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Too Much

Sometimes--most times--I’m too much. Too exuberant, whirling about in my prints and bright colors and painted lips and flailing limbs and careless gestures and wild, bright hair that curls onto everything and everyone around it, latching onto every pore of humanity, every piece of earth and atmosphere. Too loud, with a barrelling walk and steps that echo no matter the heels and soles attached to them, laughter always shooting out in abrupt sparks, ever expanding in the air, voice marathoning through inflections and volumes and a near endless stream of words. I’m even too loud in my quiet--breaths huffing, snorting; throat rasping in constant irritation; knuckles cracking, fingers and toes and feet and hands fidgeting, legs and ankles crossing and uncrossing, stretching and contracting; the cadence of my body rarely ever stilled, mind sprinting through stories and plotholes and memories and delusions and echoing always with emotion, inflection never muted even in ennui, in numbness. Too big, a body continually pushing forward, widening its boundaries, the geography of its flesh ever changing; hair sucking in heat and moisture, arms growing more and more dimpled, stomach protruding and slouching. Heart beating too earnestly, bleeding all over everything always, never once giving itself a break, grabbing singelmindedly at the world, pawing its way into everything and sinking its teeth in, not letting go until it leaves behind bruises and scars and is equally bruised and scarred in return, throwing itself on a pyre, on a lance, its rhythym a steady booming bass. Too declarative, the whole of me a tiny planet with its own gravitational pull; no hesitation when moving forward, unable to slow, to dance its way through life on lithe, graceful steps; too clumsy and uncoordinated to be truly, innately elegant, but all the same grabbing that ungainliness by its reins and pulling it forward, forging a path; opinions too sharp and cutting and chromatic and boisterous. I am, elementally, instinctually, too much. No matter the effort to restrain, to temper, to soften, to control, I will never not be overwhelming and emphatic, a jittery, anxious thing continuously starving for the world at my feet. So I have to divorce from myself this need to dull my roar, this compulsion to restrain my steps and movements and gestures, to fold into the world as if I am compact and infinitesimal when I am really colossal and vast. I am not small or soft or graceful or composed, and I will not let this world tell me that I should be; a tree can only be a tree, its roots tethered deep and anchored in rich soil, its branches ever seizing outward; an ocean can only be an ocean, unbound and sprawling and unrestrained, violent and volatile and gentle and placid in equal measure at its own whims. I will not mold myself into shapes nature did not make for me, I will not contract into myself, I will not lower my voice.

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A second death in as many days and I succeed at being Strong and contained, until the tweet Where one young brother says I’m not scared of dying, I’m scared of breaking my mother’s heart. I am flesh Two rooms down the hall from my mother’s flesh Holding in my hands the news which is not new and today, at last,          I understand How primal and intelligent her need To be done with this— Our sorrow, our joy, anything at all thought ours— To be done with the almost unavoidable assertion Of a self she refused To let her body take on—and to be done Permanently, by making A useful choice, through a man made useful by her choosing, A man of Irish-Scandinavian stock (the only criteria, I have wondered, in angrier moments), so that Her boys, my brothers and I, or at least our bodies Emerged from hers looking Spanish, maybe Greek or Italian. Three boys, each passing Closer to her one True North. When she tells me not to put forward that I am Black, she is saying          I love you. She is saying I want you to live. I see now. When she told my brother          she wished He’d just find a nice blonde girl and settle down, I took her by the face And, staring into her even-keeled nonchalance, Told her I love you and you are crazy. Today I see: I am flesh, I am free To inhabit my life: to stand, to sit, to breathe, to play tag Or with a toy gun, to walk away, or to run, to put my hands up, to          ask why. Today on a walk I took to release How it felt to be shut out—this time, By the editor of the African diasporic journal Who asked not me but someone who didn’t know me Was I Black— I cross 112th and Amsterdam and suddenly Am 20 years-old again, Drunk, out-of-control in pain without knowing Why, trying to jump a taxi Because I’d spent my money on booze, and the cop Whose car pulled into the crosswalk to block me, To stop me as I ran, gets out and says to me If you don’t pay the man, I’ll arrest you. I was underage. I jumped a taxi. I was incoherent and angry. I did not have the money to pay the man. I was not arrested. Turning from the news, I complain now to a friend I don’t know why we (all of us) should want to live— It’s all so futile and banal. It’s all so pointless, even when it’s good— As my mother rests inside her safe and dusty room Next to the man she crossed an ocean to find. I have thought her wrong To think that we would need saving. But what do I know Of having to choose one violence over another? Asleep now She rests inside her flesh, my father close beside her On his back, his forearm across his eyes, He who chose her, too, And over his own family, he knew to tell us, having learned early That you must cross whatever line you have to cross.

Charif Shanahan,  If I Am Alive To (via isabella-castronovo)

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Berryman’s rage wasn’t rage but sorrow turned back on itself. With teeth.

Marianne Boruch,  There Ought to Be a Law Against Henry

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As from dark orchard leaves, from quiet scripts where each shape sends its tendril reaching— circle and line, the swaddled bud, the petiole sprung, an envelope tendered.     By a window, the infant turns, rooting toward the breast,                     sun-lit, the mother humming. (Those far things, sources of power and regret, cliffs and waves, continue at a distance.)               Here you’ll find a name scrawled in the bark— last words, left to chance and strangers.            There, the black ant, burdened by a crumb, and the weight of her lacquered armor, crossing—climbing, switching, doubling back—gnarl and crevice and cul de sac.                Pinch-waisted, driven on, and trembling, does she have a notion of her own, or is it only species memory—so fearless, so abstract?     because it is winter everywhere,            I spin my cocoon            I dig my heart a grave     Indifferent, a blossom drifting, the knob swelling, the leaf turned to shadow: filigree, smudged. The petiole now brittle in the first cold nights.                        The burden, relieved, weighs all the more from the guilt of its release.     Too light, too light, like a sudden waking, the sun in your eyes: you cannot see for it.     How long will we live in this leaf-strewn place, thinking we belong to the sky?

Susan Stewart , Poem from Hölderlin

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Her body is not your bedroom, it is not a place for you to rest your weary head and then leave in a mess in search of greater adventures. Her body is a home, but not for you, it is a sanctuary for her and her alone.

Nikita Gill (via meanwhilepoetry)

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If my love for you were a teacup, I would praise it for its blue. I’d consider Its delicate handle, the pictures painted there Of ladies, of their parasols. But my love is not a teacup, It is not even the tar pit from which we draw Fodder for the desolate streets, oh lightless at night, Oh pathways asking for feet and their memory, It is not even a tugboat going Bravely into morning, carrying cordage and salt, Nor that saddest, sickest animal In the zoo, carious, mangy, whose hair molts, Who with its wounds sits in the bare Hay-padded corner of a cell and licks At the question of what it means to be here. Yet in winter my love is covered with the brightness Of snow, in winter my love is filled with eyes. It waits for me at the block’s edge, Habitual dog, who walks me back into that gaseous Entity we call life. Others’ loves may wink and smile Like the moon through a resurrection of vapors, Like the coy and barbarous moon, who knows no allegiance. But my love is more like an ice sculpture In a country of perpetual coldness, which the heat Of your anger cannot damage, nor the pick Of your words impugn. Now Lay your worry aside from you, stranger, Put your hands near these curves: do you feel That hallowed temperature? Among my people We call this absolute love.

Monica Ferrell,  Of the Irresolubleness of Diamonds

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After a century, humpbacks migrate again to Queens. They left due to sewage and white froth banking the shores from polychlorinated- biphenyl-dumping into the Hudson and winnowing menhaden schools. But now grace, dark bodies of song return. Go to the seaside— Hold your breath. Submerge. A black fluke silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline. Now ICE beats doors down on Liberty Avenue to deport. I sit alone on orange A train seats, mouth sparkling from Singh’s, no matter how white supremacy gathers at the sidewalks, flows down the streets, we still beat our drums wild. Watch their false-god statues prostrate to black and brown hands. They won’t keep us out though they send us back. Our songs will pierce the dark fathoms. Behold the miracle: what was once lost now leaps before you.

Rajiv Mohabir,  Why Whales Are Back in New York City  

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You may not believe it, but I have tried, set my sights on the morning star in belief it would guide me. I have tried. I have tried, as the Jesuits taught, to be singular, to be whole, to be one. The labor of this was exhausting. Time reveals things one need not appreciate when young, and I fear being singular, being one, is something damned near impossible for someone like me. Saint Jerome, cloistered in a tiny room, found his singular calling in updating the Latin Bible with his knowledge of Greek texts. In Assisi, Saint Francis updated nature, called birds out of the trees. I am, unfortunately, no saint. Fractured, divided to the quick, I am incapable of being singular. And the old nun who taught Art at my high school, who called me a stupid mongrel, understood this very fact long before I did. Profession, family, belief: I can see now my background challenges me, prevents me from remaining true to only one thing. The fog, settled over Ocean Beach, settles the matter by embracing everything indiscriminately, and I want to understand why I notice such things. For most of my life, I have desired a category, a designation, but maybe that desire was misplaced? Maybe it was just another failure, a failure of imagination? Outside, two hummingbirds cross-stitch the air. They have lived here for so long, lived off the “nectar” I boil up for them each week, that they show me no semblance of fear or distrust— they hover and feed near me with violent precision.

C. Dale Young,  Portrait in Graphite and Ornamental Hagiography (via isabella-castronovo)

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(take six)

the knife of grief

sings as it cuts through

my flesh, pale and dimpled

it scrapes out my throbbing innards

pulp and seeds discarded in bundles

fat and dripping, pulsating

the jagged edges of my body

now gaping wounds mouths open in prayer

echoing, echoing

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(take five)

           crying                   is easy, despair. the diaphragm    constricts             sobs are ripped        from                the bottoms of              feet

phlegm pools           at the       base of an                   upper            lip

   vocal chords         burn           eyes are    vandalized       by                 tears

but grief                is phantom                        its ectoplasm seizes                  hold of tight          marrow and                       electric circuits

hollows                              out

ventricular     polyps

until the              body is owned

      by chill.    

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(take four)

grief

hollows

me

pale

vase

brittle

and

cold

little

fragile

apparition

humorless

wind

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(take three)

it hollows me a pale vase brittle and cold

a little fragile apparition a humorless wind

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(take two)

it hollows me

a pale vase brittle and cold

a little fragile apparition

a humorless wind

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Grief, a series

(take one)

it

hollows

me

a

pale

vase

brittle

and

cold

a

little

fragile

apparition

a

humorless

wind

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Emptiness is a blessing: it can’t be owned if it doesn’t exist. * My father said to bloom but never fruit— a small trickle eating its way through stone. * I am one kind of alive: I see everything the water sees. I told you a turn was going to come & turn the tower did. What are the master’s tools but a way to dismantle him. * Who will replace the blood of my mother in me— a cold spring rising. She told me a woman made of water can never crack. Of her defeat, she said this is nothing.

Lisa Ciccarello,  A water woman has no body  

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When within ourselves in autumn we feel the autumn I become very still, a kind of singing, and try to move like all things green, in one direction, when within ourselves the autumn moves, thickening like honey, that light we smear on faces and hands, then touch the far within one another, something like autumn, and I think when those who knew the dead, when they fall asleep, then what, then what in autumn when I always feel I’m writing in red pencil on a piece of paper growing in thickness the way a pumpkin does, traveling at fantastic speed toward orange, toward rot, when in autumn I remember that we are cold-smitten as I continue smearing red on this precipice, this ledge of paper over which I lean, trying to touch those I love, their bodies rusting as I keep writing, sketching their red hands, faces lusting for green.

Mark Irwin,  In Autumn

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bullet

love is a bullet

it hurts just as much going in as it does coming out

but you're numb to the pain at first

too dumb too stunned struck back by the force of it all