I imagine this is a thousand years in the future and you have just discovered my art.
I expect the future is good to you.
That the future is good, period.
I hope people talk less about people's bodies.
I hope the temples are still temples and not community theatres for pretentious sanctity.
I also hope my art takes you back.
That it shows you that the life I've lived was one worth living. I can't imagine how you found this but I'm glad you did because maybe this means fate still exists.
If you were looking for a sign to go on a journey, this is it.
Go, for when you're alone and the only solace worth finding is in your head,
A journey is something to offer at the door to the rooms of your mind.
I hope my art shows you the places I built for the days when houses could not house me.
For when my body tried to expel me.
For when I fought to stay because the life I learned to love was worth fighting for.
The places were beautiful places.
They existed without bonds to time and space and they filled me in on the days I felt hollow.
The places were where I went when all that was left of me lay beneath the ruins of what I used to be.
The air there was a little damper and the rains a little heavier. The sands were light and seas led nowhere.
I laid lilies and irises there. Lilies to mourn the parts of me this
world killed and irises to celebrate the parts that survived.
I also remember that this is now and you have found my art
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In this poem, I write about fluorescence
And all the ways I'm accepting being a broken thing
I will be 20 this year and while there are things I do not know
There are things I'm learning
I'm learning to always think of the rose pendant on my neck as the flower it is
And not as the noose I occasionally want the necklace to be.
I'm learning to be the things I've lost
To hold my grief in the ways my mother can no longer hold me
So I sit with my grief and tell it it's okay to be sad.
I hold its hot tear stained face and I tell it that it's okay to cry.
I tell my grief all the things I want to be told.
I'm going to be 20 this year and I'm still learning to see myself as beautiful. Still reminding myself that flowers can grow out of cracks.
That my cracks can be pretty things too.
I'm learning the many things measured as more valuable by the fragility of their structure.
Crystals, China...Me
I'm learning to lay more irises in the rooms of my mind
To give myself more flowers.
Learning to teach myself that a noose is not an accessory
That accessories on necks should always be pretty things
I don’t consider myself anything of a poet.
