Category Archives: Stuff That, If It Rhymed, Might Be Poetry

Super Saturday: Reflections, or, He Shoots Lightning From His Feet

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I’m constantly amazed at how applicable my posts before the accident are to me post-accident. This post was originally posted on April 22, 2013.

I want to pack up every thought I’ve had in a box and place it in a corner where I will one day forget about it and when I finally rediscover it I will assume it’s a box of old basketball trophies (the kind you get for participating) and because you can’t do anything with old basketball trophies I will put it out with the trash and never have to think about it again.

I want to pull back all the words I’ve ever spoken as if they existed on measuring tape and I could push a little button on the side of my head and they would all come back to me and even if the shock of all of those words hurt me a little and made me feel a little dizzy at least they would stop hurting anyone they have stung.

I want to walk backwards through life and watch as everything I’ve ever done unravels and I want to know how it feels for the pressure to decrease steadily steadily steadily steadily.

I want to line up every person I’ve ever known and I want to stand on trial before them so they can judge whether I have helped or hurt them not because I want to know if I am a good person or a bad one but because I want to know how to maximize the helping and minimize the hurting.

I want to write down everything and everyone I have ever loved so that I can chart it [love] and diagram it [love] and dissect it [love] and maybe figure out what it [love] means.

I want to curl up into God like He is a king-sized bed and I am a three-year-old child and I want to feel all of my secrets wash away under me deep under the covers into long-forgotten and never-traveled bed-spaces.

I want to gather all the people I have seen but whose names I do not know and feed them cake and throw a party with small talk and then later big talk and then much later tears and when I leave I will know many new names and I will have made many new friends and fallen in love perhaps twice or more.

And I want to dance so hard that I create a storm and no one will be able to get near me and they will look at me and they will say that storm used to be a boy but then he danced and now he shoots lightning from his feet.

A Snapshot of Transition

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Somewhere between watching Teen Mom and walking around Detroit something inside him opened up and started beating.

No, that wasn’t exactly the right metaphor. It was more like something that had always been scabbed and bruised had begun to heal and with the healing came the responsibility to keep the thing whole and healthy.

Somewhere between reading Foucault and dreaming about women, a deep patience poured out of him and made him a jittery island of impatience in a calm sea. And suddenly there was time. There was so much time. There was time to question. There was time to rest. There was time to wait. But even for all of the time, he did not want to question, to rest, to wait.

Somewhere between listening to a song by Kendrick Lamar and reading a short story from Sherman Alexie, he wondered at the improbability that he has ever had an original thought. He wondered what pedestal he had ever used to judge other people. He wondered at the limited facts and limited knowledge he had used to form opinions about the world.

Despite Lack of Knowledge

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So many of the things I have known are other things that I do not know.

For instance, the hill. It has always been the symbol of the free, of nature, of the earth. It has stood in stark contrast to the perverse civilization of Court Street. It has provided a safe haven for underage drinkers–haven because away from police, safe because it’s difficult to binge drink on a hill that you have to walk down in the dark.

And so, all this time, I have known the hill as operating outside of systems.

Today, I was sitting on the hill, enjoying one last sunset, and I noticed cigarette butts and broken glass. The hill has always been something I do not know.

But it did not change the magnificence of the sunset.