What My Loneliness Does {1 of 2}
· 🌳 some sad selfies I never sent + a tattoo of my poetry 🦷 ·
In 2014, a book of poetry I’d been working on for a decade was finally released—so I went on tour to celebrate its arrival into the world. That tour took off from the city I’d finished writing the book and—after detours north to Philadelphia for a typewriter tattoo then west to New Orleans for a radio interview—it was completed in the college town I started writing the book those ten years before…
I made sure to stop and see as many of the friends who helped encourage me during the writing of the book as possible—in order to personally deliver their copies to them. After my last reading, and on my 29th birthday, an ex turned friend confessed he wanted a line of my poetry tattooed on him—and asked if I would accept this (plus a tattoo of my own) as a gift. I was delighted by the idea!
Shortly after that tour ended, so did the relationship I had just packed my life up into boxes and already shipped across the country for… I had no other plan, just a book of poetry in hand. I remember taking these selfies that winter without a receiver or spectator in mind. Simply contemplating the image I projected as a poet—with this newly minted typewriter tattoo on my thigh and a broken heart.
~ What My Loneliness Does ~
Pace sideways, on
pointed crab feet.
Skin me. Like the quick tongue
of a hunting knife.
Curl the floorboards.
Open like a sail and let the wind
fill it, like a man given to belly.
Migrate through my body,
to it’s warmer parts.
Wear the mouth of a blow up doll.
Father the bees.
Grow roots, then teeth.
Like the snow, blanket
softly everything.
Unfold the days. Fold them
up again into paper cranes.