wake up, breathe, keep breathing

I read so much in high school. I mean, I read so much all the time growing up. I was a reader. The quiet kid, the weird one. I loved disappearing into another world. I loved meeting the characters there. It was easier to be friends with books. I was never too shy. I never sad the wrong thing. I never wore the wrong clothes. Books, words. A girl doesn't need much more.

In high school I discovered poetry. I had a teacher that started out class one day reciting America, by Allen Ginsberg.

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. 
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. 
I can't stand my own mind. 
America when will we end the human war? 
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb 
I don't feel good don't bother me. 
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. 

I think a lot of it was hearing a teacher say 'fuck' for the first time, but also realizing that poetry can be meaningful and beautiful and have a message and all that, but it could also be raw and selfish. So wonderfully delicious and obscene. And I found that what I loved about books I also loved about poetry. Because there were these worlds that I had yet to visit. And I wasn't alone. And words. I had no idea you were allowed to use words like that.

There were poems that I loved in high school, that I thought I totally got in high school, that only now are coming back to me. In waves, in torrents.

Nicole Blackman, the ambitions are

the ambitions are wake up, breathe, keep breathing
the ambitions are wake up, breathe, keep breathing

Lucille Clifton, the lost baby poem

if i am ever less than a mountain
for your definite brothers and sisters
let the rivers pour over my head
let the sea take me for a spiller
of seas        let black men call me stranger

always        for your never named sake

These poems, they sneak up on me. They tap me on the shoulder and disappear into the shadows. And I have to stop to find them. If I am ever less than a mountain.

I love that ten years ago I loved these poems. That I tried so hard to understand them, that I could at least understand that this was a world that someone else was living in. And then I am so thankful, that I tried, that I read, that I kept reading. Because after a nightmare, the one line I have in my head, wake up, breathe, keep breathing. Wake up, breathe, keep breathing. It was right here waiting for me. And I wasn't alone anymore.