FIRST POEM WRITTEN DIRECTLY TO MY MOTHER, RIGHT BEFORE MOTHER'S DAY

"Don't set out to become a cosmic
lesion upon your own damned life. Be more than you could have possibly expected."

Without you, I never would have known this.

The levitation that bestows a doubt, slot-stanced foolish there: Deliberate in heaving
on my sorry crib. A hereafter stitched into green windowcloth, my tongues intend to choose
offal in serenity. Brassia beating smoke all throughout a greenhouse. The nodosa extinguished
with absurd brevity. A garden you helped to form inside of me: the garden that cannot help but grow.
I heard Hendrix beat Dylan on "All Along The Watchtower" steamed off cat-piss with Brooksie in extraordinary poker light, leaving enough
to learn I was only 12. Stalled a climbed tree with my belly a wobble or stutter short. I catch of each branch. I am here for the interview. I am hoping to get the job.
My muscles bend quite the same as your own. I have celebrated your birthdays. I would loan you my scissors.


While there is a beg your pardon or a plea,
a take-me-out-of-this-before-I-begin-to-pop,
at least I didn't have to wear leg braces or teeth braces and you had no Autistic children.


Of the mother twice aware I can only shame myself in saying: I did not set out to become another cadaver on a cooling board.
I did not set out to become a cylinder spacing myself between.
Illegitimate in ways I have not been, I see myself facing inward.
There is a day for us. Gold will become of dirt.
The shores are staying apart from the sands. And so I salute your arms,
the pieces of you that can still hold onto a liver, lungs, spleen. Into life is enough to say thank you,
a short newspaper clipping of resolve. A gift ten times any other.
My unassuming "I love you" and an "Each day is your day."