Once I started talking to myself like I was someone
else it was the only way that made any sense to think
about anything: you notice the acorns now.
You comb your hair. You miss your mom. You
are not a good daughter. You were about to say this
mechanism makes it easier to forgive yourself.
I know I never was a child but still I have to ask,
is everyone grown up now but me? I am getting older
now and I still want people to want to fuck me but mostly
I am concerned that I might not be getting any smarter
nor any kinder, that I might not have really learned anything
after all, that I will die asking myself the difference between
precious things I am afraid to touch, that death is our only lasting
invention, that there is nothing more commonplace.
*
Most likely several twenty-two year old women with baby
daughters died last week but only one of them was your baby
cousin. You are wondering if America did not break your mother,
too, if blame is the reed your mother breathed through jungle nights
until the bayonets passed, if the reed is what swung your mother’s hand.
Your mother isn’t dead but you miss her anyway. You believe
in dead things, old trees, some stones, your ghosts, that every death
is commonplace except the death of someone you love.