Counting Descent

by Clint Smith

We didn’t say certain words in my home because we were told they could hurt people, but words were the only way I ever knew how to fight.

When did it learn it was to become a cage? What is a cage beyond that which it holds?

To deny the full humanity of others is to deny it within ourselves.

But what are these words but an empty lyric? What then is anything, beyond the language we give it? What else do we have to describe the carnage we see but all that is woefully inadequate?

can you claim something as your own if you don’t remember how you found it

we are addicted to what always leaves us

This is a protest against isolation, against loneliness, against thinking you’re the only one experiencing the trauma that leaves a man full of cracks. Didn’t you say that, James? That books showed you that you weren’t alone in your pain? You talk about humanity, but what is more human than seeing yourself in another? I remember when holding me would have gotten you killed. Now you pen these pages yourself. Is that not a protest, James? Is that not resisting all that they never meant for us to do? We’ve got to protest on these pages. This ink be our picket line. How can we write about the soil and not talk about the blood? How can we write about the tree and not talk about the noose? Ain’t no ars poetica here, James. This here is for our survival.

Do you remember who you were before you picked up the pen?

I wonder how many things the world has deemed fact that are actually just presumptions made by men in robes or glasses or scrolls full of poems like this one

it would be nice to be something in a museum one day because that’s what I’ve been told means you’ve lived a meaningful life but I think instead I might like to be in a garden where even after I die the residue of me can help grow something more beautiful than I ever was

It is hard to describe the comfort one feels in sitting with something you trust will always be there, something you can count on to remain familiar when all else seems awry. How remarkable it is to know that so many have watched the same sun set before you. How the wind can carry pollen and drop it somewhere it has never been. How the leaves have always become the soil that then become the leaves again. How maybe we are not so different from the leaves. How maybe we are also always being reborn to be something more than we once were.

all we got is what we name ourselves otherwise I am just a room you are just body & we know how wrong that is