I don’t know how to hold my head around you
(you, like the moon)
ODDSTDONTPLAYDATWOMPSHIT
-kneeCO.lie
stubborn is the free fall
can’t reverse the angle
running out of patience
holding on to,
holding on to fake news
Today I felt the weight
of everything that is held
together in make-shift laughs
what did you take?
Motion Sickness
Christopher J.D.
Motion Sickness
“My melancholy wants to rest in the hiding places and abysses of perfection.
This is why I need music.”- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Motion sickness doesn’t just happen when you are sitting
in a car or standing weak kneed on the deck of a boat—
no, sometimes it’s what is around you that makes you dizzy.
Sometimes the distance between morning and evening,
sometimes the rhythm of a week, the tide of a month
are all it takes to remind you that you are just biology—
a child wet with the fear of your next real loss.
Nervous (the net will never even out), you put your ear
to the ground near the reservoir, because before you
knew what loss was you’d learned how to feel it there,
like a mirror feels your face or a shadow, your shape;
you learned from others who came, marveled by their
own biologies, holding their own grudges with the earth.
You came and heard them, watched them, and sometimes
made to join them; something about how the light
danced on the water’s surface had you singing along,
moving your body honest and without wanting. But
you know you can’t sing, and even if you can, you’d say
that at the reservoir you were not you but someone else,
and you’d be right. Because after all you were sick then,
worn weak by the cycle of your own poverty. Whatever
poverty that might have been. Whatever it may still be.
