing it is not because
I am making fun of you, but only because
I love you enough to point out the seriousness
of everything in this world with a smile on my face.

How else could I possibly repay that great push
you gave all those years ago
to allow this poem to breathe in this form?

my psychiatrist tells me i have holes in me.
she says it as though it is something
i should already know.
and when she says it,
the shift inside me is something i wish i could compare
to the grinding of tectonic plates,
if only i were strong enough to bring about an earthquake.

but since i am a stranger even to aftershocks,
i keep quiet.
my earthquake is stillborn,
expressed instead as a nod,
as a chewing of the lip,
as a silent, compliant “mhm.”
and the urge that nestles itself at the pit of my stomach
is not an urge to disagree;
it is an urge to forget.

because my psychiatrist tells me i have holes in me.
she says it as though it is something i should already know,
and she says it in a way that is not meant to make me feel incomplete,
but it is a way that still does,
and if i can forget this,
even for a moment,
i can forget that i am not okay.

i do not like not being okay;
i do not like having problems,
and my psychiatrist,
she tells me i have holes in me and she says it
as though it is a problem.

and so begins a slow disintegration:
i become but a bearer of problems,
a garden growing only weeds —
something in need of fixing.
i see myself a war-torn landscape,
dry and cracked and lacking life.
i see myself the kind of ground you step on and say,
“remember when things used to grow here?
remember when it used to be green?”

i am still trying to be green,
always trying to be green,
but my psychiatrist tells me
i have holes in me,
and suddenly green becomes a color i will never know how to paint.

outside my psychiatrist’s office,
on the wall of the waiting room,
there is a painting of flowers —
irises and a geranium —
and the leaves, i know, are supposed to be green,
but the paint is old and faded
and they don’t look it.

and for a moment,
i think
that maybe,
whether iris
or geranium
or boy riddled with holes,
maybe it is possible to bloom
even if you are not green.

(a.m.)

let me tell you
the sky was a piece of cardboard.
i was 16, painting
it black.
something precocious.
a beginner at beautiful.

i sat under this night i created,
waiting for someone like you
to nod and hold my my head and
tell me, tell me, tell me
you're it, you're all the ocean rushed into one
you're it.

oh i never believed in you.
nor the black night which was just black
cardboard but you
came along anyway -
ambling in and i didn't understand
if you were carrying light bulbs or not
whether they were burnt out or not,
whether this was still darkness.

but we talked.
and spoke and thought and
talked. we talked.
our words became
pinholes
pricked into the cardboard.

and i saw it then
for what it was
but i tried to hold the darkness, tried
to pull the blindfold tighter.
i saw it

a blackboard
dotted with white chalk.
the sequins on my birthday frock.
handfuls of glitter
spilling through a net.
i saw.

how we filled the night with stars.
how we didn't know what it was.

yet we wrote
we would remember.
how strange, how rare, how true.
our hands enfolded
we punched the roof.

look,
a hole.
some light.

a moon.

let me tell you
the sky in fact is
blue.

the words
are beads and gems
and hooks and strings

scattered in a box
somewhere in
the softness behind my breastbone

my palms are up to catch the key
whenever it chooses to land

a pandora poised
to make ornaments
from all she uncovers,
all she unleashes

the magazines tell me
'natural'
is a ***** word

like my bare skin
is some kind of rebellion.

i have laid no foundation.
no mascara on the windows.
so they find my architecture
unacceptable.

yet I think my home
is beautiful.
simply
because it is home.
my skin.
my nature.

still
i hear them whisper
'natural' is a ***** word -
and you don't say those out loud.
do you?

you do not need to fit in their beautiful
because it lies
that one size fits all.

you were not made
so powerfully, so tenderly,
so naturally
to smooth yourself into
a magazine cutout.

remember
you are not a puzzle piece.
the only place you need to fit
is inside that skin of yours.

i thought

i was more his
than my mother's

as he shouted at me
as i shouted
to him

lost
behind angry.