Time Is a Mother

How come the past tense is always longer?

I’ve plagiarized my life to give you the best of me

How else do we return to ourselves but to fold The page so it points to the good part

I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard.

Then it came to me, my life. I remembered my life the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree. & I was free.

How you can love the world until there’s nothing left to love but yourself.

What we’ll always have is something we lost

In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for love is Yêu. And the word for weakness is Yếu. How you say what you mean changes what you say. Some call this prayer, I call it watch your mouth.

Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns into gold. Our sorrow Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow. Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it. I'm trying to be real but it costs too much.

What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?

I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.

Because this body is my last address.

Because I, too, needed a place to hold me.

I’m still afraid of butterflies how they move so much like a heart on fire.

none of us are children long enough to love it

How can we know, with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that survives?

Because my uncle never killed himself—but simply died, on purpose.

I'm back inside my head where it's safe.

They say the earth spins and that’s why we fall but everyone knows it’s the music.

i could not speak so i wrote myself into silence

a loaf of rye is rising out of itself, growing lighter as it takes up more of the world. In humans, we call this Aging. In bread, we call it Proof.

Because what I did with my one short beautiful life— was lose it on a winning streak.

my people my people I thought the fall would kill me but it only made me real.

You can walk away. You can be nothing & still breathing. Believe me.

Oh no. The sadness is intensifying. How rude.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I imagine Van Gogh singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into his cut ear & feeling peace.

Because the fairy tales were right. You’ll need sorcery to make it out of here.

If words, as they claimed, had no weight in our world, why did we keep sinking, Doctor—I mean Lord—why did the water swallow our almost human hands as we sang?

Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.