inreaction

ex- out + sprre to breathe

in the beginning god said and there was.

then god did and there was a man
man of dust from the ground
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life
a truly creative inspiration.

today men speak and there is not.
it appears god inspires  no longer,
breathes no more.

expire; oxford english dictionary:
To pass out in, or like, breath
To breathe one’s last breath, die.
To come to an end
To become void through lapse of time (rare)
To be consumed, exhausted, or spent.

–
A young man sits with Milton.
Footnotes astound, overpowering verse
penned in visions of a blindsighted belief.
Belief in the magic is no more, creation has
breathed it’s last breath, died;
Come to an end.
Miltonic is no more, no patience for allusion;
No voracity of reading, no schema to draw from or on.
Man’s history has been told in three chapters,
of Original verse. Genesis it seems, has ceased.

There is little to learn, still less to earn,
When the nation’s mind is set to burn;
The foolish bolster promises of hope
Of a new genesis, spoken by our nemesis.
Now anatomically named men bring our fall,
Bearing shiny holsters and threats for all.

The race is over, has been for ages;
We’ve turned from light to fools on campaign stages.

of, and upon, stars and skies
i loved, crazed, wished, and thrived.
morning and light i despised and decried.
now i see darkness’s damning lies.

where pleasant hid, plain and yet worse abound.
change has come but not yet gone,
despite how the weak come to fawn.
upon this, pain still wound.

like time told by the warm sundial
do vice and more traits abhorrent
grow steadily and evermore apparent,
so too does this pen’s ink turn green with bile.

days may stay bright with sun,
but night no more for this one.

[i just saw spoken word like mad and remembered why i have faith in the word]

it’s been so long i’ve forgotten how to start.

but really all we’re ever doing is remembering how to start. every time our minds slip back into remembrance, we take time to call back something we knew–maybe its familiarity we look for, maybe it’s this newness, and it’s sweet decadence. regardless of our ignorance or our malice or our sweetness, we try to find that which we knew. whether we’re stroking the curve of another’s back or we’re dancing without reason or we’re frantically throwing vocals into reciting words–its all in calling back.

so i remember. and it comes back as i remember that i dislike typing words that i wish i was writing with messy ink blots and unlined notebooks–but sometimes we remember too late. because really, we are too late. we remember too late.

it’s like growing up. we forget that we’re doing it. we forget who defined us when we were kids–who we wanted to be in hopes of being something older–something other–than who we were. we forget how old college kids looked by the time we were freshmen. we forget–because it’s easier than remembering–what we wanted until, often, its too late to find it.

but some days we remember. it wasn’t until after three or four performances that i remembered why i wrote so much. i could say realize but what is realizing something other than remembering what we knew when we were kids? “i realized i love her?” no–i knew it. i knew it the first time i saw her without others around her–i saw that what i thought possible, what intrigued, was real–i remembered to trust myself.

i remembered why i disliked the term “growing up”–so pathetically ironic. employing metonymy to use a childish phrase to refer to losing all that we acquired by middle school. learning to tie shoes so we could trip with more than just bare feet. learning to spell so we could realize that words are only as powerful as the belief with which we speak them. reading so much that we needed glasses–only to realize that some people’s eyes are far too empty.

we’ll get even older, and then what? we’ll need not only those shoes but walkers. not only those words but earpieces to hear them. not only those glasses–but magnifying glasses beyond those perched on the bridges of our noses on faces with wrinkles some will hate while someone once told us that they’re only where smiles were. it’s funny–no, it’s sickening–that the day we took our magnifying glasses off of ants on our sun baked driveways and onto each other–burning eyes turning people not just into “mature” friends, but into races and genders to be separated [even when lying intertwined]–was the day we grew up in this world.

but we did. and we are. we’re learning and we’re growing. some doing both fast than others, some not doing either at all. some of us sit in class all day–every day–but that’s the problem. we sit. we absorb facts and sometimes we even imagine how it could be “on the other side,” but we don’t learn. we can’t always. and somedays, we shouldn’t.

we can absorb facts and we can grow. we can stretch our minds to possibilities–gender equality, racial equality, waist-size equality, yourmotherboughtyouabenzandminedidn’t equality–but really we shouldn’t have to. we shouldn’t have to learn tolerance. we shouldn’t have to learn acceptance.

because we had it. we had it when we noticed slanted eyes and darker skin and bushy eyebrows–when we wondered what these changes were but before we racialized and were racialized–before our minds were stretched, not to include these differences [they were readily accepted as slanted eyes did not mean anything more than another playmate], but to create room for the negative associations we developed.

we shouldn’t have to learn. but we do.

all of us are growing, we have grown. the world has grown up. it’s time for us to remember what it was before it did.

this was the part where i’d tell you how beautiful you are
and you smile and pretend its not true
but you were right when you said sometimes things change
so i’ll smile and pretend i never saw your face.

don’t worry darling, there will be another you
sometimes i think i’ve already found her
some days i fancy that she’ll be the first thing i see tomorrow
you were right when you said things change.

we all make mistakes sunshine
and it’s true–you were the greatest of all of mine
but greatness is rarely all that bad
so breathe easy, and keep close to whomever keeps you warm.

if i see you someday
remind me of what didn’t happen
because, my dear, the rest happened far too many times