band-aids & other temporary healings

i don’t think there comes an inherent healing
_____with poems or with time.

i was once so triggered i thought i was home
i got comfortable i took off my bag my jacket
____each layer ___from off my shoulder
until i unzipped & was sitting on my own skin
___in the dark so long
it could only have been a chair, wherein
my skin hangs _____ ass over the armrest
for decoration,_____ growing eyes out in
_____this silence, like a passive God,
and yet everything_ was just_ still there,
_________________________________________like my
eczema, which i scrape from so long,
_______i pull from scabs the scaffold
with a bike attached by my project/building.
_____yes, i did_______ thumb through all (t)his
_____________________courtcase/heartbreak,
belt that made the brown a darker brown &

i said it fertilized my flower bed some days,
_____knowing some days that it would not.
&, yes, this whole thing’s a garden. it(ch)-
the scaffold contraption, with its chains, lock,

& self, ______________________ clings to iron
________like how mothers do
the good child after losing custody____ i’d say
each bike,_ hugging the scaffold,_ was & is me.
_______and it was here –

_______i asked to be let out of me
for so long in my room that, in the interim,

a boy got his wish for death, got born again,
woke up in a new mother’s arms, & then,
again, he still handed us his newest intercom
eulogy. & although we knew ________each
mother wanted every moment he could have
been to rupture the eardrums
_____of a passive God,____ all we asked for was
a moment/of silence. people be counterintuitive.
but, this,___ this one time i died for so long,
while i became a quantum thing__ so broken
in its compartments
light could not ____emit, i thought i was giving
out a healing/a poem/a love but fell instead
and kept falling until __every orifice of me
shifted_____ to red
and then translucent________ and________ then,
“what was
_____his name?” whoever he was, he was
who i was then[?”] giving empty space,
paradoxically warm, with a mouth so good,
_________God undid me. and i kept going.
knowing what i wanted was
a whole body again,______ all i asked for was
_____to be/undone.

how mother dusting off her son’s casket
with wail begins to have an a’ight day,
within an archive of stillness & still-
together, i am still/here….