Hi hubski
I've been back and forth about posting this and if I did, how would I tag it? It probably should be tagged #stateofthelil, but let's just consider this a writing prompt. For Now.
When I would try to explain myself to a significant person, there's this:
1) what I say
2) what I want to say
3) what I really mean
and on and on.
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There Are a Few Things About Me That I Think You Should Know
When I say, “I don’t like to leave the house,”
I mean it depends on the house,
But give me a library of my own,
An expanse of desk, and some beautiful pens
And you would need a helicopter to airlift me
from my island.
---
When I say, “Don’t tuck in the top sheet,
I need to move my feet freely.”
I mean, if we let my feet breathe,
they won’t run off.
---
When I say, “It takes one person to have an idea,
but two to form a committee and call a meeting,”
I mean that I do play well with others
And like to create something out of nothing,
even this relationship.
If we try to spin straw into gold
A beautiful sheet of straw might emerge.
---
When I say, “I prefer booths and baskets,”
I mean, if I have to leave the house
Eating out should be a picnic -
The table, spread before us like a library shelf.
---
There are a few things about me I think you should know:
But what’s essential is invisible to the eye,
Every trip includes an unknown destination,
And the self you present to me, your relative self, is yours only for now.
---
Edna St Vincent Millay wonders, “If I were starving,
Would I trade my memory of this night for food?”
Her answer, “I do not think I would,” is my answer too.
---
and when I say that I stopped eating when my heart was broken,
It’s not so much that my heart was broken,
As this: When roads diverged in a yellow wood
He went down one path thinking there was a pretty forest that way,
But found only a steep cliff.
I stood looking a long way down the other path and through the trees
and saw only that it looped back around,
To where I was standing.
---
And finally, when I say there are a few things about me
That I think you should know,
I mean all that I am
All that I show you or give you
Is as substantial as the vegetables I cut every morning and put in your lunch
As substantial as the broom I put behind your fridge
or the three-way bulb I put in your three-way lamp.
I mean that I don’t know yet
What you need to know
to go with me down the road and into the yellow wood
And neither do you.
We won’t know until we get there.
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What about you, hubski?
Are there a few things about YOU, that I should know?
thenewgreen steve I played hockey
_refugee_ flagamuffin poetry
Footnotes: The Little Prince, Martin Buber, Robert Frost, the Torah, "Love is Not All" (sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay)
I don't know if I fully fit in theme, but this is what came out, lil.
there are a few things about me that you should know.
When I visualize myself, I see a flower inside a vast cavern.
clinging to survival on the precipice of possibility,
the water droplets of hope washing my face.
When I see myself in a mirror on late nights, in half dark and in hurried glances
I recognize a stranger: not myself,
a tall Ent with a beard of moss
and a faerie held safe in his body.
When I say "I have Dysphoria, I'm depressed, I hate myself."
I am holding, in the pit of my gut,
a desire to tear off my own ill-fitting skin
like rings on a tree, stripping myself down to a smaller,
more youthful core, an attempt to turn back time
and right the wrongs of a life so squandered.
But I don't do that. I thrive on promise, and hope, and the sound of wind through the quaking aspen.
the emerald beetle bores its holes in me,
but I will compensate for the loss and be greater for it.