Elise's Poetry
If Confessions Were Funny
It’s like when someone at a party steals a joke. Timing is everything, demanding patience so that the joke lands on the perfect moment. Although I want to spit out my joke like a thirty-third tooth, I must endure my discomfort because I know it will be swiftly cured by your glorious soul-saving laugh-sound.
It’s like when there’s three others at your party who watch as I part my lips and suck in the right amount of air and suddenly their greedy ears perk up as my original breath rolls up from the back of my throat up and glissandos over my tongue, connecting neurons and nerves, plucking and shaping a sentence from my mental pool of lexicon as I whisper my one good joke.
It’s like when my breath is too quiet to be heard. The oral cavern of my head feels like burnt velvet, my tongue against it second-hand firewood while my teeth almost shatter on the impact of snapping themselves so swiftly shut. Curse all my tactics of self-preservation, I ended up silently muttering my pun to you under my breath! Of course the set-up dribbled out of the corner of my mouth, followed by a punchline that oozed down my neck and into my shirt. I must exist in the mess of my language like an incompetent infant.
It’s like when there’s an awkward risk of a silent room, that I cannot open my mouth. To witness one’s own mushy words reverberate against the hard walls of where you stand is equivalent to letting someone curl your littlest eyelashes with the end of a fireplace poker. I ask myself: are perfectly-crimped lashes worth the risk of permanent blindness? Could be. There’s always room for regret; it’s the room in which I often sleep. Those close to me say it is best that you know how I feel. But would you have laughed if my words hadn’t tripped over the hard boulder of my self-consciousness?
It’s like when someone awful steals the joke that was meant for you. One of the others says it, out loud, yet verbatim to my words that still pool in my belly button. Of course you hear it this time. You laugh, because it really was a good joke, but we don’t make eye contact because I have a weird stain of sentences haloing my open lips.
Your laughter, my finger in my mouth, fishing out double entendres and punchlines as I feel intense, unbearable hatred for this thievery. You are laughing louder than ever, but I can’t hop on the back of the train (that used to be mine) that is so rapidly leaving, since you will look at me with confusion, because I cannot reclaim my very own joke.
You think they are funny. You should spend some time with them to see if they make any more jokes; perhaps they will perform a comedy set with all the words I wrote on a napkin, or thought silently in my room.
It’s like when it is so much worse than someone stealing my joke. It’s more than a joke, it is the truth of my soul. This was never about a joke.
You leave me, who listens to the laughter that should have been mine. For now, I will blame it on the volume of the music, the quality of your hearing, and likely the divine alignment of the planets. One day, I will not need a sharper ear to hear my tiny jokes. Some time, someone might catch my words before they stain the ground.
I don’t hear you anymore, and nothing is funny.
M(is)use
To put a name to it makes me afraid that someone will steal it away from me.
You can’t steal ___, but you can steal a muse.
I’ll tell you: My heart is my muse and without it I often wonder if my arteries will clog and the white powder of my skull might sprinkle out of my nose and dust my upper lip. Sorry, it’s just my muse.
The word shares an association with Picasso, who abused his muses and used them for pleasure, but I’m left thinking that I have become a servant to my muse. My muse chooses to write and put words down that make my heart give out, and all I can do is faint or else this weak poet might die. ___ can’t kill me, but a muse can.
What if my muse leaves me.
God, I can’t even think about that. It would render me numb and I would have to be dumb to continue on. Like a shell without the snail. Then that shell would crush into fine powder (like my skull from before?) And fall out of the nose of a former poet named me.
The Act of the Kiss
Standing in silence, my mother and I will make a “t” with our fingers over our foreheads and kiss the middle. It takes a maximum of seven seconds, but by now, the wrinkles on my forehead follow the outline of her finger, and my third eye sheds blessed tears.
The imprint of her mouth rests in the middle of the cross she made, in the same place where Jesus was nailed before his father kissed the middle of his forehead and brought him back to the clouds.
Maybe that’s what my mom does, every time she kisses my forehead, it brings me back into her arms as a tiny baby. I can’t help but wonder if God ever held his son like that. If not, I refuse to be jealous.
We have done this since I was small, when my mother had to bend down to touch my head, and I probably batted her away and ran off. But now I do it when she forgets to, and my neck cranes down, just slightly, to brush hers. I’m glad my growth has given her back a rest.
It can only be because of love that we bend and stretch for each other, so we can give a blessing that means so much more than a Son of God’s final resting place.
And that means we have strung up our holy kisses on a cross that is a legend destined to be told until the end of time.
But that’s only for us to tell.