One for the record books. Literally.
I mentioned back in April that I was asked to write a poem for the yearbook. I did, but I haven’t seen the page since I have a new job. I’m assuming they used it. Either way, I thought I’d share it here. The theme I was given was “The Inside Story.”
The Story Inside
(For students past, present, and future struggling to become themselves.)
In school, we were asked what we wanted to become
and we answered “Teacher!” or “Mommy!” while stranger
inclinations hung inside like the wet underwear out back.
We were ashamed of the clothes closest to us. I probably smiled
and said “policeman,” but yearned to haunt the stories,
the old houses, the graveyards. If I had said “ghost” what future
was I cursing myself to? Ghosts rarely alter the future;
they are whispers in the past. How could I become
a Jedi or another archetype whose story was the story
of us all? I wanted to see in bull’s-eyes and carry strangers
from a burning world. My heroes were never far from a monster’s smile,
so I also wanted the atomic heart and armored back
of Godzilla. Even if my imagination took me back
to the West, where I could ride wild horses into a future
ripped open like a stained-glass horizon, I’d still spend miles
in swamps and mausoleums, more Poe than Gunsmoke. To become
an outlaw might be nice, a cthulu-cowboy nicer: the stranger
in an even stranger land. I realize I still wanted the ghost story.
But aren’t we all haunting or haunted no matter the story?
Like Kahlo, every mirror cracked like her fractured back,
painting blood outside the body, the self itself a stranger.
Her pain let me understand my own and she let me want a future
tied to the images created by hand and by thoughts like birds becoming
hearts melting in the snow of memory and lost smiles.
But then, I borrowed someone else’s answer, the smile
of someone else’s happiness and was told not to want a child’s story:
dreams and stuffed bears and board games become
cobwebbed and damp and dust and going back
to get them seems impossible, because it’s all future, future,
future. The neighbors are now no more than strangers.
And I find sometimes that there is nothing stranger
than the time between camera flashes, between smiles
that tell one story and the story inside. My imagined future,
regardless of what I told my teachers, is like the story
unread and waiting all the way at the back
of the anthology. The truth we have is what we become.
In old photos, I see a stranger who shares my story.
I had to learn to return the smile, to give back
a certain grace to a past smiling at the future presently becoming.
