November 22nd, 2015

Strangers, Portishead 1994
For Collinsville


sometime I will tell you about the first time I heard this song
it has something to do with painting my bedroom at 15
and how that room felt like a comfortable cage

and how, in a rose-colored chair from the second floor
I would watch dusk fall on all the gathered
houses like a net or a veil, trapping us, binding us, hiding us

and think of all the things I wanted but didn't know yet
you were one of those things, and when my skin itched
with fever under that ceiling, it was a burning to know more

to be more, to break out of myself. The room was carpeted
and I used to lie on my belly and write while kicking my legs
up and down to exercise my hamstrings

This is all true. I am from that carpet and that chair and this
song and those painted walls and the prefabricated wardrobe
I learned how to put together because the room didn't have a closet.

I am from the sick feeling of anticipation as the nail polish dried
and my head floated, free at last, drifting on the fumes. I am from the
light blue sadness of heavy dusk pressing all the factory houses into the hill.

I am from the laps I ran up and down that street and all the sweat
rolling down my back on summer days as we walked around the little
town feeling our own beauty for the first time while the cars honked

and the construction workers whistled from a roof above and our
summer shirts clung to us like the last bit of our childhood. I am
from the shame and glory of that moment especially