Poem-A-Day: A Tyrant Seeks Conclusion in the Known Self by Emily Kendal Frey

December 17, 2013 A Tyrant Seeks Conclusion in the Known Self by Emily Kendal Frey In California we went to the dive bar and I lost my  wallet   I remember falling into it    And maybe kissing against someone's garage    I fell on city sidewalks    In California and other places    The trees looked at me tenderly    I'm guessing    You do not love me because your mom did not love  you    I understand the equation    Meanwhile, I make a butter fire in the kitchen    Two times I heat the butter for the eggs    Both times I burn it    Just observe, I tell    My students, describe what is    The woman next to me on the airplane    Moves pictures from her wallet to her pocket    In case we die    I cry with my eyes closed and the Sprite goes by    The unconscious drives us to master    The childhood situation    I wonder if there are spiders    Here, in the carpet or between the seats    A place with bugs is so    Much more friendly    The book I am reading tells me    Ours is an earthbound crisis    That until we cease to dominate    With doing, we will fail    At being    My fingernails    Are the color of rotten peaches    On Orcas Island there's a stone tower on top of  Mt. Constitution    Some days you can see for miles, the many    Mountain ranges and pine-crusted bodies    In my mind    I practice dying    I throw myself over the edge    The plane is making its way into the streaking    Sun of this country    In Mexico I slept in a clay structure facing the ocean    I could hear the wind constantly    I bought you a tin heart with a hole in it    I brought it back in my backpack    In bed you said Don't make fun of me    When I'm old, okay?    When I think of your face    I have to think of me    You are holding my knee    And now I look into you    Now I look up and face    The abject fear    I am an animal    The bedroom is trees    Go limp a voice tells me    When a person passes me on their way to the restroom   I pretend they are the kindly face    Of god  Look deep into the eyes    Of the divine    It's so beautiful isn't it    To believe you are looking    At the future      Copyright © 2013 by Emily Kendal Frey. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem "We all want to know the future: who we'll be, where, with who, and when. We think our minds will keep us safe, but they won't. I don't want my plane to fall from the sky with a black heart. When I'm up there I try to feel all the love I'm afraid of on the ground." --Emily Kendal Frey Most Recent Book by Frey   The Grief Performance (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.    Emily Kendal Frey is the author of The Grief Performance (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011). Her second book, Sorrow Arrow, is forthcoming from Octopus Books in 2014. She lives in Portland, Oregon.    Related Poems Fons  by Pura López-Colomé  Hotel Berlin by Cynthia Cruz My Heart by Kim Addonizio  __________________________ Love reading Poem-A-Day? Help support it today.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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