by Lemmy Ya'akova
here i show you a human heart
a cento after Kristin Lueke
what is known: time passes. sky’s blue.
there was a time—can you believe it?—
when i didn’t know your name.
we feel the world in friction
measure learning in the wounds.
a voice can say so much. the rest
remains unholy mystery (holy mystery?)
no one thing stays one way. i imagine you young
take you in hand like a stone fruit uncertain
if i should say sorry for the year i spent quiet.
we will learn to love a little mystery. our fate
is weird on both ends & indifferent between
some nothing torn asunder. emptiness itself
emptied out. materialism holds life
is merely matter made complex. this sounds right.
i call no monument my kin. each catastrophe
a clearing, each clearing punctuation & so
it comes as no surprise this stubborn, graceless
disbelief that, only in its infancy, the earth
could do so much: create rogue paradise,
fruits we’ll never taste, but something will, or did.
already horses for fifty thousand years now
how long before no? & please? or are you okay
& what do you need, i have plenty.
i love the world with you in it, keeping
what you can alive & hoping, seeking, seeing
in yourself a whole self, born of earth
that has suffered to have you, however impossible,
cryptic, occasionally unkind, however you are
beloved, at last we survive this together.
take comfort.
take longing.
let flowers.
a house that doesn’t change is a dead house
once again, I brought my head to the heart party.
kazu makino might call this “suffering with aim”
so I continue on like I haven’t made this mistake at all,
like I showed up for my shit sandwich right when
I was hungry, bored maybe.
this is a poem about loving,
not the way most of our parents have taught us—
consider, love that isn’t an alter, love that isn’t everyone falling
on their own swords. here, I remember when I offered
my hand & they swatted it. there, when they offered
their hand & I did the same. look, I’m just
as confused & scared as anyone. we want to be
of use so badly it’s killing us. don’t worry, I would throw
a toaster in the tub to hang out with you sometime.
the day Val Kilmer died I didn’t know but I saw cowboys
everywhere who told me it was time to regulate
my nervous system, who told me I, for some reason
that doesn’t matter, need to feel guilt in order to feel
like a good person. I have to stop watching myself
from the outside. so I unearth myself
again from the dirt, rise with the sun over the graveyard.
it’s true, it feels like death, and I’m no jesus but if I was
I’d say, do what must be done. don’t be tamed in order
to be loved, to love. we would never see a puppy try
to convince a bear to be a puppy but, it’s as if
we want to suffer, as if it isn’t coming either way.
Lemmy Ya'akova is Y2K popcorn & a cat in an overgrown moose. Their first day is here. The brave dark wheel will try to keep up.