Bent Double
Here is the mouth of my body.
Here is the heart.
Here is the mind I’m talking to.
Here is the ground
hitting my knees,
doubling me up doubling me
over, sighing.
Someday soon I hear I’ll stop crying.
Here’s the art on my body quaking.
Here’s my Met Gala walk.
Here I stumble. Here I talk.
Here’s the thing
I’m saying,
here’s the thing:
I’m tired of waking up
screaming,
grabbing our skeletons by the throat.
There’s a thunderbolt in my mind.
Here it comes searing
out of my mouth
rolling over on meaning.
I’m too tired to be pretty. I’m too tired
for fucking my way through.
There’s a heart in my heart holding
itself apart—
There’s a morning in the morning hiding
its face from light—
I’m turning into myself.
I’m turning back towards memory.
When the morning rises up dark,
then I will be through
telling this poem what to do,
telling you what to do with me.
I’m telling
you, I’ve told you:
With me the morning comes slow and seeping
Filling me up.
Letting me out
in threads.
Folding over double,
bending down,
hitting my knees
to the ground.
Trenna Sharpe is a poet living and writing in Portland, Oregon. She works as a copywriter at Instrument. Her poems appear in the collection ‘The Heart’s Many Doors,’ The Tangerine, FIVE:2:ONE Magazine, Industrial Lunch, Poetry Miscellany, and Incessant Pipe, and a chapbook, (#7) from The Lifeboat, out of Belfast, NI.
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