Staceyann Chin

Des Moines then Minneapolis...

As it is with epiphanies
the knowing

burned electric for eons

anecdotes traded
not about hearts

or cunts
or ambition

but about poetry
and how my chest would not exist without it

words became bond
and wrapped solid
around my craze

tonight

I was brave

allowed me to see myself
with kinder eyes

I am doing fine
my own throat reassures

without the raw flesh of invulnerability cloaking my misgivings
I was honest

revealed the saddest parts of my effort
as human

mundane
lonely

alone

I am committed to being singular
trying
not to fall in love

with any potential
dream

larger than these small hands of cartilage
can sustain

banal
boring and blatantly besotted with the curve
of gut attached to clarity

I sat frightened
in a nondescript chair

promised my shoulders

to regret nothing
but my own

intention

I will allow my body
only
what I consciously choose

this is what I have a duty to do

fall in love with
myself
before I let another motherfucker touch me

to glow brilliant on the inside
to be sure

to know this carnal measure
as whole as dominion over breath

I will not die compliant
belief broken and hollow

I have been thrown out of love too many times
for any whispered word to be magical

twinkles and twilight
are illusions

the night need not be dark
for a conjurer of fantasies to fly blind
into meaningless hope

love in this century is hard

it takes prisoners
whole legs

even when you decide you will not join the fray

being your best self
requires
petites mortes

tiny stakes twisted through brave hearts

what is it about your own
spirit
that scares you

mirror mirror in my pocket

gift me a vision
to lay true in this locket

pictures are not alive
you said
photographs are not always warm

you laughed
drunk

neglect

beautifully flawed
I will have to learn
to forgive my most errant self

take me home
to my own body

scented with its own failures
no one is owed the pleasure of my screams
without emotional precedence

let me be
body bucking
buckling under the weight of a lack of feeling

I am not porcelain
the slick bathtub is here because I wished it

no one need see me
wet
smoothed slender by lavender

rosemary
mint

sleepy
and slipping into oblivion

this isolated bliss is reality
informed by choice

my own voice remembers
twenty one

twenty three
twenty five

the years before I learned to love other arms more than my skinny elbows
bending
to make more room
for me

my other parts
irreverent

forgotten now

twenty six
eight and thirty
thirty one

how I have grown small
these last hours

days
weeks turning months
stretching toward the a future I cannot yet know

old transvestite time

grow me
knees and ankles

angled towards a beginning
curl me invincible

infinite
incredible
if only because the lines of me

have outgrown
the deadened root of these lessons I have yet to unlearn

in the spirit
of things germinating,
Staceyann

Posted by staceyann at November 17, 2004 12:48 AM