ever green

.i don’t want to go back. .i’ve spent too much time learning from the furious swings of feeling nothing to feeling everything, desperate to destroy myself but craving the experience of everything. .maybe it’s the tease of spring that makes me think so much of adolescence… winter holding on like that boyfriend you went out with for two weeks, who stalked you for the next two years because he couldn’t believe you broke up with him after such a deep love, spring playing like the shirt falling off her shoulder was an accident, and just because she talked to you for a whole hour yesterday doesn’t mean you’ll even see her in the hallways today. .so the frantic rocking rolls on, between a settled numb – a paralyzed hibernation of nothing doing, festering in guilt and lethargy, escaping into someone else’s stories – and a clamorous itch, like .i want to rip through my own skin, bust up through cement, be warm and fast and full again. .i didn’t respect it then, but when my thoughts were more reckless, overflowing, unhinged, what .i put down on paper (remember paper…) cut much closer to the raw.
.like this:

there was a kiss, sweltering, slow, under matchbook moonlight
on a warm spring barefoot jacketless night,
our hands and hands all over,
mine tangled in curls
from fear of falling down your neck,
our clothes on – but I can still feel you
hard, trembling, lunging, pulsing into me,
our tongues like simmered syrup rain
immersed and coming up for air, eels out of fog,
tasting salt wine and dandelion milk.
you can walk away and smile,
wiping my flower water off your damp chin
with your unbuttoned sleeve, but
i stumble to bed tasting you…
even if the kiss is a lapsing look
..i can feel it on my eyelids
like the moon stealing into my open window,
and too many nights I’m sweating, going to bed in love –
waking up thirsty


don’t worry mom and dad, it was a dream. .but it makes me think hard about everything that .i protect when .i write. .the best teacher .i’ve ever had shepherded that poem and countless others with a mantra .i knew was solid gold, but still with an innocent perspective: be true to yourself.
.be honest with, devoted to, expressive of all the murk and glow and flush and tweak of your multitudinous self. .there was a force behind that part of ourselves that ran full speed into idiocy – saved by luck and congratulated with hubris – there was a strength to the angst of forming and transforming, werewolves at nightfall, that .i’ve only started to appreciate now. .can .i be more at peace with who .i am, and still touch that nerve…? .can .i fucking write this thing in all lowercase letters without being corrected by Word or having to put periods in front of everything? .can .i rip the lid off all the theatres .i’ve built to show the world only the packaged and rehearsed?

.one step closer today. .already .i’ve had a recurring dream involving a life-or-death chase through a hospital with a little black girl in my care and an older woman, a reporter, who let me drive her truck but the pedals were so far away and hard to push down .i had to brake 2 minutes before each light, learned that spinal tap is going on tour again and that there’s a new uber-detailed book about columbine, eaten two bowls of cereal. .the editor brain .i was born with is currently refraining from deleting this paragraph because .i can’t fathom how anyone needs or wants to know any of that. .the dramatist, also an immutable presence, wants to end with a flourish. .like an idea that we could all have a moment of silence for those years that were marked by gimpy rituals and mystifying rules… we could all breathe in what it felt like to thirsty… we could look at each other and see the vulnerable parts that haven’t caught up to our ages and nod like we’re all part of the same secret society: misfits and seekers and rebels and gods. .worth all the trouble we are.