Each night, I run fingers over skin and search for new wounds. Thin cuts scabbed into dashed and dotted lines that trace elbows, wrists, and knees. I gave no lease for you to be here, small bruises dark and purple like grapes, rashes that burn across my back like wildfire, lashes from higher whips, and I don’t know why you’re here, but here you are to stay.
And as my skin snaps and splits and I twist in the shower, I feel that there’s someone else inside me, waiting to claw his way out, to see, to breathe.
In sixth grade our English teacher drew a vine of grapes and told us to write a poem about it. And so I wrote a handsome little thing of rhyme and meter that seemed to talk all on its own. But my teacher told me it was bland, and too strange, and why would grapes be afraid of being late to meetings? So I arranged my papers, my binder, and I slid out of that class.
And when I tore that poem to shreds later that night, I felt that there was someone else behind me, a puppeteer, actions heard but not seen.
My father looks on as I crumple papers. I wipe folders of poetry off my computer. Protagonists, farewell, here’s your climax, plotlines cut, tension released, stories dead. The ink pools, forms an orb of black fruit that drops silently from my heart to my stomach. My father says nothing, but later I see him browsing through empty folders.
Self-destruction is a weed that grows from seeds planted where we can’t see them, an ivy that grows along paths traced by our veins and goes to our brains and interrupts trains of thought-- It wraps around nerves, axons and dendrites, the trial of looking strong,messing up right and wrong, and we reach inside to pull out the choking vines, but when we tear it off it rips out pieces of our mind-
And when I drift into sleep after fighting another day, there’s someone else inside me, spreading out the soil and laying down the seed.
My father and I drive down PCH, past hotels, beaches, villas, parks, vineyards, cemeteries. “Resolution,” he instructs, “is the most vital part of the story. You must have resolution.” Later we stop, and I find myself propped behind the wheel. My father rolls down the window. Air flows in and I drive. We tell each other stories the whole way home.
My father shows me piles of inkbrush paintings he painted as a child. Crow flying over bamboo, wild goose over lakes blue, grapes at their ripest dripping off the vine. “Many more,” he mentions, “I did not paint, or threw away. Don’t trash your poetry; treasure it. Don’t forget your life; write it.”
When I write again, for what seems like the first time, someone is feeling the meter someone is humming the rhyme someone is distilling words into the champagne of poetry;
