How To Make A Poet (Though Making A Milk Jug Lantern Would Be Better)

I was delivering the mail.
No, the actual mail.
There were steps,
It was icy,
and bullshit bullshit bullshit...

Anyway,
I slipped.
Something deep inside my ears whispered to me:
Whee, whirlybird,
Going down.

I might still have been all right, except--
I landed in the spokes of some kid's bike
Left on the walk;
Then I was dead
Cos I broke my neck just like Mama always said.

Lady come out, lady say,
Omg, call the lawyer.

Then I was floating above my body,
And I thought,
No.
No no no no.
I had almost finished reading a novel, and
I had thawed some hamburger for tonight and
I had a movie that came in the mail,
Set aside,
Like a a potentially distracting
Arranged bride.
So I can't die.

But I died.
I saw souls whipping into the light
Like their hair was on fire.
The love!
(they said.)
The well-being!
(they cried.)

Well, that's not how my experience went...

God looked at my life and then at me and said,
WTF?
And I looked at my life and then at God, and said back,
wtF????
I came back as a cat.

I peed the little potted tree,
I bit the hand that fed me,
I shed and shit and scratched and that was me.
I was angry.

Then I died again, and still,
No love for Shay.
I stood before God in her Radiance,
And was sent back as a geranium this time,
That I might learn patience
And the art of being still.

I was pink, and pretty,
And people said, how nice.
All the time inside I was screaming
GAHHHHH! GAHHHHHHH!
Cos I was angry.
Then some kid, maybe the child of the one with the bike,
Said off with your head, 
And I said
Nothing after that.

I screeched at God, WTF?
And God said back, well, wtf?
I went back as a tropical fish
And an ant
And a dung beetle
And a labrador retriever,
The only one in history that bit.

I died and died and died and died.
And stood before God,
And got the trapdoor in the floor,
And a bon voyage.

It stopped being funny pretty fast.

So, after I was a monkey and a microbe and a
Frozen test tube baby in a basket,
God finally sighed.
One more time, She said, and 
Off I went.

My mama tried to kill me cos
She knew she bore a poet.
But I wouldn't die, not again.
No no no no no,
Not having it.

So I grew,
And scribbled, 
And went GAHHHHHHHHHH!, but
I did it pretty, so pretty.
I didn't love no men, and they didn't love me neither.
I loved some women til it made me cross-eyed,
But they said, we can be friends, such friends.

Then some dweeb at the mall told me God loves me,
And I smack him hard upside the head
With my latest volume.
I beat him
And beat him
And beat him
And beat him,
And that's the most use poetry ever was. 
I beat him, but I did it pretty, so pretty.

I went to jail and they said,
What's your name?
What's your gender?
What's your credit score?
What's your sign?

Then they gave me ten to fifteen years
To contemplate the Divine.
______

picture found on weheartit.com