Three poems
and a playlist to go with them ♡
“None of you should be happy dwelling in the burning house of the threefold world” - Lotus Sutra
Ceremonial traditions that move us from students to adults are simply that, ceremonial. For so long, I have imagined the soul of a student slowly fading as the soul of a woman, an adult moves forward. I have a sneaking suspicion that we are all somewhere in the middle, and will be for the rest of our lives. A mix of colors and opacities, and hundreds of lessons, modules, of livelihood.
I have not always believed in the lifelong student mindset, I’m not sure the adults around me have either. There is always room for improvement, yes, but what happened to being smart and wrong at first? Being intelligent and off-kilter? What happened to singing the wrong lyrics loudly and on key? Wearing grief like a cardigan instead of a tattoo? Shouldn’t we untie knots before they suffocate us?
Being decisive in living as a student forever means I need to get out of this damn room. You cannot truly hear me from down here, and more importantly, I cannot hear any of you. I can read you, and watch you, but I cannot hear you. I am tired of leaving traces. Bleeding and then just waiting to bleed again.
Octopus
A soft-bodied shapeshifter
in her penny-sized house,
sleeps away the faults she
wishes to abandon, to renounce.
The whales pulled down the driftwood
while the fish pulled down the steel,
that she used to make a doorknob
before her house was painted teal.
Hey, clever pretty shapeshifter,
what’s there left to do?
You built a home, now build the world
build everything anew.
Swaying with the mama waters
each ticker still in place,
ever played three sets of heartstrings
lay down a somber, sticky bass?
The water sits still seldom,
under the moon, sharp and black.
The shapeshifter shoots her ink
no one notices an attack.
Some think it was the cutting waves
Or a shark who preyed & pounced,
but sea spirits still hear honey bass
lines passing her tiny teal house.
O’ knotted snake in this garden
Gnawing for the roots of
Deep earth: just below skin
& muscle stretching
toward a source,
Peach-fuzzed nerve endings
stretch across landscapes,
tickled by breezes
petals flick beneath its heart,
O’ knotted snake in this garden
belly hidden from the sun
spread across the grass
soon your breath will be lost,
The voices of rain say somewhere there’s a
fish— sand stuck between each &
every gill eroding the rough curves of a
swimming moon, locked beneath the river’s top,
Grief is a fungus growing beneath each scale
blue, withering, & wet
festering like a dormant web of spirits
arms around the body before the attack
O’ knotted snake in this garden
you’ve been left with creases of violence
open beneath the sky, the running river
the mouths of the east and west.
Farmhouse foreigner
The lambs, ewes & the caramel-skinned
copper-haired cowgirl looks at me stretched & alive
through the windows, past the tulle curtains,
today I am not a foreigner
so I will not go back to earth behind the
blackberries, the lavender, the overgrown grass,
or be a ballerina dancing atop the
black keys of folk to sing
a silver-tongued lullaby but I will
write a poem for the cowgirl & her friends until
dew from the tulips bring the curl back to my hair
once flattened by my sun hot palms.