(via lifeinpoetry)
(via lifeinpoetry)
(via lifeinpoetry)
(via lifeinpoetry)
The first song from my newest spoken word project, “Blessed Are The Weak (For They Are No Good!)”, or “FTANG”.
www.h-ngm-n.com/storage/CERTA_Juliet.pdf
“It’s the thirteenth day of spring and all the snow
is dirtier than it was yesterday. My teeth
are one day older and the sky
has another thousand molecules of cancer moving through it,
but my eyes have been dry,
and that feels really nice, in bed eating Oreos
like a normal person, my feet getting warm as my brain
softens and slips away from itself
like a moon, a sailboat, all the pretty things
we don’t know how to hold.
You asked me for a letter
and I sent you a star-shaped piece of my tongue.
You asked me for a letter
and this isn’t it. I’m sorry. I get so busy
thinking about you that I forget
to think about you. I imagine my insides
like a whole sea of sailboats
murmuring to each other in the dark,
and I wonder how many secrets exist on the Earth at any given moment,
what breed of flowers
will dig their roots into our graves, what shade of gold
is your breath when you dream?
You make me want to make stamps out of morning,
seal every envelope with a moan.
How many fibers of the universe have we given birth to?
Like this I am always wading through an orchestra, my hips
always brushing against some sort of glass, all these breakable
thoughts about God, the sun
in April, the sound you make when you look at me and don’t make any sound. ”
This particular combination of delight in the universe and the speaker’s desire for death will remind many of Sexton. Yet Certa has made the subject of depression, and the way it may present death as a constant choice, into wholly her own investigation of the way “[her] bones are laced too tight.” The failing relationship at the center of the manuscript is interesting, yet the relationship of the speaker to her own body and the concept of remaining within it takes on precedence. She repeatedly asserts “this is me” while, without acknowledgement, therapists offer their opinions: “They keep telling me I’m too high-functioning/ for a full-blown diagnosis.” This is the contradiction that takes on the most pain—one for which there is no explanation or release, in which the state of humanity may simply be to pain from awareness of mortality.