LONGFORM Acrylic, pencil, and drafting tape on paper, 9 x 12 inches

This piece is an original stream-of-consciousness long poem written in one sitting. The full version reads as follows:

“Troublesome to be shaded but holding the shield, to be a rose trimmed but wielding the shears - a bird who believes its wings are clipped but whose feathers are full-fledged, opal even in the sun. To feel as if made of obsidian sludge, to boil, to ooze, but to be the white sand in the cape. To feel forgotten, but others find your grains in the pockets of their shorts well into the winter. A self stifled by its selfhood.

Sorrow. A sorrow that cannot be climbed over, cannot be burrowed into. Cannot be melted nor shattered. A sorrow that cannot be pierced - your barbs will not stick. A sorrow that will accept an embrace, littering the grass with embers too weak for the dew. To caress sorrow is to be surprised by its warmth. To be surprised by the suppleness of its center. To understand why resistance sits between the gaze and the navel. You come to see that some have never seen a cloud before, simply for that it is overhead. Never seen the sweet movement of an earthworm before, for the fingers have never met a spade.

I want to live in a world where the sky cries in coconut water, where the pools are murky, streaming down my street. I once slept in a land where the ponds were golden, as if crafted by an orb weaver, embroidered by knobby legs. I once lived in a land where royalty was adorned with crowns of twigs. To sit in the sun, braiding brown pine needles, counting the day’s bounty on your skin. To whisper in the garden and be heard only by a pair of herons, bronzed, lithe. To know your body because you lived in it. To climb trees and count crickets. To lose it all, swept away by water and time, both relentless.

I used to express my love anonymously, mourning a person’s hands in sharpie on a bathroom stall. Now I do not know quite how to love. Love may be like a tree, frantically branching and budding - cyclical, rigorous. Love may be stalagmites of wet sand dripping from a weathered hand, beautiful, fragile, of this earth. Love may be a cloud at two in the afternoon - transient, illusory, but how sweet. Love may be a pear ripening on the tree - softening past its appeal into decay. How human it is to write out sentences like this, to think that a thing is anything but what it is. That it is. To live so isolated in the mind that existence is no longer enough. No longer standing in reverence.

But how to be of this earth? How to be of the tree frogs and the day lilies and even the mosquitoes? How to learn to lie in the cool earth long before our time? How to spiral outwards instead of in? A whole personal solar system orbiting the bellybutton.

Please exorcise me. Please wrap your hands around my skull and turn it toward the moon first, and your eyes second. Please place both of my hands firmly on the center of your chest so I can feel the tempo by which you live. I promise I’ll take good notes - my handwriting is real nice. Please lay on top of me, sink my bones into the mattress, never the sea, so I can remember that I am more than just a mind. Please walk the dog with me and watch me water the plants. See how they trot, with a gait so golden. See how they sprout, ambitious, never yielding. Watch me do the same. Watch my hair grow long, long, long. Watch it cascade down the stairs, glimmering, proud. Watch me braid it into a rope. I can be useful, and they will all clap and say thank you very much. Watch me melt and drip through tradition’s fingers, like candle wax. Say you’re proud. Say you’re proud of me. Say you like the way it feels. Will you mount this horse with me? We don’t have to canter, our gait needn’t be golden. We are smiling and I do believe that is enough.

I do believe that should be enough. Alas we yearn, dewdrops cresting our nose. Dewdrops adorning our lips. To our surprise, they taste like honeysuckle. To our surprise, the shears feel made to be gripped by our soft palms.

I feel relaxed in suffering, I soften into it, I moisten sorrow’s cheek with my breath, sour and begging.

The hands of the clock are set to eleven eleven so that I may always make a wish, desire streaming out of me and pooling at my feet. Will you make a wish for me? With me? Will you thumb the minute hand and tell me I need not yearn, for I have you? For I have? For I am? For I? Will you rest your forehead on mine and tell me I look like a bug when I look at you like that, but in a good way? Will you tell me that I am an iridescent beetle who sure does know how to be? Will you be a cricket and teach me song?

A daffodil droops into view. I would have gone crooked but for you, I sing to myself. I sing.”