This is a sentence with a sense of urgency
let us celebrate the death of breath
like your lung’s favorite emergency
No matter the worry, hurry fam
never lose the fast food for thought.
Quick lips, decide joy
without a jury.
the last gasp is how the breath crashes
into a crest of ash
nothing good is good
until we learn it cannot last.
I want to save you from your sorrow—
But what if I am not ready?
I’m only brave in the stories I tell.
Everything I feel is a familiar spell.
Everything I feel is a navigable hell.
This sorrow I feel is a charming tale.
I like the plot of my pity.
Some days it’s good to be pathetic.
Misery cannot always wait.
I know my friend Vanessa says,
That there is space for joy
That there is space for pain.
And I believe her, but
Isn’t it easier to be empty?
In the mirror I misplace
my dark honey eyes
in the dim corner where
I choose to lose myself
With no one’s help
but my own.
In the violent silence
of my lonely heavy head
I own my mistakes
with a defeating dread.
In my darkest hours,
I carry deadweight
Like a living history
I want to rewrite.
Should I tear my heart out now?
In high school I graduated in the top ten percent of my class,
Guaranteeing my admission into a public university tho,the
Truth is I struggled the first year, stumbled in and out my sadness
Between classes until I did not want to answer the question
Of my own doubt. Finished the year with a 2.2 GPA, decided
To double-major in English & History because words were arks,
Language became a Lark. Hear me now: I took an internship
At a global law firm working 25 hours a week while enrolled
Full-time and also working at the Gap as a sales associate selling
White women skinny jeans, folding their clothes, and earning
a dollar above minimum wage and life moved fast like overdraft
fees and drip-coffee and sleep never came when I called, only
stayed when I asked to leave my bed, and I won’t talk about love
tho its absence did crack me open like a sun on the sidewalks
I’d walk cross campus just to see if the love of my life
could choose the light behind the dark flight of my goodness,
goodness what I tried to do all the time didn’t always work out
tho failure seems far-stretched, like a hamper of dirty laundry
I let rise and fall cause I didn’t have enough quarters to wash
Myself clean, and nothing came easy tho I smiled endlessly
At the storm’s shadow, decided I’d rather dance than be doomed,
So I saw my path form like dust on hardwood, instructions for
The future got me looking for direction, cause I can’t always
Tell the lesson. Success isn’t fiction, it’s a long-distance
Relationship with your vision. Check it: It took nearly
two hundred thousand dollars and seven years to hear
the song of myself and hear music. Have I always been
an instrument? I want to be truthful without being misleading:
I cannot guarantee anything but I know I’m not supposed
To be where I am, tho I am here, tho I walked the plank
of each mistake, spent days ignoring the dual ache
of the heart, of the stomach, of the wallet, and I guess
you’d expect every success story to run like a river
leading into something bigger, but I couldn’t have done
any of this shit if it hadn’t been for decisions made
on my behalf beyond my control, for the standardized
tests I had to consume like fake bread, worrying
and waiting for my future to rise in the oven, and
nobody wants to believe this but I never stopped
writing poems, never stopped returning to the
written or spoken word, even tho I heard my words
were a detour, I still saw the finish line like a couplet
out a Shakespearean sonnet, and whatever is asked
of me, I’m on it. I had to suffer so I could say this.
All my success is a blessing my family sings, and
Look at me, smiling like a lyric they picked
Out like a bluebonnet blooming through Spring,
And tho time gave back what it took, I still look
At the man in the mirror as a bowl-cut boy who
Spent his days in the library, lying his head
Down on the carpet to read the story written
For him to read. In less than a month, I graduate
Law school with honors, and this is now my final bow,
Where I catch the rose tomatoes thrown at me like
My mother’s lipstick crashing against my cheek.
I rewrote the story written for me. Now, let’s start
From the beginning.
After Chen Chen’s poem of the same title, from When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List of Further Possibilities
With flat feet. Without mustard. With my hand in the wind on the driver’s side window. Without my grandma’s green thumb. With three degrees. Without enough sleep. With interest accruing. Without a proper bookshelf. With cold coffee on the counter. Without somebody to love. With enough love for somebody. Without hesitation. With the West Wing. With NPR Morning Edition and Steve Inskeep. Without speaking Spanish fluently. With a Spanish name. Without my brothers. With my niece, Jessi, smiling when she sleeps. With flash flood warnings. With melancholy. Without my Uncle Jesse. With the luxurious burst of bravery. With Brent in Alaska. With Grandpa’s Parkinson’s. With Cast irons. With saints for candles. With hashbrowns, extra crispy. With my hands tied. With no excuse. With loose change to spare. With a village raising me. With a tank on empty. With moments to waste. With stubborn smoke. With credit cards. With exigency. With the scarred sky. With a gold ring. Without contempt. With key lime pie in the fridge. With the war. Without peace of mind. With dawn holding my hurt in her hair. With her hurt. Without you here. With you somewhere else I wander. With mangoes I peeled in the kitchen. With self-discovery as a page I bookmark. With my father’s ship-metaphors reaching the port of my purpose. With True North. Without ego. Without jinxing joy. With Pablo Neruda. With the gulf in my gut. With my hands covered in blisters. With Marvin Gaye. With the court’s permission. With reason. With logic. With emotion. Without home. With the homies. With the church bells ringing at the top of the hour. With the train arriving in one minute. Without a passport. Without a criminal record. With a shoulder shrug. With a gym membership to the YMCA. Without enough water. With my body floating in the ravine Labor Day weekend. With enough Pilot G-2 07 pens to fix my constitution. With amendments. Without the popular vote. With my personality pushing through my socks. With letters to women who love the idea of me. With my name on the line. With no man coming back alive. With a minute to spare on the meter. Without forgiveness. With forgiveness. With me as the villain. With me as the hero. Without fear, there is no love. Without love. With love as the last word in the room. With me as the speaker. With you listening.
I would like to walk in your mind barefoot
Naked, mouth open. Strange glory of the body,
I ask you protect what I neglect. Here,
your soil is asleep with secrets
I softly wake with my lips. Strange glory
of the dirt, what mad joy you keep alive.
The triumph of where did it go all wrong
Fills the vaulted ceilings of your feelings
Like slow water in a dance hall. Last call
Comes like the last straw and I grab your hand
Like quicksand. Hear me with your whole body.
The secret entrance to our secret selves
Once had a key, but where did we leave it?
Out of my own wilderness I return.
After gathering the shade scattered in the garden,
I want to thank God for the Earth,
Rejoice in the sprawling worth, remembering
Spring as the time I swam and did not sink
Remembering my flintstone feet as a sundial
While I try to see the tops of the redwoods
This earth never once betrayed me
I want to thank God for this
But stop myself
Cause God allegedly gave us earthlings too
And what this earthling does in the dark of night
Underneath the marauding magnolia trees
Maneuvering between the wind as the bayou breathes
Can spring a loathsome wrath against the space we share.
Not enough of us care, even though there are more of us now
Than ever before, and the earth is smaller now than it was,
I can see it in how we look at one another.
But today, I reach for the light.
Out of my own wilderness I return from a hungry loneliness.
Even in loneliness, I have yet to love the light less.
Were it not for the pictures of my grandma’s backyard garden
All over her Facebook wall, it’s possible I’d never forgive myself
for staying inside the house.
“You happy now, bitch?”
-Buck Moreland, The Wire
It depends cause when I was in Venice with my cousin Marcos I ordered a drink called the Papaya King, and instead of just telling the waitress the name of the drink, I told her I’m ready to declare myself the Papaya King, and for the rest of the afternoon, that’s what she called me, and I drank a sweet kingdom. I became a kinder sovereign to myself. Nobody ever looks at the laws we follow. I’m here to change my constitution and that takes time. Who am I to promise time? I am always giving what I do not have. I want to be less selfish but I want more time for myself. If it weren’t for the places I travel in my head. Dark passengers and all crawling under the flood boards. But that plot is boring. The plot where I could be happy right now is ideal especially since I just went home for Easter, saw my cousins and brothers, saw my grandma and grandpa, saw my aunts and uncles, saw my best friends, and saw my brothers, all the pieces to this puzzled person who processes an infinite number of ideas together at once. I pull a memory like a thread and run through the past and the people who saw me grow. But where I go isn’t always so sweet. Like if I explained to each person I met the number of sad departures my mind takes every moment without ever guaranteeing my return, it’d be too much. But god I love the rush of remembering. I keep the pantry stocked with details. I’m not even looking for the truth and it still surprises me. Admit or forget, admit or forget, admit or forget. Pride is a pickle so don’t call this confession. It’s the lonely in-between I run from. But my hamstrings are weak, the muscle memory is terribly tender. This game of hurt is a worrisome sport. The thing is, I hurt myself more than any contact with a woman could. I make a promise to pretend cause it’s easier to revisit the invisible futures we could’ve had than spitting up the apple. I want to anticipate the taste of temptation, tired of hesitating at the jump, just want to be done waiting, but ask me if I’m tired of wanting, or yearning, or hurrying the present like I need my faith in the future sustained cause in twenty-four days I graduate law school with honors and this year I take the bar to become a lawyer and this is history in my family, this is a dream I see on my calendar, like this past Valentine’s day, my first niece was born, crying in the afternoon heat, the love I felt then would’ve destroyed the demons of kingdom, would’ve tossed the tyranny of guilt out like rotten fruit at the end of spring, but spring is still here, and these days, a swarm of birds follow my car home and in my head, it’s the Flying V from Mighty Ducks, and I am not alone anymore, which is such a fucking relief. When people ask me how I’m doing, I usually reply, I’m happy because I’m here, and I’m here. I admit it. I admit it so I will not forget. Today the sunset looked like a papaya pulled apart. I stood in my backyard like a proud Papaya King. I tell my people who want to know, it’s not always yes or no. I rest my case, Your honor.
I meet a guy at the Walmart Neighborhood Market on Belfort and Gessner who says his name is Mac, but people call him Big Mac, so Big Mac asks what I’m about and what I do while we both stood in the parking lot after discussing the cooking failures caused by empty propane tanks, laughing off backyard disasters when I finally tell him I’m about to finish law school, and how I’m almost a lawyer, and that’s when he stops me, that’s when interrupts my sentence like a cloud passing over the sun, and he says no you are a lawyer, you have to say it, for it to be true. Put it out there. Big Mac pulls the doubt out my mouth like a spare thread on the sleeve of my dreams, and I unravel into my grocery bags and both my hands are carrying my gratitude for this afternoon’s agent of kindness reminding me to let the good word be heard, and we shake hands and part ways like old friends, and once I return to my car, I rejoice in who I’ve become, how the world is run by none of us but we all choose to participate in fate, even when I’m late to the learning, life delivers me from my mistakes, and this is a lesson I take home with me Thursday afternoon like a ticket stub I keep on the wall in my room
When my dad would lose in backgammon, he grumbled
About luck, about both my brothers and my failure to adhere
to the updated rules of the game. I mean, the man justified defeat
Like a dying king in battle
And I believed in his brave wounds
Even when I did not see the foreshadow,
in how he salvaged small sorrow into a ship
like a sailor stuck in the sea of himself.
My father carves a life boat from each lesson
From each lesson, he rescues himself.
When I would cuss growing up, my mother would
admonish me, Zachary Fredrick! Do not cuss!
To which I reply, but my father is a sailor!
And she’d laugh where she stood, her eyes heavy with
the past,
and my tongue was a sail in the wind of an ocean I’ve
never been in
“Therefore, dear sir, love your solitude
and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation
the suffering it causes you.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Dear Zachary, sir—I need you to love better.
Dear sir, I need you to love better and mean it.
You can start with me, and all the sweet-sounding
suffering I cause you. This isn’t advice.
I love watching you try, but what good is
showing up, if you do not follow through
with who you wish to become?
Apart from me, you are another and I am other.
As if we exist in separate dimensions.
Am I a place you go but do not mention?
Dear Zachary, together, have we not walked
through shame like confetti and cascarones
underneath pink evenings? Have you forgot
the wilderness of your childhood, the backwards
deliverance of our innocence? We passed the time
like a jar of fireflies at dusk, opening the closed
jar to see how far we could see trace the fading
light. Each time you proposed an exit strategy to
get out of your head, who was your canary?
What if I told you it is not possible to love
someone until you love me? All the pain
in our heart is instructive. Isn’t that what
you call precedent. Would it please you
if I gave my argument with authority?
Because I know how you hate the past,
And yet, you protect your agony, unequivocally
too stubborn to learn the errors of your ways
And I know this weighs on you. I can feel
the slow puddle of your blood form when
you refuse to participate. Dear sir, please,
I am not an exit strategy. I am an invitation.
My only wish for you is to receive what
I give without leaving me behind. Remember
how it feels to stumble through the unfinished
plot of what is lost and what is gained? I know
you need me most when it rains and the air
changes instantly, announcing to the world
what is here and what is to come, the same way
you wish you could change back into the man
you wrote about once before you became an
island, stranded in the sand of your fears.
I hear you talk to yourself when you refuse
to use your voice. I know all your tricks.
In the mirror, when we visit each other,
Your eyes trace our body in the dim light.
Dear sir, don’t you see the space I give
is empty for a reason?
A POEM A DAY 