All I want
Is to be a woman.
All I need
Is to dance over a wood floor
witnessed by a few who love me,
to tell them who I am.
All my life is a page torn from this book,
Torn out in supposition of completeness or rage.
There is no perfect moment,
Only specificity.
The way I design things
Falls apart when I light the candles
and start to play.
The insides rewrite themselves into a future finale
And I forget why I came here.
I notice I am on stage again.
I have tears in my eyes
You look through me,
Not into me.
You see something of yourself in my face
I don't know who you are.
This tenderness of mine
I keep shut,
closed out of reach.
But on stage it is safe to show:
I give you unnamed souls,
Death crying,
A baby being born in light.
I give you everything I have forgotten to remember about myself.
I give you the way my belly flowers when I open to emotions purging in the night.
I give you a balloon, filled up with innocence and tied with a ribbon.
I give you my ambition. I don't want it anymore. You can build your skyscrapers with it
while I collect tadpoles and swim with the fish in my pond.
I will give you the maple tree I sat in as a child, climbed up and read stories all afternoon in the light.
Because all I want
Is to be a woman.
To relinquish this claim I have
On anything other than clay.
All I want is to dig my hands into earth
and live there like a tree for decades to come.
All I want is to remember what it feels like
to be a song on the wind,
An osprey taking flight
over a sun-baked river gorge.
All I want is to be the main character in my own movie,
Cello music playing in the background,
While I drive home in a dusty old pickup.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
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