exceptindreams, posts by tag: andrea gibson - LiveJournal

"Royal Heart"
Andrea Gibson

You will never be let down by anyone
more than you will be let down
by the one you love most in the world
it’s how gravity works
it’s why they call it “falling”
it’s why the truth is harder to tell
every year
you have more to lose
but you can choose to bury your past
in the garden
beside the tulips
water it
until it’s so alive
it lets go
and you belong to yourself
again

When you belong to yourself again
Remember forgiveness
is not a tidy grave
It is a ready loyal knight kneeling before your royal heart

Call in your royal heart
Tell it bravery cannot be measured by a lack of fear
It takes guts to tremble
It takes so much tremble to love
Every first date is a fucking earth quake

Sweetheart, on our first date
I showed off all my therapy
I flaunted the couch
Where I finally sweat out my history
Pulled out the photo album from the last time I wore a lie to the school dance
I smiled and said “that was never my style
Look how fixed I am
Look how there’s no more drywall on my fist
Look at the stilts I’ve carved for my short temper
Look how my wrist is not something I have to hide” I said
Well I was hiding it

The telephone pole still down from the storm
By our third date I had fixed the line
I said listen,
I have a hard time
I mean I cry as often as most people pee and I don’t shut the door behind me
I’ll be up in your face screaming “SEATTLE IS TOO RAINY SEATTLE IS TOO RAINY
I'M NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO LIVE HERE.”
I sobbed on our fourth date

I can’t live here
In my body, I mean
I can’t live in my body all the time it feels too much
So if I ever feel far away know I am not gone
I am just underneath my grief
Adjusting the dial on my radio face so I can take this life with all
of it’s love and all of it’s loss

See I already know that you are the place where I am finally going to
sing without any static meaning
I’m never gonna wait
that extra twenty minutes
to text you back,
and I’m never gonna play
hard to get
when I know your life
has been hard enough already.
When we all know everyone’s life
has been hard enough already

it’s hard to watch
the game we make of love,
like everyone’s playing checkers
with their scars,
saying checkmate
whenever they get out
without a broken heart.

Just to be clear
I don’t want to get out
without a broken heart.
I intend to leave this life
so shattered
there’s gonna have to be
a thousand separate heavens
for all of my separate parts
And none of those parts are going to be wearing the romance from the
overpriced vintage rack
That is to say I am not going to get a single speed bike if I can’t
make it up the hill
I know exactly how many gears I’m going to need to love you well
And none of them look hip at the hot coffee shop
They all have God saying “good job you’re finally not full of bullshit”
You finally met someone who’s going to flatten your knee caps into
skipping stones

Baby, throw me
Throw me as far as I can go
I don’t want to leave this life without ever having come home
And I want to come home to you
I can figure out the rain

---

My eyes can’t get enough of the trees—/they’re so hopeful, so green.

"Song on the Subway"
Ocean Vuong

Rush-hour on the A rain. A blind man
  staggers forth, his cane tapping lightly
own the aisle. He leans against the door,

raises a violin to chin, and says I’m sorry
  to bother you, folks. But please. Just listen.
  And it kills me, the word sorry. As if something like music

should be forgiven. He nuzzles into the wood like a lover,
  inhales, and at the first slow stroke, the crescendo
  seeps through our skin like warm water, we     

who have nothing but destinations, who dream of light
  but descend into the mouths of tunnels, searching.
  Beads of sweat fall from his brow, making dark roses

on the instrument. His head swooning to each chord
  exhaled through the hollow torso. The woman beside me
  has put down her book, closed her eyes, the baby

has stopped crying, the cop has sat down, and I know
  this train is too fast for dreaming, that these iron jaws
  will always open to swallow a smile already lost.

How insufficient the memory, to fail before death.
how will hear these notes when the train slides
  into the yard, the lights turned out, and the song

lingers with breaths rising from empty seats?
  I know I am too human to praise what is fading.
  But for now, I just want to listen as the train fills

completely with warm water, and we are all
  swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart
   flowing from his hands. I want nothing

but to put my fingers inside his mouth,
  let that prayer hum through my veins.
  I want crawl into the hole in his violin.

I want to sleep there
                           until my flesh
                                                  becomes music.

---

Does anyone know which poem this reader is referring to?
"There was a poem I remember reading on your livejournal a few years ago and am trying so hard to find it but i cant. I only remember one possible part of one line, something about "being pressed close" and something like swimming like a fish through a lover's ribs/ribcage? I've searched everywhere :("

I think of happy when I think of you/so wherever you are I hope you're happy

Warning: This poem is about bullying.

"The Bully"
John Lee Clark

We boys were marching up to Rodman Hall for supper and he stopped and I bumped into him

He whirled around and pointed at me and touched his lips with his middle finger and slicked it back over his head

I protested

He said yes you touch my butt

I said me not not see you accident

He said not believe you

Before breakfast next morning he saw me watching Gilligan's Island

He switched the channel

Hey

He laughed

Next morning he did the same thing

I said oh that better thank you

He frowned and pressed the remote

That interesting me like

Switch switch switch

Then Gilligan's Island was on again

I said no no not that awful boring please other other

He laughed and left Gilligan's Island on

One time I was in the shower room and a rocket of water slammed into me

Fire extinguisher

I couldn't see anything except for a baseball cap

It was his cap

I laughed and said more more feel good come on

His last year I was still learning the art of the white cane and sometimes got delayed tapping off course at night

One night I veered off between Noyes Hall and Frechette Hall and a boy offered his arm

I didn't know who until under a lamp I saw a baseball cap

Inside Frechette Hall I thanked him and he smiled

A few minutes later Gary Karow our houseparent came up to me and told me that the bully was so happy after helping me and maybe I should ask him next time I needed help

I never did

Some years later he drove down to Texas with a friend to help him pick up a pick up truck

On his way back alone it was twilight and he turned off his headlights and veered left into oncoming traffic

A car swerved in time

Another swerved

Then it was a truck that couldn't swerve and that baseball cap

---

John Lee Clark is both Deaf (born to an all-deaf family) and Blind (became so in adolescence). The word order of some of the lines (I said me not not see you accident) resembles the syntax of American Sign Language.

and the trees are naked and lonely/I keep trying to tell them/new leaves will come around in the spring/but you can't tell trees those things

"Publication Date"
Franz Wright

One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one’s book in the hands of a kindhearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can’t remember what the others
are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private

National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning

and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I’m in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?

A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Federico García Lorca
risen from the dead —
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.

---

On this day in...
2011: "Boats" by Cyril Wong
2010: "The Red Coat" by Idris Anderson
2009: "God Says Yes to Me" by Kaylin Haught
2008: "The Night Abraham Called to the Stars" by Robert Bly

Tell me what your bones say. Tell me what you would say to me if you knew it was 2 a.m. and I can't sleep again because of the loneliness. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Tell me what the name of the poem is that I need to read tonight. Tell me why or tell me you don't know, but that it's okay. Tell me that you're here.

My bones said, “Write the poems.”

"Prism"
Andrea Gibson

My friend Derrick says love is the only war worth dying for. But every time I say, "please come back", I feel like I"m trying to find a dirty needle in a haystack, and God knows I can't go out like that. I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity. Our lovers' necks are so soft. I lost my head so many times. I got sober just hoping my eyes would dry. Still, I drink so much in my sleep, I can't sleepwalk a straight line to the guest room or collapse, hang so heavy inside her lungs.

She speaks and her voice trips across her heartbeat, each word limps into the air. We are gone, she says. And I am no mortician; I have no idea how to put make-up on the dead. I have no idea how to unerase, so I just puddle at the door, my face looking like a deck of falling cards, like everything's been playing me. We tried so hard. But when I said "give me a ring", she thought I meant a call. Now I haven't had her number for two years. We've been saying how many times are we going to keep cutting these red flags into valentines. You know, all those wars we fought have turned our shine into rust, we can't even touch each other's hearts without a tetanus shot.

We can't begin to remember how we forgot there is no shelter in the womb. The heart forms long before the ribcage. My mother swore she could feel me kicking weeks before my feet formed. That's how hard my heart beat -- and it still does. They say the womb is where we learn love is knowing the cord that feeds you could at any moment wrap around your neck. I hold my breath for the entire 56 seconds it takes her to walk to the window to stare at the road to tell me she has nothing left to tell me, we are done, carrying our level heads in our tornado chests.

For the first time, I know she is right. As the dawn, after our first date, we were so young, and I hadn't written an honest love poem yet. I hadn't met anyone I could fall so hard for 'til the night we kissed on our skateboards, she teased me for going so slow. I said I never want to catch up with the letting go. I want the plead in my throat to forever anger my spine and the seams of your slippers, love, even when the dove crashed through the window, even when our friends said, you can call it love, but you know Einstein called himself a pacifist when he built the bomb.

When they ask why we stayed together for so long I say, I don’t know. I just know that we cried at the exact same time in every movie. I know we blushed everyday for the first two years. I know I always stole the covers and she never woke me up.

I know the exact look on her face, the first night she used my toothbrush. The next day, I brushed my teeth like thirtysome times, 'cause I didn't want to let her go. You have to understand when it hurt to love her, it hurt the way the light hurts your eyes in the middle of the night, but I had to see, even through the ruin, if what we were burying were seeds. There were so many plants in our house, you could rake the leaves even through that winter when I was trying to make angels in the snow of her cold shoulder. She was still leaving love notes in my suitcase; I'd always find them.

The day before I left, I remembered a story her mother told me. She said, Andrea, when Heather was a little girl, she couldn't fall asleep without tying a string to her finger all night long, she'd give that string the tiniest tug to make sure I was still there. And I'd tug back. That was love. That was love. As easy as that. Sometimes. Sometimes.

---

On this day in...
2011: "Midnight Skate" by Karla Huston
2010: "Boa Constrictor" by Shel Silverstein
2009: "Late Fragment" by Raymond Carver
2008: "Stargazer's Death" by Vasko Popa

there are times when/the sun strikes me/like a gong,/and I remember everything,/even your ears.

"Birthday Lights"
Calef Brown

---

On this day in...
2011: "Poem for My Twentieth Birthday" by Kenneth Koch
2010: Weekend, no poem
2009: "I know you little, I love you lots" by Shel Silverstein
2008: "Today someone read me St. Francis of Assisi" by Fernando Pessoa

the stars are kissing your cheeks tonight

"The Madness Vase"
Andrea Gibson

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.

The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man soon.”

The first psycho therapist told me to spend
three hours each day sitting in a dark closet
with my eyes closed and ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking
about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.

The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.
Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give
than what they get.

The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”

The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me
forget what the trauma said.

The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones.”

But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”

My bones said, “Write the poems.”

---

On this day in...
2011: "Ain't No Cure" by Rishma Dunlop
2010: Weekend, no poem
2009: "Frog Haiku" by Matsuo Bashô
2008: "Sonnet XVII: Love" by Pablo Neruda

tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño

"Pole Dancer"
Andrea Gibson

She pole-dances to gospel hymns.
Came out to her family in the middle of Thanksgiving grace.
I knew she was trouble
two years before our first date.
But my heart was a Labrador Retriever
with its head hung out the window of a car
tongue flapping in the wind
on a highway going 95
whenever she walked by.

So I mastered the art of crochet
and I crocheted her a winter scarf
and one night at the bar I gave it to her with a note
that said something like,
I hope this keeps your neck warm.
If it doesn't give me a call.

The key to finding love
is fucking up the pattern on purpose
is skipping a stitch,
is leaving a tiny, tiny hole to let the cold in
and hoping she mends it with your lips.

( Collapse )

---

M heard her perform and speak a couple weeks ago, and because he's wonderful and thoughtful, he had her personalize and autograph a copy of her book for me, which is one of the most amazing books I've ever read. I opened it up and the words are beautiful, they just flow with the most interesting wordplay and images, and if you get a chance, you should find a copy and read it.

"For Eli"
Andrea Gibson

Eli came back from Iraq
and tattooed a teddy bear onto the inside of his wrist
above that a medic with an IV bag
above that an angel
but Eli says the teddy bear won't live
and I know I don't know but I say, "I know"
cause Eli's only twenty-four and I've never seen eyes
further away from childhood than his
eyes old with a wisdom
he knows I'd rather not have
Eli's mother traces a teddy bear onto the inside of my arm
and says, "not all casualties come home in body bags"
and I swear
I'd spend the rest of my life writing nothing
but the word light at the end of this tunnel
if I could find the fucking tunnel
I'd write nothing but white flags
somebody pray for the soldiers
somebody pray for what's lost
somebody pray for the mailbox
that holds the official letters
to the mothers,
--------------fathers,
--------------------sisters,
and little brothers
of Micheal 19... Steven 21... John 33
how ironic that their deaths sound like bible verses
the hearse is parked in the halls of the high school
recruiting black, brown and poor
while anti-war activists
outside walter reed army hospital scream
100, 000 slain
as an amputee on the third floor
breathes forget-me-nots onto the window pain
but how can we forget what we never knew
our sky is so perfectly blue it's repulsive
somebody tell me where god lives
cause if god is truth god doesn't live here
our lies have seared the sun too hot to live by
there are ghosts of kids who are still alive
touting M16s with trembling hands
while we dream ourselves stars on Survivor
another missile sets fire to the face in the locket
of a mother who's son needed money for college
and she swears she can feel his photograph burn
how many wars will it take us to learn
that only the dead return
the rest remain forever caught between worlds of
shrapnel shatters body of three year old girl
to
welcome to McDonalds can I take your order?
the mortar of sanity crumbling
stumbling back home to a home that will never be home again
Eli doesn't know if he can ever write a poem again
one third of the homeless men in this country are veterans
and we have the nerve to Support Our Troops
with pretty yellow ribbons
while giving nothing but dirty looks to their outstretched hands
tell me what land of the free
sets free its eighteen-year-old kids into greedy war zones
hones them like missiles
then returns their bones in the middle of the night
so no one can see
each death swept beneath the carpet and hidden like dirt
each life a promise we never kept
Jeff Lucey came back from Iraq
and hung himself in his parents basement with a garden hose
the night before he died he spent forty five minutes on his fathers lap
rocking like a baby
rocking like daddy, save me
and don't think for a minute he too isn't collateral damage
in the mansions of washington they are watching them burn
and hoarding the water
no senators' sons are being sent out to slaughter
no presidents' daughters are licking ashes from their lips
or dreaming up ropes to wrap around their necks
in case they ever make it home alive
our eyes are closed
america
there are souls in
the boots of the soldiers
america
fuck your yellow ribbon
you wanna support our troops
bring them home
and hold them tight when they get here

---

This is taken from her website, so all the punctuation (or lack thereof) is her choice.

"Photograph"
Andrea Gibson

I wish I was a photograph
tucked into the corners of your wallet
I wish I was a photograph
you carried like a future in your back pocket
I wish I was that face you show to strangers
when they ask you where you come from
I wish I was that someone that you come from
every time you get there
and when you get there
I wish I was that someone who got phone calls
and postcards saying
wish you were here
I wish you were here
autumn is the hardest season
the leaves are all falling
and they're falling like they're falling in love with the ground
and the trees are naked and lonely
I keep trying to tell them
new leaves will come around in the spring
but you can't tell trees those things
they're like me they just stand there
and don't listen
I wish you were here
I've been missing you like crazy
I've been hazy eyed
staring at the bottom of my glass again
thinking of that time when it was so full
it was like we were tapping the moon for moonshine
or sticking straws into the center of the sun
and sipping like icarus would forever kiss
the bullets from our guns
I never meant to fire you know
I know you never meant to fire lover
I know we never meant to hurt each other
now the sky clicks from black to blue
and dusk looks like a bruise
I've been wrapping one night stands
around my body like wedding bands
but none of them fit in the morning
they just slip off my fingers and slip out the door
and all that lingers is the scent of you
I once swore if I threw that scent into a wishing well
all the wishes in the world would come true
do you remember
do you remember the night I told you
I've never seen anything more perfect than
than snow falling in the glow of a street light
electricity bowing to nature
mind bowing to heartbeat
this is gonna hurt bowing to I love you
I still love you like moons love the planets they circle around
like children love recess bells
I still hear the sound of you
and think of playgrounds
where outcasts who stutter
beneath braces and bruises and acne
are finally learning that their rich handsome bullies
are never gonna grow up to be happy
I think of happy when I think of you
so wherever you are I hope you're happy
I really do
I hope the stars are kissing your cheeks tonight
I hope you finally found a way to quit smoking
I hope your lungs are open and breathing your life
I hope there's a kite in your hand
that's flying all the way up to orion
and you still got a thousand yards of string to let out
I hope you're smiling
like god is pulling at the corners of your mouth
cause I might be naked and lonely
shaking branches for bones
but I'm still time zones away
from who I was the day before we met
you were the first mile
where my heart broke a sweat
and I wish you were here
I wish you'd never left
but mostly I wish you well
I wish you my very very best