Christina's Words

Last night I painted a purple tree on my bedroom wall
I woke up this morning in a pile of leaves
The colour of a million different faces
Thinking of that hand that planted the seed
Of the family tree that grew us all
And how each one of us
Will one day fall back to the ground

This morning
I was listening to my heart pound
Knowing with every single beat
That a thousand other hearts were falling asleep forever
On a day they never thought they would
And I know there are tribes of aborigines
That decide how and when they’ll die
After a hundred years or so
They walk into the desert alone
Offer up their breath
And within two minutes soar into a death
As beautiful as their life
And I was thinking I
Will probably never be enlightened enough to decide how I want to die

So this morning
I decided how I want to live
What I want to give
What kind of song I want to sing
Now I’m no longer
Looking at my days like they’re a cup
Calling them half empty or half full
When they’ve always been enough
They’ll always be enough
To fill me up
If I stop thinking so much
And start drinking them up
Until I get so drunk and high on my days
I’ll be walking up to strangers and saying things like
“Hey, I know Jesus was born in a manger
But I woke at dawn today
To watch the earth’s horizon
Give birth to true rising sun of God
And I can’t stop singing hallelujah”

Can you believe we’re here?
Can you believe there are gods somewhere praying to us?
I want to be that nut on a bus
Who’s really a prophet
Telling everybody
“Smoking is bad
Stop it
You might be an opera singer some day
And how are you gonna hit the high notes?”
I wanna live like those high notes
That rise from the throats of old ladies
When they see little babies
Riding in shopping carts
I wanna start somebody’s heart like that
Taking ninety years back
So you’ll have sworn
You weren’t born
Until you saw me
Planting roses
In all the sidewalk cracks
So when you trip
You’ll fall in love
With someone you thought you hated
And now look at what that love has created

Look
There’s a sky
On her faded blue jeans
With a flock of birds
About to fly to my words
And my next line’s
Gonna rhyme with her eyes
And she’ll wink
And I’ll think I’m as beautiful as him

I wanna live my life
Like it’s a little league game
I don’t care if I win
Just wanna watch some little girl
Get her very first hit
Watch her father cheer so hard
He spills his beer
And decides to quit
I wanna split some woman’s
Tired eyes open
Wake her with her own sunrise
So she knows
There’s reason to be hoping
She’ll say
“There are stingers in my heart
But I’m sure that I’m a queen”
And that night
She’ll vow to swarm
Until every angry car horn
Is reborn a song
Of let there be light
Every angry war cry reborn
A song of let there be life

I wanna build the timid teenage boy
A microphone that will
Echo his rhymes
The same way
They echo in his shower
When he’s home alone

I wanna write poems
In the tone
Of your mother’s eyes
When she whispered your name
For the very first time
Poems that will make you go home
Pick up the phone
And call her
While I call mine to say
“You know those lines
On the kitchen wall
Where I grew
Taller and taller and taller
Put a couple more there won’t you?
Cause I’m growing up here”
No longer looking at my days
Like they’re a cup
Calling them enough
From now on
They’ll be overflowing
Since now I’m knowing
It’s up to me
To fill them up

~ Andrea Gibson

Every morning the maple leaves.

Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts

from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big

and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out

You will be alone always and then you will die.

So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog

of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.

Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party

and seduced you

and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.

You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?

A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.

Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.

What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.

Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly

flames everywhere.

I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,

that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.

I’m not the princess either.

Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.

I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,

I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow

glass, but that comes later.

And the part where I push you

flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,

shut up

I’m getting to it.

For a while I thought I was the dragon.

I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was

the princess,

cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,

young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with

confidence

but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,

while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,

and getting stabbed to death.

Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.

You still get to be the hero.

You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!

What more do you want?

I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re

really there.

Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?

Let me do it right for once,

for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,

you know the story, simply heaven.

Inside your head you hear a phone ringing

and when you open your eyes

only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.

Inside your head the sound of glass,

a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.

Hello darling, sorry about that.

Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we

lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell

and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.

Especially that, but I should have known.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together

to make a creature that will do what I say

or love me back.

I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not

feeding yourself to a bad man

against a black sky prickled with small lights.

I take it back.

The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.

I take them back.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

Crossed out.

Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something

underneath the floorboards.

Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle

reconstructed.

Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all

forgiven,

even though we didn’t deserve it.

Inside your head you hear

a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up

in a stranger’s bathroom,

standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away

from the dirtiest thing you know.

All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly

darkness,

suddenly only darkness.

In the living room, in the broken yard,

in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport

bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of

unnatural light,

my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.

And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view

of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.

I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,

smiling in a way

that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,

up the stairs of the building

to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,

I looked out the window and said

This doesn’t look that much different from home,

because it didn’t,

but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.

We walked through the house to the elevated train.

All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful

mechanical wind.

We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,

smiling and crying in a way that made me

even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I

just couldn’t say it out loud.

Actually, you said Love, for you,

is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s

terrifying. No one

will ever want to sleep with you.

Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—

here’s the pencil, make it work . . .

If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window

is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing

river water.

Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it

Jerusalem.

We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not

what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,

a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over

and over,

another bowl of soup.

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.

Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.

Forget the dragon,

leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.

Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,

in gold light, as the camera pans to where

the action is,

lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see

the blue rings of my eyes as I say

something ugly.

I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,

and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.

But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.

There were some nice parts, sure,

all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas

and the grains of sugar

on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry

it’s such a lousy story.

Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently

we have had our difficulties and there are many things

I want to ask you.

I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,

years later, in the chlorinated pool.

I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have

these luxuries.

I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.

We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .

When I say this, it should mean laughter,

not poison.

I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.

Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.

Quit milling around the yard and come inside.

Words … for the Time Being

Author: Christina's Words

“Enough” by Andrea Gibson

“We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for…

“Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” by Richard Siken

“I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? …

“The Ubiquity Of The Need For Love” by Ronald Koertge

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