I am the backyard river / that died too young to name itself / I am the boy that will lose his name when I am tired of feeling alive…
Apostle Creed of a Depressed Boy
“My body is a haunted house that I am lost in. There are no doors but there are knives and a hundred windows” – Jacqui Germain
& I love the feeling of tracing grief beneath the root of my skin
Every word that begins in the throat / ends with the family’s picture folding its hands against your mouth from spilling it out
I don’t know how to pray to anymore / when prayer is a key to a damaged lock
I am the boy in a cobweb on the kitchen door / a knife got broken in my palm to imitate my heart
The room wore darkness as the blood crawling in my veins
The image of the almost dark night / seduced the room into nakedness / draw the curtains, said my father / exposing the sour taste of my skin on his tongue,
& the pain / & grief I shared with a God that died in a horror movie
God too, is depressed / God too, is depressed
God too, is depressed / God too, is depressed
We are gods created by another God
The woman in the moon is my mother
The moonlight wrapped around my body like / a cloud on the tree nearby / & the night burns slowly on the candle stand
The wind holding my body parts together / makes a shape of the light in / the kitchen sink
The kitchen door swings back & fro like clothes in the wind
It was mournful / the muteness of house towards us / my breath too scared of silence, leaves me for the curtain
I am afraid of living another second / I am afraid of praying / God will consider me a hypocrite
I believe in my solitude
Last night, there was a moon dying in an old well – [I believe in death also]
The night unscrewed itself from the curtain
I am the backyard river / that died too young to name itself / I am the boy that will lose his name when I am tired of feeling alive
I am figuring out other alternate ways of living
I would love to write about this feeling
The heaviness of my name for my mouth to mention
I would love to write about this feeling / that loves dark places / about the songs made for dead birds / & boys that are bored of God & his pompousness
I hold my life in my hands like mutilated money / I want to unplug the light from my eyes
I want to love what is refusing to love me
Tonight the sea is rising in my mother’s tea cup
The black & white TV on the wall carried / the color of silence
Three years in depression are enough to stop / running around with death in this house
& you know how this feels / the night trying to look down on you / or the bulb on ceiling that tricked you that you are still alive
Since we were all born screaming,
I am losing the last song in my throat / I am losing the lyric in my cries
Every sound in the house sounds like / God instructing Moses to take off his sandal
I want to know how it feels / to have your bones bundle together like spoons
I want to erase this image from / the family’s photo my father frowned at every morning
I want to be brighter than the bulb in the kitchen / I want to get drunk and sleep naked like a whore
I want to love you / I want to love you only / you moving with the rhythm of my heartbeat
I want to bring back the days when / we walked on the beach picking seashells / I want to kiss you again in my dark kitchen /
I want to wait until the day ends / with us sitting on the beach / watching a boy scrub the dirt off the sea’s back
My mother believed nobody will be depressed in Heaven
I believed my mother & the gospel on her lips
& this is how the day worn out on my skin / & darkness on the curtain bows in gratitude
This is how my mother forgets her voice in a garbage bag
When she said
God’s chosen people are depressed / & I built grief like a cake / when the dead & living tried to live in my body at once
At church, the pastor will once again remind us that God is everywhere
& you’ll wonder why I’m ashamed of God & the way He works
Why my solitude has a life in it & she opens her chest & reveals her heart to the singing birds on the window pane
I want to taste the wind on the kitchen curtain
I want to rip out this expired voice from my throat
I want my name to drag me out of this body until I feel my feet on the frozen kitchen tiles
In every heart is a grief that is meant to be memorized/ in every mouth is a voice that’s learning how to grow into dead music
—————-
Mourning Things I can’t Name is Blasphemy
I
This sadness was created so it could fit evenly in our mouths
Everyone knows about / the grief that hangs on our tongues
i am eager of how it will taste…
The bitterness on our lips / the night forcing itself between our teeth
There are faces on the family’s picture filled with tears / there are
Men who want to be like shipwrecks / to go beneath & never return
II
When Eric demised, his footprints were left lying on the bunt bathroom tiles
Today to remember his life, / our hearts will keep / ticking like clock until the battery runs out
& silence will be the first stage of dying / feeling God traveling in your body is another
Mama says it’s blasphemy to mention my
Uncle’s name near fire / near smoke / near things the mouth can’t name
—————-
Credo to What I want to say About Eric
A boy’s body is a home searching for a resting place
Dark night like December 22nd is a surgical room / so quiet & tired of painful audiences
Praying is like masturbating / both have happy ending
A boy grew up with a burnt body to skip autopsy / this is a secret kept only by the dead
Sometimes you can reach for the cloud like Eric by baptizing with fire
In you are people searching for their own names
In a boy’s eyes is a dark night that comes only on December 22nd
Eric said, in order to get rid of fear—get at the hilltop & write your name
on the wind
Smile is a country of forged citizens
Yesterday a boy got scared / he got himself pregnant by masturbating
A boy in search for a home searched for his navel in his grave
—————-
Poetry: Jeremy T. Karn
Image by chezbeate from Pixabay