Talk Too Much

Tell them I'm struggling to sing with angels

who hint at it in black words printed on old paper gold-edged by time

Tell them I wrestle the mirror every morning

Tell them I sit here invisible in space

nose running, coffee cold & bitter

Tell them I tell them everything

& everything is never enough

Tell them I'm another cross-wired babbling being

songs coming out all ends to meet & flash above the disc above my brain

Tell them I'm a dreamer, newborn shaman

sitting cross-legged in trance-stupor

turning into the magic feather contemplated

Tell them there are moments when clay peels off my bones

& feeds a river passing faces downstream

Tell them I'm davening & voices rise up from within to startle children

Tell them I walk off into the woods to sing

Tell them I sing loudest next to waterfalls

Tell them the books get fewer, words go deeper

some take months to get thru

Tell them there are moments when it's all perfect above & below, it's perfect

even moments in between where sparks in space

(terrible, beautiful sparks in space)

are merely metaphors for the void between one pore & another

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I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of  rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the  buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents  beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, &  children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I  love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair.  There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was  raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my  stupid heart.

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More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/i-talk-too-much/message

From here on out I will be using Spotify's wonderful features as my own personal poetry-memorizing software. Thanks.

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Alchemists, you were right, it is possible. We have the proof now. There are equations. If you could come back for a day, if you could conjure yourself into this chemistry classroom, if you could read the textbook or watch the professor writing the answers on the board Alchemists, you would see that you were right, even though you didn't know about alpha and beta radiation, even though you didn't understand isotopes, you knew it was possible, that some elements can change into other elements, that transmutation can occur. Alchemists, there is proof now that it is possible, although each new element, having a brief half-life, would keep changing into other things. Alchemists, you were right, you can make anything, anything, uranium, plutonium, tellurium, mercury, copper, cobalt, platinum, silver, and gold, you can make gold, an isotope so radioactive it would sparkle before your eyes. Alchemists, you were right. It is magic. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/i-talk-too-much/message