poem fragment i just found
i went hunting for a poem to share with y'all that might be my favorite, and got distracted. found this in my Hampshire 03/04 folder, under "Spoken Word Experiments." (how foreboding is that...?) might be today's lil project.
When We Met the Room Almost Stopped Spinning
Most of my life I lived in a house of tornadoes.
Despite the size my friends stopped coming over,
passing Christians and their dogs would bark at the driveway
like this was their duty to God
for the day.
Wellesley
is where families come to raise children
who don’t know how to wash dishes.
Knocking on our front door
was like standing at the edge of a vacuum
powerful enough to suck down whole buildings.
That’s sort of the beginning of it.
My sister and I played games like
“Chain Your Hand to the Guardrail Or You’re Gonna Fly Away”
and this wasn’t the kind of flying
kids dream of.
It’s more like growing up thinking
some night you’re gonna be flown to a private Oz
in your head,
where no one’s wearing masks; their heads really just look like
that.
But this is what the suburbs do;
either your house rattles or it doesn’t.
You learn to cope:
open the windows to equalize the pressure.
Close the windows to make the Christians shut up.
Open the windows to pull the pillows out of your ears.
Wash the dishes, go to school, try to stop shaking.
When you leave, you dream of spinning tables and spinning salt shakers.
Nothing looks right if it’s not unstable.
So when we met
I loosened up like a drunk in a car wreck.
When We Met the Room Almost Stopped Spinning
Most of my life I lived in a house of tornadoes.
Despite the size my friends stopped coming over,
passing Christians and their dogs would bark at the driveway
like this was their duty to God
for the day.
Wellesley
is where families come to raise children
who don’t know how to wash dishes.
Knocking on our front door
was like standing at the edge of a vacuum
powerful enough to suck down whole buildings.
That’s sort of the beginning of it.
My sister and I played games like
“Chain Your Hand to the Guardrail Or You’re Gonna Fly Away”
and this wasn’t the kind of flying
kids dream of.
It’s more like growing up thinking
some night you’re gonna be flown to a private Oz
in your head,
where no one’s wearing masks; their heads really just look like
that.
But this is what the suburbs do;
either your house rattles or it doesn’t.
You learn to cope:
open the windows to equalize the pressure.
Close the windows to make the Christians shut up.
Open the windows to pull the pillows out of your ears.
Wash the dishes, go to school, try to stop shaking.
When you leave, you dream of spinning tables and spinning salt shakers.
Nothing looks right if it’s not unstable.
So when we met
I loosened up like a drunk in a car wreck.