my eight months of dying

alysia harris once said, "the mornings can be so mortal." it's from a poem she performed with jasmine mans about loss. i replay that performance whenever i need to cry and i'm not exactly sure why. i think of that line every sunday. sundays can be so mortal. sunny sundays feel like the day after a baby's birth. but when it rains on sundays, like today, it always feels like i'm home from a funeral. i've never been to one though. the closest i've come was watching claudio's funeral procession from the bathroom window when i was like ten. i stood in the bathtub and put my chin against the pane and watched the cars in silence. when it was over i opened the window just a little bit. all i heard was the rain. and about five years later, i watched my grandfather's funeral at my eldest aunt's house. we all stood around the box-set in her corner room where the curtains were deep red and never let in any light and watched this video that was recorded on a shaky, low-budget, handheld camera. there was a lot of static, a lot of wailing, a lot of noise. someone in the room suggested we mute it. all that was left was a wooden box mounted in the middle of a room. either the video cut ahead or i couldn't watch for a while, then that box was being loaded on the back of a hay-stacked pick-up truck, driving down dusty, dusty roads. i wondered how, in his seventy something years of life, that was all that he became. i'll never forget it.

i met alysia harris once. i think it was backstage at some show. i was like seventeen. she passively said hello and feverishly kept writing on this napkin. that night i met a lot of people who are big name wordsmiths these days, but she stood out to me. i thought she was rude. a poem is never that important, never that public, i thought. you feel it when its happening and then you pray to god you remember it when you get to some paper in private. that's my philosophy. if i don't fully feel something in the moment what's the purpose of trying to pass it on? besides, you only remember what's important, what has impact, so wouldn't that make your poems stronger? i think poets these days ramble too much before they get to their point. i should be able to tell you how i feel in just a few lines if i've felt it enough.

anxiety

and if we didn't think,
just did,
would there be more alive
than lived,
would we only die,
no dying?

i wrote that poem in the midst of a poetry class i was shopping at the beginning of my senior year at amherst. i ended up walking out before the class was over. all of the talk about producing good poetry in the semester to come made me anxious. i thought about death a lot in that eight months or so of my life. i've always been afraid to speak those thoughts into existence though. i obsess over many things, usually in fleeting intervals, it's part of my mercurial nature, but i've always been afraid of talking or writing about death. a few weeks ago, i met a man at a friend's dinner party who looked at me head on and asked me what my biggest fear was. i gave him some bullshit about not being able to fully love the way i've always wanted to. i guess that's partially true. what i wanted to say was dying. i think about tupac and many other famous people who have expressed some sort of peace or acceptance or foreshadowing of their deaths before it has actually happened. i'm far from any of those feelings. but what if i put my fear of it in writing? what happens then? in the nature of opposite outcomes, i imagine it would bring some sense of immortality. who knows. none of of us ever actually do.

i read a quote somewhere during my eight months of dying, it was from an interview with a lady who was terminally ill with cancer. the interviewer opened by asking her, "what does it feel like to wake up everyday and know that you're dying?" to which she responded, "what's it like to wake up everyday pretending that you're not?" i never read the rest of the interview. i wanted to write a poem about it, but i haven't felt that feeling through. six lines or so would be nowhere near enough right now. i figure i have some time.