poetry- this is the way it works: you read it. then you think about it. then you let me know what thoughts came of it. if you don't want to waste the time coupling the thinking and the reading, then don't read it. it really doesn't matter, because i have type it out anyways to get the full effect for myself. it's all really an exercise in my own selfishness anyways, and someone knowing that one of you may read it and take it seriously helps me in some way. so, here is the first of my poems after a long silence. this poem is not bullshit, it is the real story of a real person.
She smoked her sorrow in homemade cigarettes
Curls of smoke rising up while tears in rivulets
Came cascading down her stolid cheeks. She said
She hangs on not for herself. She said she hangs on, but not
For herself.
The pools on either side of her nose were grayish-blue- I watched them
Pass wide to narrow and narrow to wide
Tear by tear,
And crime by crime, of all the crooked things
Done by all the ashen, sooty
People hidden with their weapons, behind those
Smokey eyes.
She spoke in syllables remote to me- but close enough to
Make tense every fiber of muscle in my body.
The day she held that gun to his
Slightly balding, oily head the day she said
“You’ll never fuck with me again, Dad,
you’ll never fucking touch me again.” She pulled back the hammer, the
barrel against the temple, in his sideburn’s stead. He had replied to her, “my girl
I’ve taken you before, and I’ll take you again, and I’ll have you right now,
And you won’t say anything.”
And she had let the gun drop,
Heavy in her hand, and she
Took her thumb from the hammer,
Removed her justice from his head. And that day she told
him “fine, just take me again, one day I’ll get out
of here, but fuck you, I don’t care, just
take me again then.”
He had climbed on top of her,
Just like the hundreds of times he had before,
From the year when she was twelve,
To the year when she turned nineteen- and went for the last time
Out that creaking front door.
And she went with a man to be rescued, and he
Took her in his arms, he her savior,
He her miracle-worker, his love had
So many charms- he had taken her
From Daddy’s prison bar arms. Where he carried her,
She thought she’d never gone,
She had stumbled in darkness so long.
And the first time his knuckles smashed
And banged against her stolid cheek,
It wasn’t a cause for much alarm.
See, she hangs on not for herself,
She doesn’t hang on for herself.
And as her eyes tighten into grey smokey circles,
I wonder for who does she hang on?
Today she fights the nausea
That she has had some two years long,
She smokes her homemade cigarettes
In drags hard and long.
Her body has changed shape from all the
Effects of the antiretrovirals,
She keeps some weight by smoking
A little weed, but the virus
Keeps on coming, like a knife inside,
Cutting spirals.
She runs away sometimes, she tries
To find shelter from all these
Criminals inside, from all these
Criminals with their own knives.
From the man she loves now,
She is sometimes a fugitive,
Afraid that instead of saving love
To give, what she’s got is a death
Sentence in her blood.
Somewhere behind this screen of smoke, she hangs on.
She exhales, and wonder for how long.
She says she doesn’t hang on for herself, she hangs on,
But not for herself- tell me,
While you smoke your sorrows,
Tell me how you hang on.
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