memory

Damn those old journals. Who could have remembered that I quoted Lorca after writing INNOCENCE in white-out calligraphy on smeared purple wine when I was only twenty? Who could have told him that that is what he became- a cameo whisper lamenting women who don't love the ocean in a notebook smeared with ink, tears, and sex fluids of a blue-haired little girl who couldn't keep her head on straight? Inside these already yellowing pages of pain wrapped in sore-eye sunrises starring Me, I'm always sick in the head over some boy, or trying to save some spider, or eating the lips of city girls like they were the long lost strawberries of my father's garden and, even all the way out here, I can still taste that color on their chapstick. There I am just loving like the tall grass taught me to. It's a long way from here to there and I don't think I have the gas tank to make it. I don't think I have their numbers anymore, god knows how those rosaries of digits are always changing hands. If you tell me I tied a daisy to a chainlink fence in hopes that Mumia could see it inside the hellhouse at SCI Waynesburg for the Childrens Crusade to Death Row when I was fifteen, I believe you. But that me seems worlds away from this one.

We are sitting on the cold floorboards in an unfurnished room watching life dance backwards in my stack of photo albums in the corner. A history of a life I started watching walk away from me early and I started writing it down so everyone could stay with me, longer than a flash of eyes meeting on a busy street, faster than a firefly leaving my father's hand in the fields, slow motion like inside of a fist fight or coming for the first time. If I grabbed anybody too hard or tore their skin with my nails, I'm sorry, but like a child eating dirt, I must have you- senseless, somehow. And that goes for everybody.