#andrea gibson
“Last night I painted a purple tree on my bedroom wall
I woke up this morning in a pile of leaves
The colour of a million different faces
Thinking of that hand that planted the seed
Of the family tree that grew us all
And how each one of us
Will one day fall back to the ground
This morning
I was listening to my heart pound
Knowing with every single beat
That a thousand other hearts were falling asleep forever
On a day they never thought they would
And I know there are tribes of aborigines
That decide how and when they’ll die
After a hundred years or so
They walk into the desert alone
Offer up their breath
And within two minutes soar into a death
As beautiful as their life
And I was thinking I
Will probably never be enlightened enough to decide how I want to die
So this morning
I decided how I want to live
What I want to give
What kind of song I want to sing
Now I’m no longer
Looking at my days like they’re a cup
Calling them half empty or half full
When they’ve always been enough
They’ll always be enough
To fill me up
If I stop thinking so much
And start drinking them up
Until I get so drunk and high on my days
I’ll be walking up to strangers and saying things like
“Hey, I know Jesus was born in a manger
But I woke at dawn today
To watch the earth’s horizon
Give birth to true rising sun of God
And I can’t stop singing hallelujah”
Can you believe we’re here?
Can you believe there are gods somewhere praying to us?
I want to be that nut on a bus
Who’s really a prophet
Telling everybody
“Smoking is bad
Stop it
You might be an opera singer some day
And how are you gonna hit the high notes?”
I wanna live like those high notes
That rise from the throats of old ladies
When they see little babies
Riding in shopping carts
I wanna start somebody’s heart like that
Taking ninety years back
So you’ll have sworn
You weren’t born
Until you saw me
Planting roses
In all the sidewalk cracks
So when you trip
You’ll fall in love
With someone you thought you hated
And now look at what that love has created
Look
There’s a sky
On her faded blue jeans
With a flock of birds
About to fly to my words
And my next line’s
Gonna rhyme with her eyes
And she’ll wink
And I’ll think I’m as beautiful as him
I wanna live my life
Like it’s a little league game
I don’t care if I win
Just wanna watch some little girl
Get her very first hit
Watch her father cheer so hard
He spills his beer
And decides to quit
I wanna split some woman’s
Tired eyes open
Wake her with her own sunrise
So she knows
There’s reason to be hoping
She’ll say
“There are stingers in my heart
But I’m sure that I’m a queen”
And that night
She’ll vow to swarm
Until every angry car horn
Is reborn a song
Of let there be light
Every angry war cry reborn
A song of let there be life
I wanna build the timid teenage boy
A microphone that will
Echo his rhymes
The same way
They echo in his shower
When he’s home alone
I wanna write poems
In the tone
Of your mother’s eyes
When she whispered your name
For the very first time
Poems that will make you go home
Pick up the phone
And call her
While I call mine to say
“You know those lines
On the kitchen wall
Where I grew
Taller and taller and taller
Put a couple more there won’t you?
Cause I’m growing up here”
No longer looking at my days
Like they’re a cup
Calling them enough
From now on
They’ll be overflowing
Since now I’m knowing
It’s up to me
To fill them up”
—Andrea Gibson, “Enough”
Alright tell me in the tags, what’s Your Poem? That poem you heard once and it has dwelt within you ever since?
Introductory Video!
“I crash into things in the dark.
Even when the lights are on.”
CMM and I had a wonderful, sweet, and super sexy date last Friday. She is giving me one long lesson in patience and it drives me up the wall (in the best way).
Her slow, methodical exploration of sensation is diametrically opposed to my impulsive, rushed, gimme-gimme, lack of control.
How can I sit still when you’re biting and licking my inner thighs? How can I not beg and whimper when your fingers lightly graze my panties over the softest, most sensitive part of my pussy?
She made me cum without removing my panties or my pretty dress.
Afterwards, eating pizza and grinning at each other, we had a deep emotional conversation. I wondered out loud why my male lovers can’t seem to go so deep so easily. “It’s not their fault,” she giggled and assured me.
I explained to her that my patronus is a bull in a China shop (she nodded, she already knew).
She listens so closely, she can read everyone, always. She can predict the future (she’s pretty sure, anyway). She keeps planes in the sky.
I wanted nothing more than to give her the calm I feel when I’m with her. To prove her wrong, again.
“But do you really know me?” I challenged. “Can you predict my future?” I’m a sweet, but stubborn, bull.
Little responds very well to those who always know where the bathroom is, and never forget the sunblock.
But what gifts can a little bull offer a China shop?
An Insider’s Guide on How to be Sick, Andrea Gibson
[ID below:
Never say the words ‘this is not my life’ This pain that wakes you screaming in the muzzle of the nightThis pain that woke your lover, chased her to another room to another lifeThis fevered faintingThis tremorring chestThis mangled kiteThis panic like a cave of batsThis nurse drawing blood wearing doubled gloves This insurance doesn’t cover that This hurried paycheck of doctor after doctor after doctorThis stethoscope that never hears your heartThis hospital bedThis florescent darkThis save your prescription with side effects worse than the diseaseThis please let me have one month where I read more poems than warning labelsThis not knowing what the test will sayThis pray pray prayThis airplane’s medical emergency landingThis shame when you can’t walkShame when you can’t fuckShame when you’re home alone sobbing on another friday night Say ‘This is my life This is my precious life This is how badly I want to live’Say Sometimes you have to keep pulling yourself up by the whip Take punch after punch to the face forward To the head upAnd still uncurl the fist of your grief like a warm blanket on the cool earth of your faithSay every waiting room is the clime where you will finally take shape to fit into the keyhole of your own gritty heartTo open mercyTo open your siren throat Say every fever is a love note to remind you that there better things to be than cool Fuck coolFuck every pair of skinny jeans From the month your muscles started atrophying to a size twoSay fuck you to anyone who asks you if you eat enoughSay how do you not know that is so fucking rudeRemember you never have an obligation to quiet the hurricane inside your chestEspecially on a day when another healthy person suggests ‘you would feel so much better if you would just focus your breath into a Buddha beam of light”Like that light is going to miraculously dissolve the knife that’s been churning in your kidneys for the last six fucking monthsSay Sunshine, please go back to your job at the aroma therapy aisle at Whole Foods and leave me aloneI know how to talk to Godand God does not expect me to use my inside voiceGod knows how goddamn hard I am working to become a smooth stoneSo I can skip on my back across this red red sea So I can trust deep in my screaming bonesEverything is a lessonLesson #1 through infinityYou will never have a greater opportunity to learn to love your enemy than when your enemy is your own red bloodTruce is a word made of velvet Truce is a word made of velvetWear it everywhere you goBandage the window where you screamed at the mountain for forgetting your footsteps Trust that mountain is climbing youEspecially on the days you inevitably want to avalanche everyone who loves youWhen you can’t walk from the bed to the bathroom without clenching at the wallsWhen you can’t imagine you can fall to pieces in another’s sturdy arms and still be seen as wholeRemember, the universe only became the universe when it shattered into dustAnd that shattering is the one thing you can always trust enough to tell you the truth is so quiet you may never have heard it without a stethoscope pressed to your chestThat is to say in the house of your compassion its possible illness will be the landlineAnd its how you will begin to hear the world clear as a pin droppingThe downpour of its eyesThe long quarter of its broken throat On my most broken days when my faith is a willow and the pain has nothing but an ax to giveThe only thing I want than to die is to live Is to live to hear my neighbor play his music obnoxiously loudTo get cut off in traffic fifty more timesTo get broken up with while standing in line at the DMVTo have another doctor drive another needle into my skin for the hundredth timeSo I can say, for the hundredth time, that needle is the needle on a record player, Doctor, everything and I mean everything can learn how to sing.]
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