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{an open letter to a better poet} kasandra larsen We're not speaking the same language, though we use identical alphabets; my vocabulary's limited, and I can't pry the top of my head off, let syllables spill, list images that have meaning to anyone but me. Memory is faulty on this end; I make things up, invent, even after forty years hard labor, because I can't remember detail unless it's at the center of a wound, distancing myself from everything but trauma, only recognizing that as truth, spending only as many pinched minutes in this body as necessary because it hates me. My aches don't always reflect reality, nor do my eyes, but if I were a brain in a jar, the fear is that I'd vibrate this through ripples in the brine: sad echoes, copies, derivative shadows of someone I could have loved if I'd caught her as a child. Now I'm unable to find a single expression that's truly mine, yet keep trying, compulsive, addicted, words my only currency to describe decapitated sensation, lack of boundary that serves to muddle me; it isn't envy so much as simple inability to see and fix what seems to go so remedially wrong compared to words that make me ache to put my skin back on. |
