This Poem Kills Though it can Heal
She is the first poem I have written these last six years or so. The only thing for which I have been asked by you. Wise though you are, even in my strength, perhaps it is all I have ever owned to give you. You SAW that! My only human, girlish blush.
Dork. Pervert. Never again tell me I do not know you.
It is what it is, what it may be, only what you say, you are the only audience, though others may think they can read it. Believe me.
Go see it in her, my journal. She carries it so much better than I may ever hope to do.
Her friends are also fond of you, more than she, for she is more me than I wish to be.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/psychoticfallen/http://www.livejournal.com/users/violetshotsilk/http://www.livejournal.com/blackwillowswan/ Alexandra
If we could swim
I asked you that day you bemoaned your height and its disgrace in basketball to teach me how to swim.
You did not know how and I was not surprised, the East what it is.
And yet what I have not found in myself but that has been in you?
You know how to Swim, Matthew. It's Martial Arts,
Fighting for your life in the water.
I suppose I do as well.
This is what I have tried to tell you,
What you refuse to hear.
I have only been seen to swim when I thought I was, or knew I could be drowning.
Mama so proud, not knowing I couldn't breathe but for her, cheering me on
Little dolphin bluish-black on her back
Appearing to swim away.
For true. Swimming to the air of her arms, her kisses, her clownish smile.
Her high voice, more sorry, buring, kisses as she lifted me gasping from the water.
There I released the chlorine in my stomach, my throat, and she knew but what had happened.
"Oh, Darling, I didn't know, you looked the beauty, so sweet
Swimming away on your back.
I didn't see your pain for being unable to breathe in again."
And so, I'll try to tell it again, as it is and not like:
Matthew Mahoney, it's as morphine is, and a bit like swimming.
I have the movement and breathe in the mirror before me, with you
But I fear the water is mine and not yours, god of the black moon
Of the sun, of the red bandages and the blue heavy bag, my lower abdomen.
Even that is mine, you see. Never will it end. Though I bear not your children
So am I ever and always pregnant with what you have given us.
Understand. This is not fate, not shrewish destiny, blushing in her bloody violet anger.
This is how we were meant to fit. Together and apart as lost puzzle pieces.
Or marbles, they say, you the giant pearl aggie, me the alexandrite, cheap amethyst sub.
Round in the anger of her knowledge, knowing she alone may be your fate, and yet cannot be for her will to live
Without you.
Let me never say it again, and if I regret nothing else, that I have ever said it to begin.
But I had to, Maddie, My only Oberon or Albert, or John,
Not knowing, either of us what it means to hold anything, too light in our paths
I am let go, though I feel you all around me and swim,
Black swan to the air, where I may not find you, yet I know just now
Just right, where you may have been.
Alexandra