Some days
the shadows eclipse the light of the soul
that like a lantern, like a prism, must keep shining out
Sparking, a lighter with no flame.
I am the light of the world.
The smell of burnt hair reminds me of my ancestors.
Witches and witchhunters all.
Today, I read about a strange math puzzle, where 1=one, but nothing is greater than 3.
But, in my eyes, 1 can never equal one, because by viewing it, it’s doubled, and by saying it, it’s tripled. It’s like 1 = infinity.
I am obviously no mathematician.
Burnt hair, burnt smells, acrid smoke, Fatena Ayyad, with burns all over her body.
My foster sister once. She was crazy about tennis.
I am crazy with grief.
As a child, I could always see a concentration camp when I closed my eyes.
I could see numbers on my skin, and hungry people. I remember, with a memory that never happened, being trapped in a train with too many people, and no hands to hold.
Maybe we all have memories that never happened.
There is a primitive satisfaction in tearing meat off a bone. Not cutting it up, or gently eating it, tearing it off with your teeth, quickly and fiercely. It’s what lovemaking should be. Honest. Direct. Primal.
Hungry.
Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs shaped my early reading, with Sylvia Plath joining in somewhere in my 20′s. A teenager reading Burroughs was eye-opening, thrilling.
That’s a man who knows how to tear meat off a bone.
Sylvia’s jar and Sylvia’s oven still hurts me. She was my mother, and I am her. We are all crazy, all smart, all wicked, and all funny. And all 3 of us are partly dead. As for Jack?
Well, you know Jack.
Most of my writing classes were pretentious. “That’s a poem.” “That’s not a poem.”
I always got A’s. Apparently I could pretend a poem.
All these words about me, all these thoughts about me, they entangle me up, because I have no daughter. No Freida to my Sylvia, as I was to my mother.
Freida and I are on a level most can’t fathom. I’ll never meet her, but we’re sister souls.
With no Ted.
I had a Ted once. He threw me away.
I still love you. My father. My daddy.
You asshole.
Where are these thoughts leading? Where is this poem leading?
It’s leading to this.
This.
